HomeReviewsRaft
Premature Evaluation: RaftOh buoy oh buoy
Oh buoy oh buoy
Developer:Redbeet InteractivePublisher:Axolot GamesRelease:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:SteamFor:£15, $19.50, €18
You’ll have heard of Raft. It’s the best open world survival crafting there is, for the singular reason that rather than having to run around to discover and excavate resources, they’re all swept towards you on a never-ending tide of stuff. Plastic, wood, leaves, potatoes. All you have to do is catch the detritus with a hook on a string and then yank it towards you, so that it becomes part of your raft and your raft can grow larger and more elaborate.
Once freed of the job of fishing endless crap out of the brine, you’ll find plenty else to be getting on with. On the horizon you’ll occasionally spot islands or derelict rafts. Once you’ve researched and built a sail you can more easily guide your growing wooden house towards these landmarks, dropping anchor and jumping off ship to pilfer anything useful you come across. It’s in the shallow waters surrounding islands that you find the rare metals and clays required to transition to the next stage of the tech tree, where everything kicks into high gear and you start building radio antennas and transmission towers using ropes and coconuts, unlocking the game’s lore and story mode as you do.
This is a more guided survival game than most. Raft not only has a literal story to uncover, revealing the reasons why the world got so wet, but it cleverly chaperones you from one discovery to the next, unfurling a quickly expanding list of researchable equipment and tools while staying focused enough to keep you from feeling utterly bewildered. Recent updates have introduced super large and sprawling islands with buildings to explore, animals to tame and bees to capture. You can stick engines and rudders to your raft and sail it any which way you want, no longer a slave to capricious winds, using radio equipment to discover and revisit any islands you’ve come across. Raft’s endless oceans feel entirely empty at first, but beyond those horizons hide great piles of stuff.
Besides, placing a bunch of people on a raft has historically resulted in exceptionally strange results that have very little to do with finding new islands. In the 1970s a bizarre social experiment was carried out in which ten strangers attempted to sail across the Atlantic on a small raft, the purported aim to study the psychological effects of sharing a confined space for a long period of time. Predictably enough, the subjects of the study formed a kind of awesome hippie sex cult andmutinied against the researcher. The raft became known in the tabloid press as the Sex Raft, inventively, and is the subject of an incredible 2018 documentary calledThe Raft.
So that’s your homework this week: play Raft, watch The Raft, and then if you like, go have an orgy on a raft. Thank you.
