Raft is an excellent first-person, indie, adventure, survival game developed by Redbeet Interactive and published by Axolot Games on the 23rd of May 2018. The game has been cleverly designed to simulate the feeling of being stranded at sea, all alone. This outstanding game can be played single or multiplayer to either have the option of finding absolute focused teamwork or braving the seas alone.
The game itself runs smoothly on your computer; the nice, calming waving with the relaxing music really puts you at ease… until the shark attacks your raft, and you must defend for your life. When you finally make it to an island, with maybe two to three platforms on your raft left, you begin to realise that this game might be harder than you thought it was. Stuck on the first island, all you can do is get your toes nibbled as you try to get stones from the seafloor and wood from the trees as your vitals slowly perish into the abyss.
Even though there is a shark constantly attacking your raft, there are some lovely things to this game. Starting with the storyline. Immaculate, perfect. I absolutely love the whole thing. Trying my best not to spoil too much for future players, I will say that the way you discover the storyline is well planned. You must find notes that are scattered around the world using your navigation system, whether they are on top of buildings, under islands or simply in the middle of nowhere. The graphics of this masterpiece are also fantastic, just the way that you can see every drop of water in the ocean, every grain of sand, and how… your PC runs on two frames a second. Well, I will say it’s more of an experience than something you should take for granted. Unless you have a big, beefy computer.
One of the best parts about the game is you can customise your raft just the way you like it. Starting with simply expanding your raft, then moving onto multiple stories for your raft, and then, if you really want to, you can even paint your raft an entirely different colour. Another is the amazing places you will discover while following the storyline from the Radar Tower to Caravan Island, and places like Tangaroa to the final destination – Utopia. There are so many places to explore, people to unlock, and even achievements for your Steamstats.
As for my own experience playing Raft, I personally find that it’s more of a horror game than anything else. The way that the shark speeds up as it’s charging towards you is terrifying. But as soon as I can get a constant source of water and food, the game becomes not only a lot more enjoyable but it also becomes a lot less stressful. Another thing that I find odd about this game is that whenever I’m underwater, I just forget about oxygen, my brain just doesn’t realise that breathing is an important part of living. I don’t know if that’s just me, but I find that hilarious. In my defence, I usually forget about oxygen because I’m busy trying to take in the high quality of graphics that I am looking at. As for my multi-player experience, Raft has been an excellent game. I beat the game for the first time by myself before moving on to multi-player, so when I do play with others, I am usually focused on building the raft and making sure that the other player(s) get to experience the storyline just as I did.
For my final analysis of Raft, I would say it’s an eight out of ten for gameplay, eight out of ten for graphics, and ten out of ten for storyline. Therefore, an incredible eight and a half out of ten for Raft. I think that my rating for how I feel about this game is a little biased because of how much I enjoyed playing it. I’m also not considering many of the flaws in the game, like how you can glitch under your raft, get stuck on an island in a random location with no way out, or if you lose your raft, you can’t build a new one and have to restart the entire game, but alas, I still think that Raft Deserves the 8.5 votes, as it’s an incredibly well-designed game. Claps to Redbeet Interactive and Axolot Games, and a final thank you for this beautiful videogame.