Stranded Deep (2015)

[PL] Wiele błędów, nieintuicyjny system tworzenia przedmiotów. Małe niebezpieczeństwo ze strony fauny napotkanej w grze. Po kilku głębszych można zagrać ze znajomymi pod warunkiem, że gra byłaby za darmo lub kosztowałaby w granicach 10zł.

[EN] Many bugs, non-intuitive item crafting system. Little danger from the fauna encountered in the game. After a few deep shots, you can play with friends, provided that the game would be free or cost in the range of $3.

I wanted to like this game, I really did, but at the end it just made me stressful instead of relaxed, so I had to drop it.

When I first played it in 2015, it was a buggy mess and didn't tell me anything. I mean sharks were swimming under land, pretty much a horror show. Then I tried it again this year, a little less buggy and actually tells you some things in a tutorial, but you still have no idea what to do. That would be OK, I mean it's a survival game, but the mechanics are just so bad.

You want to eat a crab? Drop it on the floor to skin it. You spent all your wood on building a decent house? Too bad, you only need that stupid tent to sleep in. You spent a bunch of time rowing to another island and now you want to sleep throught the night there or save the game? Better find some cloth somewhere to build a stupid tent again or you have to go back where you came from. There is just no point in building a base and sitting on an island, waiting for the leaves which provide water to run out. You either constantly move, bringing whole engine blocks with you in your backpack or you spend half your playtime rowing back to bring some more materials to survive a few more days onto your base.

So if you like challange and some stress, here you go, but if you want to have fun go play something else.

Intro

Stranded Deep is a first-person survival game in which you have to gather resources, craft things, keep your character alive and explore a bunch of islands.

The Good

• Actually sensible crafting requirements! You don't need rocks to make a bow.
• Nice music.
• Solid tutorial... for the most part.
• Your watch tracks your survival stats and skills, which is a neat way to do that.
• You can turn off animal attacks and permadeath.

The Bad

• When booting you get one of those shitty menu-blocking pages. It only accepts Enter as input, not even a mouse click. And then it starts loading a bunch of stuff. Ugh.
• No story, no mystical elements, no flavour at all.
• You have to drop crabs/coconuts to open them for some insane reason. And coconuts roll away too.
• The tutorial doesn't teach you how to build a raft. I built a buoy base, now what?
• Shitty controls, which are seemingly a requirement for survival games. You can't assign items to quickslots, the dial menu requires you to select an item and click on it to actually use it and you can't drop items from the dial menu.
• Trees don't show any damage when you start cutting them.
• You find a hammer early on but the tutorial won't progress until you've made another one.

The Ugly

• You have to build a shelter to be able to save.

The Truly Atrocious

• The game doesn't save when you exit! What the fuck.

Conclusion

I played this for 80 minutes and initially quite liked it because it seems less grindy and nonsensical than most other survival games. When i booted it up again i found out the game doesn't save when you quit, nor does it warn you about that. I had just spent 10 minutes slowly sailing towards a second island.

The game, whose only content consists of exploring (tiny) islands, requires you to build a shelter on each tiny island or lose all progress when you quit. And if that wasn't bad enough, shelters require cloth, which you can't harvest but have to be lucky enough to find. Honestly, just how incompetent can you be as a developer?

3/10

I tried to like this game, having just come off of playing through Subnautica and craving some more survival crafting action. I was even craving a step up in difficulty, which Stranded Deep did indeed provide.

However. The game has too many strikes against it for me to carry on with it. Firstly, and primarily, the game does not appear to be plot-driven. There is a category of things you can craft that are ostensibly for the story, but I played for a number of hours without encountering anything that looked like a story. Perhaps in my younger years when I had less responsibilities and more time to waste, I would've put up with investing significantly more time with hopes that some day there would be something other than basic survival to drive the game forward, but these days I'm a bit more demanding. Secondly, procedural generation of islands means that having a good or bad spot to try and survive on can be pretty random. Thirdly, the game does a poor job of documenting/teaching the most basic controls (such as how to pull/move objects that are not in your inventory - including your raft, which will most assuredly get stuck the first time you make landfall, and you won't be able to get back to sea again without this basic control which the game doesn't deign to teach you - I had to find out from strangers on the internet). I am OK with having a tough survival game where you learn from experience - such as finding out that you'll get diarrhea if you eat too much coconut, or that getting too close to a sea urchin will indeed cause poisoning - but the tutorial needs to be a little longer and broader and AT LEAST cover all the basic controls. And lastly, the game world just isn't that pretty or interesting to look at.