Stranded Deep Review

How would you cope in a survival situation? If you were suddenly marooned on a desert island would you be able to catch or forage some food? Could you build a shelter? And ultimately, would you be able to get yourself rescued?

These are the questions that survival game Stranded Deep asks of your character, a wealthy businessman whose private jet goes down over a small chain of islands in the middle of the ocean. There are no other survivors of the crash and no people on the islands, it’s just you and mother nature. With just the life raft from the plane and your wits, it will be up to you to craft, explore and fight off deadly predators until you can find a way to escape.

Life’s A Beach And Then You Die

At first glance the sandy beaches and lush vegetation of the Stranded Deep environment might seem too good to be true. Traumatic plane crashes aside, the views and the sunshine might have you thinking your character has ended up on the holiday of a lifetime. Dig a little deeper though and you’ll start to discover the dangers all around you.

Your starting island rarely has the type of wildlife that can do serious damage in the later game (think wild boar, snakes, etc). Still, even here there will be crabs nipping at your toes, poisonous sea urchins in the shallows, and environmental hazards that will wear down your health in a worryingly short amount of time. Should you venture into the sea you’ll also start to find venomous lionfish, and even sharks that can very quickly end your career as a wannabe Bear Grylls.

It’s not just the animals you need to be worrying about either. Keeping an eye on your attributes is a full time job in itself as you ensure that you eat enough food, drink enough fresh water, and even avoid UV damage that can come from spending too long out in the blazing sun. Your character has a watch that acts as a stat tracker for all these factors so that you can see at a glance what to focus on, but knowing that you need a meal and actually being able to catch, kill and prepare one are two very different things. Fail to take care of any of these attributes and your health will start to drop, until eventually your life and your dreams of getting home are ended.

Crafting Your Escape

As with most games in this genre, crafting will be a big part of your adventure. As you first arrive on your starting island the tutorial will immediately begin explaining how to make simple tools, a rudimentary lean-to shelter, a small campfire and so on. By the end of your time on Stranded Deep however you’ll be creating brick houses, building meat smokers, and even re-assembling old machine parts into makeshift gyrocopters. The sense of progression as you unlock new crafting items is one of the most rewarding parts of this game, and it also helps focus your exploration and resource gathering. Resources on your initial island are limited, so before long you’re forced to search further afield for the parts you need to build that next item.

If you’re the type of player who enjoys base building then there’s no doubt you can sink a solid amount of your time into constructing a fortress to call home. Building blocks might seem quite basic at first, but with a bit of creativity you can put together some impressive multi-story structures to house all your resources and to kick back in and enjoy the sunset over your crop farms. Equally though there’s nothing forcing you to build a huge or elaborate structure. A basic beach hut will be enough for a lot of players to call home, especially if you’re pushing towards that end goal of getting back to civilization. Crafting a proper raft on the other hand is crucial. It is possible to continue using the life raft from your plane crash, but it has very limited space for resources and in deeper water between islands sharks can easily flip you over and start a feeding frenzy. It turns out to be much safer to build a larger raft that can’t be toppled and add a motor to the back for faster travel, and most players will end up finding this an essential part of the late game.

Surviving Or Thriving?

For fans of the survival genre there’s plenty to like about Stranded Deep. The atmosphere captures that castaway feeling very effectively and the visuals can be great at times. I also enjoyed the steady progression through different levels of crafting and resources, and the sense of moving from desperate survival to becoming fully self-sustaining with my island base. The ocean wildlife, especially the different types of shark you encounter later in the game, can provide a real challenge and will require you to come well prepared in order to emerge victorious. If you do reach the endgame there’s also a series of 3 boss battles that you’ll need to beat that will test even the most seasoned and prepared players. Unfortunately though, there are some issues that make it feel at times like a bit of a missed opportunity.

One of the big problems I found when playing the game was in the user interfaces and controls. The watch to track your stats and status effects at a glance is a great quality of life feature, but in other places the developers seem to have made things deliberately awkward. Contextual controls like climbing back aboard your raft from the sea are a fiddly nightmare, especially in the heat of battle, and the inventory system is really not great.

There were also bugs from time to time with resources glitching into the terrain and becoming impossible to gather. New players will also find the tutorial system to be a little bare-bones, and at the start status effects like poisoning can feel very unbalanced. The only way to cure poison is with an antidote crafted from a specific plant, and these can be a real challenge to find initially. Later you can grow your own, but if you brush past a sea urchin in the dark before these plants are readily available it can feel like a very unfair death sentence.

Later on the game arguably swings too far the other way and nothing that you encounter on land feels much of a threat anymore. The tension dips when you no longer feel concerned by a giant boar charging you down, something that could have been helped by having some bigger land animals or maybe introducing a base attack or invasion mechanic in the later parts of Stranded Deep.

When the game originally launched there was no multiplayer mode available at all, but since then a two player co-op option has been added to most versions. Disappointingly the Nintendo Switch release does not include this feature, but to be honest I don’t think the game particularly lends itself to multiplayer anyway. For me it detracts a little from the ‘marooned on a desert island’ theme if there’s another person running around with you! A quick mention for the story too, which is very light but tries to bring in a clever twist at the end. I won’t spoil that ending here, but I don’t think it works very well and it didn’t leave me very satisfied.

Still though, it is worth mentioning that the game is available at a much more reasonable price point than some other titles in this genre. In spite of the flaws I mentioned I did end up putting a good amount of time into Stranded Deep, so for fans of this type of experience it might well be good value for money.