The character comments out loud how "disgusting" it is to skin an animal every time I do it (even though the character has been living off of skinned animals for weeks and should be used to it), so the developers were definitely able to implement contextual dialogue. Or have the character speak to himself out loud that "I could probably use the leaves of that yucca to make rope.". More generally though, it would have been helpful if the game could provide a tooltip when the player hovers over certain resources that explains what that resource might be used for. This specific tutorial problem could have been fixed by modifying the tutorial objectives to specifically tell the player to harvest fibrous leaves from a yucca or baby palm. But I didn't think to try this because I didn't have any reason to think that the baby palm fronds would be any different from the adult palm fronds. Or I could cut the baby palms growing all over the island for small amounts of fibrous leaves. It turns out, the necessary fibrous leaves are harvested from the exactly 2 yucca plants on my starting island, both of which are kind of hidden next to large boulders. I had to go online to find where to get fibrous leaves. So 2 minutes into the game, and there I was stuck on the tutorial. Then I started doing laps around the island looking for seaweed or hemp or something. So I tried using my stone tool to cut leaves off of palm trees, only to get palm fronds, which cannot be made into rope. The game lets me pluck coconuts off of trees, so I thought it would allow the same for plucking leaves off of trees.
I thought I would use leaves from trees, but I wasn't sure which trees, nor was I sure how to pull leaves from trees. The thing that dead-ended my progress and forced me to look online was trying to figure out where to get the leaves to make rope to craft the knife. I had troubles right from the start with simple things like operating the inventory and performing some of the early tutorial crafting. She said I have much more patience than her, because she would have given up right then and there. My girlfriend also said as much and wondered out loud why I would even continue playing a game that couldn't even do an adequate job of communicating its fundamental mechanics. I kinda knew I was in for a disappointing experience when I had to pause the game during the tutorial in order to look up how to proceed. Stranded Deep is definitely not as good as Control. But I mostly liked Control, so went ahead and gave Stranded Deep a shot too. I consider it "game progress insurance" in case my console fails on me. Honestly, I use my PSPlus subscription mostly for the cloud storage. Gotta get that $60 per year of value from the subscription somehow. Long before indie titles like Stranded Deep or The Forest ever saw full releases.īut Stranded Deep showed up as another free game for PSPlus subscribers (along with Control), and I went ahead and downloaded it. Survival sims were a huge fad on Steam, but the fad started to fizzle out I never got around to buying Stranded Deep on Steam, even after it left early access which is apparently still in early access on Steam, because the "survival sim" fad had petered out and my own interest in that particular game fizzled out as well. This is also the reason that I rarely go back to games that received major overhauls post-release, like No Man's Sky or SimCity (2013) - I'm already soured on the game, and it's unlikely to win me back. I don't typically invest in early access games because I don't want the incompleteness of the game to combine with my overly-critical eye and completely sour me to an experience that would likely be positive when the game is finished. Stranded Deep is a game that I had on my Steam wishlist for years - when it first became available through "early access" - along with games like The Long Dark and The Forest. I've been diving into my Steam wishlist and backlog while waiting for this fall's suite of football video games.
( < indicates platform I played for review) Can't check watch, binoculars, or compass while operating raft rudder.Animals are way too aggressive and hard to attack.Constantly re-crafting basic necessities.No in-game description of how anything works.Short, medium, and long-term rewards encourage continued play.Believable depiction of island survival.