Stranded Deep

As I mentioned last week, I really enjoy survival games. A friend pointed out ‘stranded deep’ to me last week, which is available on steam greenlight. The basics of the game are simple. You start out on an airplane and that’s where you’ll do a brief tutorial. You make a martini by dragging items around and learning how to use your inventory (which is a maximum of 8 slots to begin with). Crafting is pretty simplistic, which in this game I found to be a good thing. Basically you right click and drag items around close to one another in front of you, and a little square menu will pop up that tells you those items craft into something.

Eventually your plane crashes and you find yourself swimming around in an ocean, surrounded by sharks and water, with more sharks and water (and a few islands). Your goal from that point on is survival. The graphics to this game are absolutely beautiful, and the music caused me to jump out of my chair more than once. I managed to survive the first day, but just barely. A shark decided I would make a great meal as I was swimming around trying to explore an old abandoned boat I found just a few feet off of my island. I was getting a bit tired of eating nothing but crab, so I crafted a crude spear so I could catch some fish.

For this game it may be worth watching some of the tutorials that are out there if you’re easily frustrated by trying to figure craft recipes out. Most of them are simple logic, like dropping sticks on the ground in a pile (5) will allow you to create a campfire. You can then turn that campfire into a firepit, and turn that firepit into a fire spit, where you can hang food and cook it without having to manually hold your food over the fire.

So far my only negative comment would have to be that when food finishes cooking – you hear a ding, like a microwave. Out on my little island home away from home I’m not really expecting to hear a microwave ding when my crabs are done cooking over an open flame. Since the word of the food changes from crab to cooked crab, I really feel this is an unnecessary feature, and should be disabled. Unless of course your isolated island is equipped with a microwave. Then by all means, keep the ding.