"Stranded Deep" by Beam Team Games sounds like my perfect game on paper. It's got a whiff of "Lost" about it, as the game opens with you luxuriating in your private jet, shortly before said jet dives into the sea. Your survival instinct kicks in, you head for a liferaft and wake up in the shallows of a deserted tropical island, baking in the blistering hot sun (I didn't really need any full-on immersive gaming rig to simulate what that feels like, the British summer has kicked in with all the charm and grace of a sweaty hippo as usual as I write this!)
From the moment you manage to drag your raft onto the sandy shores, it's time to get busy living or get busy dying. Your character literally has nothing but the contents of a sparse survival pack (strapped to the raft, something I didn't discover until Day 2 of my first survival attempt, DOH!) and whatever you can construct from the island's limited resources. As you scan the horizon you can just about make out the shapes of other islands in the dim distance, and thus the game sets out its table, ready for you to dive in.
On first impressions, it's not a game that's going to task your PS4 (or PS5 if you're one of the lucky few to own one), it feels very much like an early noughties PC game in fact, complete with slightly awkward first person perspective arms that seem to snake off at impossible angles every time you do anything. There are simple inventory and crafting menus, but the game lacks some control finesse. Way too many times I found myself frustrated at the rather workmanline UI, and some of the gammy-handedness in performing even the simplest tasks (such as needing to drop a coconut to trim it for drinking, then the need to pick it back up again, drink, then discard. Something that could easily have been one smooth operation rather than a set of disjointed steps).
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| Swiss Family Robinson? |
Your only guide to your progress and health is your smart watch, which gleefully reports on the state of your health and overall wellbeing, as well as a few useful game stats. Keeping the UI to a bare minimum does at least mean the game feels nicely immersive even if the graphics are a bit hit and miss.
Weirdly though, despite it feeling a bit old skool, it's quite entertaining and I think it just shows that - other than Minecraft - there's a real lack of decent high quality survival games, a genre that does fetch up some diamonds in the rough from time to time and a genre I always tend to enjoy way more than anything bang-shooty.
Soon you begin to strike a decent balance between filling up your ever-grumbling tum, and crafting a decent shelter. As you progress further into the game you begin to realise that there's a wealth of crafting options to help you progress from a simple shelter made of palm fronds, into something a bit more like the picture above.
The game isn't without its aggressors, and as you'd expect from trying to survive on a remote island, there are lots of creative ways to die including poisoning from stepping on sea urchins, to upsetting the local wild boar population (Hint: Don't try to use spears to bring those things down unless you want to see a wild boar doing a decent impression of a porcupine but still being alive enough to gouge your guts out).
It's a game that's drawn me in despite its various shortcomings, and definitely half decent for a 'freebie' (certainly better than most of the other offerings on PS Plus lately, I mean offering VR-only games is just cruel for someone like me who gets the sweats every time he puts the VR rig on).
Recommended!
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