Stranded Deep is a survival simulator on land and a survival horror game in the ocean. There are few things that I have found so terrifying outside of Amnesia: The Dark Descent as I have when falling into the water with a hungry shark in this game.
Yeah, no thanks…
Stranded Deep has a lot of holes in it in terms of realism and actual survival. That being said, it is still one of the most comprehensive and captivating games in the genre that I have seen. While Stranded Deep’s controls on the console are clumsy and sometimes downright infuriating, the game always draws me back, despite the dumb name that might as well have been pulled out of an island-themed random word generator.
Getting My Feet Under Me
In most games, I like to play essentially as myself where I make the same choices that I would make, style the character after me if I can… You get the idea. Yet in this video-game rendition of Castaway 2 (complete with crashed aircraft), I decided to break from that trend. I thought “You know what? I’m kinda sick of the whole surviving manly man thing. Let’s be a lady and kick ass at it!”
I did not kick ass at it. . .
Much of my initial failure I can blame on struggling to accustom myself to the clunky, counterintuitive controls, strange game mechanics, and a touch of outright stupidity on my part. The island you begin on is small and lacking resources. This is probably to encourage players to go out and explore the other islands, rather than remain static. Eager as I was to explore, though, I could not make much progress when I spent, quite literally, a quarter of my time on that island searching for my missing knife.
Weird Inventory
See, Stranded Deep has a strange inventory system. You can fill your slots with various bits and pieces and then hold another item in your hand. Most items can also be stacked in these slots. Heavens forbid, though, if you have a full inventory while holding something then decide to take out something you have multiple copies of. Instead of just making room in your pack where the thing you pull out was, the game just drops whatever you are holding.
The crafting system is also tedious. See those green things? You can have 24 in your inventory and it costs 4 to make a rope. Instead of crafting them all at once, though, you have to go back into the menu for Every. Single. Rope. Or anything else. Major pain if you’re trying to make, say, 40 arrows.
This is surprisingly easy to forget and if you need to switch equipment on the fly it’s easy to drop what you were holding in the grass as you walk. Then, you find yourself scanning every pixel for some sign that your gear is hidden in the greenery. I lost a compass while at sea this way, but fortunately enough the game has no shortage of them. Just five hours in, I’d collected enough that I could have made a thoroughly uncomfortable and perhaps tetanus-inducing ball pit out of them. Still, drop something rare or difficult to make like an electrical part at sea and, well… You might do a reprisal of Tom Hanks’s Wilson scene as your item plummets into the seemingly bottomless abyss below.
Don’t even get me started on trying to steer your raft with a paddle. Let’s just leave it at this: Build a sail ASAP. The paddle isn’t worth the trouble.
The Game’s Finest Point
What Stranded Deep does well above all else, however, is atmosphere. The graphics are pretty good, but not entirely photo-realistic. You notice little things here and there. These issues are entirely overshadowed, though, by how the lighting and the soundtrack, in particular, are used.
To this day, my raft has a patch of grass growing out of the air behind it wherever I go. Strangely enough, even though grass can levitate behind my raft, there’s no mechanic for towing anything.
While walking about islands and often while swimming near them, there is a calm, simple theme playing reminiscent of the Dalish Elves’ music from Dragon Age: Origins. It is unobtrusive while filling the void that silence would leave. Then at night, when the music segues into a melancholy cello solo, you want to crawl into your shelter and go to sleep just to forget how lonely you are. When silence does fall, and all you hear is the susurration of the waves and the squawking of gulls, it is almost alarming.
However, few things are as alarming as when you hear the shark music start to play.
Not all sharks are jerks, and Stranded got that part right. There are swarms of smaller sharks all over the game. Though they might be frightening at first, you’ll find out soon enough that you can swim right up to them and they won’t even bat an eye. Well, if they could that is. The rest of the sharks in the game, though, are vicious and, frankly, just straight up dicks. Think of a stalker mixed with a serial killer and then put a two-foot, tooth-laced jaw on it, and you get the sharks in Stranded Deep. The moment one starts to target you, even if you are on land, the music changes. Whatever song was playing before fades and a soft, deep theme creeps to your ears.
You won’t be able to see the shark at first, so you spin around, frantically searching for wherever the aquatic apex predator is lurking. If you are in the life raft you start with, well, good luck. You may be rowing and, at the exact midpoint between islands, your raft might flip into the air as you plunge into the dark water and come face to face with one of these prehistoric monstrosities.
I don’t care what shark advocates say. In Stranded Deep at least, if a shark dumps you into the water, he doesn’t want to meet you, he wants to eat you. Your only hope at that point is scrambling onto the overturned raft and jumping back into the water when the shark moves away and hope that you can right the thing and paddle to safety before the shark decides to flip the raft again, which it can do at any moment.
If you have any hope for survival, you must listen to the soundtrack, as that is the only warning you will get before a shark tries to take a basketball-sized nibble out of you.
Addressing The Shark In The Room
The problem is, this music came up frequently. Just about every time I went into the water, I would hear it begin within a few seconds. After a while, even after I managed to flee to another island, I became convinced that the same great white shark was following me, like Jaws or the IRS. When I got cornered in a sunken ship and close enough to the thing, the game informed me that it was actually a tiger shark hunting me. Too afraid to be embarrassed by my mistake, my main thought was that this sucker was big enough as it was and that I had no desire to meet a great white. (Spoiler alert: you’ll meet one anyway.)
Once I made it to safety and had a moment to be indignant, I realized how sick I was of having to run away from this same shark every time I went near the water. Thus, I made it my next objective to kill it. When I finally did, after filling it with so many spears that it would have made a porcupine blush, I thought that my problem was at least temporarily solved.
Not so.
You’d think he’d have taken the hint after the first three spears to the face.
Within minutes of skinning the thing and going back in the water, what do I hear? The same spine-tingling music. I dashed to shore and, waddaya know? there was another tiger shark following me. These things are about as ubiquitous as catfish on a dating website. For all I know, I hadn’t actually been followed from island to island, but just picked up one of the game’s apparently endless supply of ocean monsters. I could have changed the settings to make all sharks passive, but that would have made the game too easy, right?
Despite all of my shark encounters, though, my character has not once been bitten by them. Poisoned by invincible sea snakes and fragile land snakes alike, yes. A dozen times. Yet the game is strangely forgiving when it comes to sharks. They will circle if you are watching them or at least give you a few seconds to orient if they knock you into the water. I haven’t had the guts to test this, but I also suspect that the player can even sprint through the water about as fast as the sharks can swim. Despite knowing this, whenever I am in the ocean, my heart nonetheless stops the moment the music dies down, fearing that it might morph into the sharks’ theme. In Stranded’s favor, though, the constant suspense helps prevent the long trips between islands from being boring!
The Last Word
The long and short of it is this: Stranded Deep has borderline wretched controls and has some crafting and survival mechanics that make the boy scout and backpacker in me furrow my brow in confusion. That being said, the game is fun and exceptionally rewarding! When you finally build something that you have been working towards or find a way to make your life a little easier, it can feel like Christmas came early. Even the lack of a story, which is usually something of a mood killer to me, only barely puts a blemish on this otherwise thoroughly entertaining, beautiful game.
More information about Stranded Deep can be found on the official website. A digital copy for PS4 was provided for the purpose of review.
Read more of my thoughts on games in my review of Evan’s Remains, a story-driven puzzle game, or the not as topical as I had hoped Liberated.
