Raft

An adventurous sandbox with survival elements and a first-person view. In the game, you will find yourself on a small raft that slowly drifts across the vast waters of the ocean. You only have a hook and rope at your disposal, while sharks swim around in hopes of an easy meal. Fortunately for you, various debris like planks, barrels, and tools float by. From all this, you can build a real floating fortress and fend off the ocean predators.

Raft is an adventurous indie game from Redbeet studio, featuring a first-person view. The action takes place in the ocean, where the player is on a fragile raft alone or with friends. You need to survive, find resources, and craft useful items from them, as well as gather food.

Raft was released in early access on Steam on May 23, 2018, and the developers promise to improve it over the year, incorporating community feedback. There was no story mode at the time of early access.

Based on the state of the game world, it can be concluded that the events of Raft take place in modern times. Consider that global warming has occurred, a plane has landed on the water, or a cruise ship has capsized due to a storm. The player finds themselves in the middle of an endless ocean on a couple of connected planks and can move in any direction.

The world and all its contents are generated randomly. Various debris floats in the ocean, which must be collected and sorted into resources: plastic, metals, shoes, glass, wood, ropes, and more. You also need to gather food through fishing or foraging, and produce fresh water.

At any moment, you can dive into the ocean to gather treasures from the underwater world. Occasionally, islands full of resources appear on the horizon, both on the surface and around the seabed.

An important part of Raft is exploration and subsequent item creation. First, the player must examine a discovered item, losing it but gaining a recipe (blueprint). Then, you can create copies of any studied items, as long as you have enough resources.

Certain actions will require specific tools, such as a saw for building or a spear to fend off sharks. Progress is impossible without improving the raft; over time, you can turn it into a sailing aircraft carrier, with almost no limitations. New options will appear in the menu, such as ship outfitting or navigation.

To make the raft more enjoyable, Raft features decorations—beds and chairs, tables and stools, clocks and lanterns, and much more—all of which will be useful during your journey. Crafting is not simple; for example, to obtain clean water, you need to start and maintain a fire, evaporating seawater from one container to another so that the steam collects and condenses through a palm leaf.

At the time of early access, the character in Raft had no backstory. It all comes down to survival, and in Raft, that means maintaining the body's needs. The character is constantly hungry and thirsty; depleting any meter will lead to death. There is also a health meter, which is active during encounters with sharks.

If the development and resource gathering events are periodic, then having a supply of cooked fish and fresh water is necessary at all times. It is much scarier to be without them than to get caught in a storm.

The idea of Raft is simple — travel across the ocean, survive, gather resources, explore and craft items, engage in underwater hunting, turn a raft into a ship, visit islands, develop to the fullest to find the largest island in the game. In early access, there were no other types of activities.

Regardless of single-player and multiplayer modes, the gameplay is mostly the same: in single-player, you have to do everything yourself, while in multiplayer, everyone is busy with their own tasks and progress is much faster.