Stranded Deep - Can You Survive The Islands?

So the other night, I was looking through games on Steam, seeing if something would pique my interest. Not that I'm bored with my many games, and I'm certainly having a lot of fun playing 7 Days to Die with my wife. She's been feeling under the weather lately, so I was looking for something to mess around with.

I didn't want another Zombie, Crafting, Survival game, however, I saw this game, Stranded Deep and took a look at it.

Made by Beam Team Games, an independent video game studio based in Brisbane, Australia, the first thing that got my attention was how the game looked:







I love realistic looking first person view games. The synopsis of the game drew my attention too, it wasn't just another first person shooter, or a "Oh Noooozzz! Zombies are coming!!" game. It was a game about survival, but it wasn't about surviving some post apocalyptic era.

It also was something more realistic: Your jet crashed in the Pacific ocean, and you've made it to a set of islands. Let's see if you can survive.

The game runs on the Unity engine, and while I'm a bigger fan of the Unreal engine, I have to admit, the game looks beautiful. Both on the islands, and under the water. I feel like the devs did a wonderful job making this game look good.

The game map is random, so each time you start a new game, the islands and where they are will be different each time. The view is full screen immersion, meaning that there are no health bars, hunger bars, compass, etc cluttering up the screen. Let's face it, in real life, you wouldn't see that either.
Of course you do need to know those things, so the Devs put it all into a wrist watch that you have to call up to look at.

Crafting is different too: instead of a crafting table, or doing all the crafting in your inventory, you instead have to gather the stuff you need and throw it on the ground.

There are some things that make me go "Hrrrrmmmmmm...." about the game, but then it is a Alpha and was just released last month in January. I imagine there will be updates and add ons with things changing as time goes by just like most Alpha releases.

Some of the things that bother me:

You can only interact with and chop down the Palm Trees. There are other trees, and you should be able to interact with them.
There are a limited amount of small rocks that you can get on each island. You should be able to bust up bigger rocks into smaller rocks. Of course you can go island hopping in your raft to get more rocks and bring them to where you want to set up your base or home, but the sharks make that a PITA.
No back pack, so your inventory is limited. I do like that they make the inventory limited and the amount you can stack items very small, as this reflects reality....however, given some of the materials we can make, we should be able to also put together a bag or back pack that can help us out, as we'd do that in real life too.

Wrecks: there are many, many wrecks you can dive to, or are washed up so you can explore them. They're all small (like fishing trawlers). It would really cool to have a few very large wrecks also.

Slow time down: the days and nights go by much too quickly in my opinion. Either slow it down, or have an option for the players to change how fast they want the days and nights to go by.

Saving: there are no save game slots. Instead, it simply saves over the same spot, so it's not possible to have several game saves. Choose your saves wisely, else you may have to start all over.

There are many things that I give a thumbs up with this game:

Weather changes: Nice a sunny, to sudden down pours where you can't see very well, or fogs roll in. Woe be it to the player if they are on a raft trying to paddle to another island when this happens: you'll get lost quite easily.

You get sick: It's possible for your player to get sick from exposure and develop a nasty cough. Better get a shelter built so you can get out of the rain once in a while.

The ambience is just right. No music constantly playing in the back ground, just the sound of the wind and ocean most times. You do hear some ominous music when sharks get too close, and once in a great while some back ground music will pop up, but it's very short and passes quite quickly.

So if you're looking for something different, or just want to see how well you'd do stranded on some tropical small islands, then give the game a try. Just keep in mind it was just released as an Alpha and there will be updates and changes down the road.

If you're interested, you can get the game from Steam here in this link below. It was just under $15 USD

store.steampowered.com...

I'm not sure if it can be bought anywhere else at this time. If you know of another place, please post it here.

Here is a video I made yesterday about it:

Watching your vid now, first saw this game played by jacksepticeye and it looks awesome (and he's hilarious). I really like the way this game plays. AFAIK, Jack said it's going to be expanded to multiplayer so that should be fun.

Turns out: NO the palm trees do NOT grow back, so you have to manage what you use. The coconuts DO grow back on the trees (which you can climb to pick them).

So if you don't have enough trees, you have to island hop around to get more wood to craft stuff. Same with the rocks: you only have a certain amount and NO way to break apart the bigger ones.

In the video, turns out there is a reason my health was not going back up: I was still bleeding. Bandages, you can only make them from duct tape and cloth. Both items you have to find in wrecks and you can not craft them.

Still love this game, as with the limitations right now, makes it very challenging in some ways. My son goes wreck diving all the time in the game, no fear of the sharks, where as I'm like: NOOOOOO! hehehehehe

a reply to: eriktheawful

Is there, by chance, a volleyball laying around to be interacted with?

a reply to: Shamrock6

Yes there is and he shows it in his vid. It's even got the blood face and grass hair from "Wilson".

a reply to: thov420

Dang it. I couldn't get the vid loaded before. I'll have to give it another shot.

Though I will be surprised if the vid surpasses the Alien "surprise" video from before, Erik

I've been playing this game and also one you should check out is "The Long Dark". Another excellent one!

Erik, I'm not done watching the video yet but I can't help but wonder about your computer leaving the game and returning to desktop. Have you noticed if you're hitting any certain buttons when that happens? Clicking the mouse?

I never had that problem with my AMD setup before... I'm just trying to figure out what would cause it! lol

a reply to: Aldakoopa

No. It's completely random. Sometimes it does it if I've paused a game and walked away from the computer. I come back to find it at the desktop with the game minimized.

It's not just games either. Like my browser, I'll be making a post and suddenly my cursor is gone and I have to click the post box to continue writing.

Completely random. Sometimes it waits until I've been playing a long time....some times it happens at the beginning.

Once it's done it, it will do it one more time shortly afterwards, then that's it. Some times for hours and hours before it does it again.

I don't think it's the hardware to tell you the truth, because I have Linux Mint on my other hard drive and if I'm playing a game while in Mint, it never, ever does it.

I've tried searching the net for it, and have come up completely empty. I can put up with it for now (all though it does tend to make me poop my pants as it always seems to wait to do it until I'm facing a zombie horde or something like that).

That is a strange one. I have an issue with my current computer that I haven't entirely figured out. Every once in a while (it always occurs at 21 minutes after any random hour of the day, sometimes multiple times per day) I have something flash up on my screen for a split second. An icon appears in the task bar and sometimes I can see a window appear for a very short time, but it's so fast I can't read the title, and it appears to just be blank white inside. The icon that appears on the task bar is too fast to tell what it is really, but a couple of times I've made it out to be my anti-virus icon.

This doesn't always become an issue to me... it has taken me out of a game to my desktop a few times but not often at all, most of the time it will happen when I'm on the web and if I was typing something it will take away my cursor like you said... it never happens twice in a row, but like I said, always at 21 minutes after some random hour.

There are no scheduled tasks that line up with that time-frame specifically... I guess I should try a different anti-virus or something if that is what the logo is that comes up.

Anyway, your issue just sort of reminded me of something that's happening to my computer, but it could be completely unrelated. It never happened on my old AMD setup, but happens since I have an Intel setup now... so kinda the opposite of your issue.

I've been waiting for a good game like this for a long time. I played it for a few hours the other day and loved it. The graphics are pretty amazing but there are a few small issues (like no player shadow or the way objects near the edge of the screen get enlarged). The other problem is the unrealistic physics, but that's probably due to limitations of the Unity engine, which is better at producing amazing graphics with realistic lighting then it is at producing realistic physics. But like you said it is still in the alpha stage and I'm sure many of these issues will be ironed out in time.

What really excites me about this game is the potential for modding. This is the type of open world game where the modding community can really help to expand the game content and make the game 10x better by putting effort into things the original developers didn't have time to focus on. There are already some great mods out there. The SDTweaks Mod adds lots of little bug fixes and game play tweaks (such as increased inventory size). The big islands mod increases the average size of the islands and can be used with SDTweaks if you follow the instructions properly.

Another awesome thing I read about this game is that the islands are procedurally generated and so you will have different islands every time you play a new game and it's possible to travel in any direction almost endlessly and keep finding new islands. I would like to see a mod which makes the islands further apart so that it becomes more of a mission to travel between them. First you'd need to build like a raft or something and you'd need to bring a large food supply in order to make it. Then it would also make more sense to have some sort of mapping/cartography mechanism integrated into the game so that you could fast travel between islands which you've already discovered.

Another thing I'd really like to see is wild animals on some of the larger islands. Right now all of the islands seem a bit bland without any type of wild life except a few crabs. And if you had wild animals you could also have some type of hunting and cooking system. What the game really needs more than anything right now is a larger number of useful or craftable objects because it didn't take me very long to create everything the game had to offer. The other thing that it could really use is some sort of goal/quest system which gives the player a purpose even after they have built a shack and experienced most of what the game has to offer.

Lastly, it would be awesome if there was a hardcore mode which did things like make the player stats affect the players abilities. For example when you are low on health or starving you might be able to carry less or move more slowly. It's still early days but this game really has so much potential and I can't wait to see what the modders do with it in the future. Another interesting game I recently heard of (but haven't played yet) is The Forest. It's also a survival game in the early stages of development and it's also made by an indie studio which blows my mind because it looks even more amazing than Stranded Deep based on what I've seen.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Thanks for the links to the mods for this game!

Love all of your suggestions for it. At the store page for this game on Steam, if you scroll down is a button for going to the discussion boards about it where you can offer feedback about bugs and suggestions for improving the game.

I love the exploring myself (there are a lot of wrecks that are in deep water that I've not touched), after awhile, all the islands did seem to start blurring together.

Something I'd like to see is random debris washing up ashore, as this really happens too in real life.

I think the coolest experience I had was running into a whale while traveling between islands. That left my mouth open.

One thing I would like to see added is dolphins. Which can be both helpful (keeping sharks away) and a problem (they are quite playful and could knock you out of your raft).

I certainly remember a lot of dolphins following our ships all the time when I was in the Navy.

a reply to: eriktheawful

Yah dolphins would be pretty cool. They added more sea creatures in the last patch so I'm guessing they plan to add more in the future. Sharks can already knock you off the raft and it scares the crap out of me lol. Diving into shipwrecks at night with a torch is also very freaky.