Stranded Deep (Early Access)

Imagine you’re stuck on a desert island, doing what you have to to survive. Okay, now imagine it with fewer sultry redheads and with more starvation and primal terror. Stranded Deep is a labor of love for developers Beam Team Games, a two-man team from Australia, a survival and crafting game that eschews the zombies and focuses more on doing what it takes to survive in a much less outlandish situation than the post-apocalypse. The game’s been in Early Access on Steam since January of this year, and has earned itself an extremely dedicated fan community. Keep reading to find out what we thought.

Wonder if Miss Earhardt lives around here?

Lucky for you, there’s an island nearby, but this strange world is a bit unsettling – islands dot the ocean for miles and miles, but there doesn’t appear to be any mainland anywhere in sight. However, there are signs of civilization all around you; the sea and the beaches are absolutely lousy with shipwrecks. There are even a few airplanes resting in watery graves down there, and if you go far enough out, abandoned WWII-era sea forts rise above the waves, daring you to risk tetanus and explore them. This world is beautiful, yet there’s something eerie about it. Wherever the hell you’ve found yourself, one thing is certain – you’re going to have to survive.

Don’t go looking for a bunker

This is where the game’s “physical” crafting system comes in – basically, you throw all the stuff down on the ground and a context menu tells you what you can build with it. Walking around the island, some of the things you will find are stones, wood, and green coconuts. and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you can slash at the yucca and potato plants with your knife to get lashings and potatoes. Soon, you’re able to fashion a crude axe you can use to chop down palm trees for more wood and palm fronds, and a hammer that allows you to build a very basic shelter and a bed. Another important thing you’re going to need is a campfire (oh, that’s what the lighter is for!), which allows you to see a little bit at night, and crucially, to cook the fish you catch with the crude spear you made.

More valuable objects, the kind you’d normally buy at the hardware store, cannot be made using rock shard and coconut shells. You’re going to have to find them, but one of the advantages of living in what appears to be the Bermuda Triangle’s more aggressive cousin is that there are shipwrecks galore, allowing you to salvage and scavenge whatever you can find. And you can find a lot – better hammers and axes, but also a flashlight (“torch”), duct tape, buckets, air tanks, and engine parts and fuel to make your island-hopping a bit easier.

The game does a great job of integrating interface with gameplay. There’s no HUD, nothing on the screen to indicate you’re playing a game. Instead, you press [F] to look at your watch, which tells you the time and the temperature. If you left-click the mouse while looking at your watch, it will display your vitals – health, hunger, and thirst, each represented by an icon and a meter. Health can be depleted a number of ways: taking damage from sharks, poisoning, or not having enough food and/or water. You can regain health by sleeping, using bandages, taking salvaged pills, etc., depending on what ails you. Hunger can be regenerated by eating, of course. Potatoes are just one source of food; others are coconuts, crabs, and fish, lots and lots of fish. Water is a bit trickier – you can get it from knifing a coconut to make it “drinkable” (then chop it up for food), or you can drink it from your water bottle. Obviously, the water bottle runs out, but you can refill it by boiling sea or rainwater in a bucket.

The only real dangers, besides your own body’s needs, are the sharks. There are tons of sharks out there, and they come in several different species. For the most part, they won’t mess with you unless you mess with them, though certain species are more aggressive than others, and they’ll even attempt to flip over your raft. You can fend them off using a flare gun or a whistle, or if you’re brave you can use your spear to kill them and eat their meat – after you cook it, of course. Other animals won’t attack you directly, but some fish species are poisonous, and others are inedible and will induce vomiting. I won’t give too much away, as it’s clear the developers want players to figure it out for themselves using real-world knowledge, or by trial-and-error.

While the dangers themselves are at this time pretty thin on the ground (though I did read that they plan to add snakes and other fauna at some point), the developers of Stranded Deep have done a wonderful job of tapping into the player’s primal fears of the dark, the depths, and the weather. Getting stuck out in the water after dark is a terrifying experience, and while storms are at this time not dangerous in themselves, the reduced visibility can easily make you panic for fear of getting lost. And in the deep dark depths, not only does the low visibility make surprise shark attacks a real possibility, but the danger of drowning becomes palpable, and finding yourself stuck inside a shipwreck as the darkness literally closes in around you comes straight out of humanity’s collective nightmares.

But none of this compare to the fear of getting lost. The game has no map, and each new game features a procedurally generated series of islands, reefs, wrecks, and open sea. Islands are small, and resources limited, so it’s hard to stay on any one island for more than a few days. This means you’re either going to have to build up a base and go out foraging, or just island-hop forever, or at least until you die. But if all the islands look more or less the same, and the ocean always looks like … the ocean, how do you find your way back? Well, you can find a compass in shipwrecks and sunken tool boxes, or you can use nature’s clock – the sun. Again, this is where actual knowledge of navigation and reading the signs of nature can help. Anyone should at least be able to establish the cardinal directions this way. Some people in the comments on Steam have suggested that the game needs a map, but I think that would break the realism, so I hope the developers don’t plan on adding one.

The World Is Not Enough

Another common complaint is that islands are too small. All of this means that there is just not much to do in the game at this time, and as cool as it is for an hour or so, it gets old fast. There’s no end game, though they do plan to eventually add a way to get rescued. But even in terms of pure survival, once you have a set routine, there’s not much of a challenge, and you might end up provoking sharks or flirting with drowning just to break the sheer monotony.  

A lot of people are complaining that updates are few and far between, and that very little content has been added since January. This is true, but this is a two-man development team attempting to make a game that looks like it can keep up with the best of them, not the kind of pixellated indie title that’s so popular these days. Yes, they might be spending more time tweaking the graphics than working on content, but they are working. And for those who are impatient, there is an active modding community that’s added a few things of their own.

You can also opt in to the “experimental branch” of the game, which is really unstable, but has more content. In the experimental branch, the seas are a lot rougher and more realistic, islands can be a lot bigger and even feature high rocks to climb, almost any tree can be chopped for wood, and there are other changes that give you a taste of what’s to come. The devs are also working on new building materials and gameplay elements, and they seem to be a pretty dedicated duo, so I have all the confidence in the world that there’s a lot more content coming. We just have to be patient. The physics are also a bit wonky, but I’m willing to wait and see.

At least it’s not all Jimmy Buffett

The game’s overlapping biome system is also really cool. As you transition from island to shallows, to reefs, and deep sea, the scenery changes in sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic ways, just like in real life, and you can find different species of fish in different areas. While I don’t imagine the distribution of species is entirely accurate for the South Pacific, it does a great job of creating the illusion of a living, breathing world.

Not everything’s perfect, though. Foliage is obviously created using flat, 2D panels arranged in a 3D manner, and the incongruity really sticks out sometimes. Currently, game elements are extremely repetitive, so that once you’ve seen one or two islands, you’ve seen them all.

The soundtrack in Stranded Deep is not “Margaritaville” on repeat, in case you were wondering. Actually, there’s very little music at all, and it seems to come on randomly. When it does, it’s deep and foreboding, and very, very minimalistic. Which is of course entirely appropriate given the game’s theme and the experience the devs are trying to create. Sound effects can get kind of old after a while – that one “axe-chop” sound might even get obnoxious after a couple hundred times. While there isn’t any voice acting to speak of, the player character does make the occasional grunt when exerting himself, not to mention the “vomiting” noise when he eats something bad, or the “oh crap I almost drowned” noise when you surface after a deep dive.