Raft

Being stuck far away from civilization is one of the worst things a person can experience, given the fact that there’s little chance them to be found in time. However, it depends on the type of terrain you encounter when you get lost, because it’s obviously a bit easier to survive on a lush island full of fruit and a shore crawling with fish than it is to find yourself in an arctic desert with barely any life around you.

Raft is a very intriguing sandbox survival game in which you play the role of a stranded man trying to survive in the middle of an ocean, with nothing but a raft and a hook to his name. Thankfully, the hook allows him to reel in various resources that float nearby, which in turn allow him to expand his raft and even build a few interesting contraptions to achieve other purposes.

Planks, barrels of food and various plants happen to drift nearby, but it’s important to learn how to use the hook properly in order to reel them in. The crafting component is simple enough, on the other hand, since all you need to do is make sure you have all the right resources and press the right button in order to create what you need. After a while, the mechanics get even more interesting.

As it’s only natural, sharks start to make trouble after a while, and they can actually destroy parts of your rafts if you do not deflect their attacks. Although it’s not possible at first, with enough materials you can craft a spear to attack the sharks, even if the task of defending yourself gets more complex later on when the raft is bigger. Other components must be protected as well, such as the water purifier or the cooking pot.

Lastly, the graphics are actually quite nice, even if there’s not much to see yet. The water effects and the objects that are part of the game are quite detailed, which speaks volumes for the future of the game. There are some optimization problems, on the other hand, but those can be fixed once the gameplay is refined and polished some more.

Raft is actually a fresh take on the survival genre, which is not something you see very often nowadays. Hence, we can only hope that the developers keep up the good work and improve their game to keep us busy for more than a few minutes.