“This is a good docking space, let’s explore this island.”
“Right, one second, I am dying of thirst.”
“Fine, I’ll grab something to eat then.”
“The grill is empty, could you put some salmon on it?”
“Fine, fine, food is cooking. I’ll shear Larry in the meantime then.”
“Hang on, where did I put my bow?”
“Oops, I need to craft a new spear, this one is almost broken!”
“Did you water the watermelons?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll also grab some coconuts for the journey.”
“Oh, now I’m dying of thirst and someone forgot to refill the purifiers…”
“Uuuugggh, okay, okay, but then add some more fish to the grill because I’m getting hungry again.”
“We’ll never explore this island at this pace…”
Your story in Raft has a humble beginning: you are stuck on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean. Your only tool is a hook which allows you to grab debris floating around the ocean. You will soon become hungry and thirsty. Oh, and there is a giant shark on your tail, circling your little haven, looking very hungry.
The gameplay is focused on expanding your raft. The most basic building materials can be found in the vast garbage fields floating in the ocean, but some items like valuable seeds, flowers, ores, sand, etc. can only be gathered from islands.
Luckily for us a series of story quests have been added to the game recently, and as of December of 2020, two chapters have been published with more on the way. The story missions usually require the players to explore special quest islands that have specific themes: one is full of bears, there is a Borderlands-style wasteland, etc. These special islands also have new enemies, some puzzles, information about the world, and usually cool new schematics.
Oh, and the shark I mentioned at the beginning is a constant ongoing threat. If you manage to kill it, it just reincarnates, comes back, and keeps hounding you.
The Good
Raft is mostly a base-building game, and it is oh-so-satisfying.
The structure of a raft gives players a unique challenge since space is limited. The base can be expanded but you can’t create a raft of 10 square kilometers because the shark keeps attacking it and you need to be able to reach all the edges fairly quickly. You can add multiple floors, but those require structural columns that can impair your movements through the raft. So overall players need to think through their general raft-building strategy, which is just perfect for base-building game.
The game is also fairly kind with players. You can freely move most of your stuff around, there is lots of room for errors. You can’t move walls or floors, but if you put the water purifiers in a suboptimal place, you can move them any time.
Raft is also really cute. You can paint basically anything on your base and add loads of decorations, making it really homey. It is always a good sign for a game when you start faffing around with the colour theme of your base.
You can get your engine going nicely in most areas. For example, once you build out a nice collector net system, you don’t need to manually fish for planks and plastic garbage with your hook.
The exploration is decent, going through the story islands is interesting, though it is not on the level of The Forest. The procedurally generated sea with random islands popping up can get boring after a while though.
A great story design element is that you sort of need to try/do everything in the game. It encourages players to experiment with all the schematics.
The music and the atmosphere is really cute. The colourful pacific-oceanic aesthetic is really pleasing and unique, I don’t know many games that utilise it. Somehow your raft ends up looking homemade but not patchy or messy.
The Bad
The chore syndrome is very strong with this game. Getting food is exactly as annoying in the second hour, once you have your advanced grill, as it is in the thirtieth, when you still need to catch fish one by one (no one has invented fishing nets in this world?) and you still have to grill them one by one.
Players get thirsty and hungry really fast, it is really a cornerstone of the game for some reason, and to make it more annoying once you reach a certain hunger/thirst level your character slows down and can only crawl, which can be really rage-inducing in certain situations.
The shark is an interesting challenge at the beginning of the game. But like many other things, it becomes a chore pretty soon. It keeps coming back with the exact same tactics, and it is just something you have to deal with every five to ten minutes without really thinking about it.
The game sometimes comes really close to being boring. Don’t get me wrong, we like this game and really enjoyed playing it, but at certain phases it drags a bit. Without a story, the procedurally generated world wouldn’t be enough to keep the players occupied after five hours or so. All the random islands are basically the same.
Take The Forest. It has a fixed map, and it is really satisfying to explore, you start getting a feel for where things are, where is the beach, the yacht, the snowy biome, or the main village. In Raft you get the same islands with two or three palm trees, some ore, some copper, a couple of flowers. Again and again and again. The first couple of times we got excited when we spotted an island, but after a while, we just ignored them unless we really needed the materials.
The story is somewhat intriguing but it is conveyed through looong and boring notes. I’m sorry game, but no. You have to do better than that. While the quest islands are interesting to explore, there are no great story moments. It is all a bit lukewarm.
Weirdly, there is also no escalation. Whatsoever. The shark does the exact same thing through the whole game, which is scary when your raft is only two by two tiles, but is much less menacing when you have a twenty by twenty base reinforced with steel.
The Co-Op
Playing Raft in co-op mode is great. It is very satisfying to build up your base together, fight giant birds, argue about which island to explore next, who gets to risk being eaten by the shark while gathering ores, etc.
You also share resources when on expeditions, we often had to share food and our last drop of water. If one of you dies, the other can carry their body back to the raft to save them. Really heroic.
The Recommendation
Overall we recommend Raft. It is just so cute.
Granted, it can be boring, needs a bit of roleplaying to make it work. If you are someone who needs a challenge or a very clear goal for a game, Raft is probably not for you.
However, if I tell you that you can paint the second floor of your raft purple and then hang a trophy of a yellow puffer fish head on your wall and it looks really good together, and your reaction is “yes, please”, then you should definitely play Raft.
For a meatier game look no further than The Forest. Raft is basically a cuter version of it, but not a masterpiece.
Info
| Release Year | 2018 |
| Genre | Base Building, Crafting, Survival |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 99 |
| Length | 30 hours for chapter 2, although we really took our time |
Rating
| Overall | Great |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Great |