Stranded Deep Review: Ugly and Tedious Survival Freebie

This Stranded Deep review may contain very minor spoilers.

Stranded Deep is one of May’s free PlayStation Plus games. Released for the PS4 and Xbox One in April 2020 by the relatively unknown Beam Team Games, Stranded Deep arrived on PS Plus with very little hype but an engaging premise. Because of this, few people have played Stranded Deep before. But now it’s free, we’re asking: Is Stranded Deep good and is it worth it?

Of the three free PlayStation Plus games this month, Stranded Deep seemed the most interesting. For those that don’t know, Stranded Deep is Cast Away meets Minecraft. And that’s a fun sounding concept. You play as the survivor of a plane crash who finds themself stranded on a desert island. From here, you must gather resources, build a shelter, and protect yourself from all the hazards of being stranded alone in the middle of the ocean. With next to no story, Stranded Deep lives and dies on its survival mechanics and the quality of its gameplay. Disappointingly, it’s boring, repetitive, clunky and so very ugly.

Stranded Deep review: Gameplay

The Stranded Deep map of islands, ships and ocean is where you’ll be spending all your time. The map is different for every playthrough and creating a new map is simple thanks to procedural generation. All you need to do is create a new save file. There’s a day/night cycle and a dynamic weather system, too, but that’s the disappointing extent of Stranded Deep‘s variation.

Clunky, boring and repetitive with unintuitive controls

As I said, the premise of Stranded Deep is one that grabs your attention. Its gameplay, however, is the opposite. Frustrating and unintuitive, Stranded Deep‘s gameplay lacks any kind of polish or fluidity. Movement is clunky and unnatural. Items are boring with often a single animation used ad infinitum. And the resource management, well…

As a survival game, scavenging resources to fashion objects and build shelters is to be expected. With that will always come a reasonable amount of resource and inventory management. In any game, it’s a fairly boring task. But in Stranded Deep, it’s downright infuriating thanks to the controls. They just don’t make any logical sense. And because inventory management is pretty much all you do in Stranded Deep, it ruins the game.

A good inventory management system should be seamless and simple. One that can be performed with muscle memory alone. Stranded Deep treats it as a laborious test in convoluted repetition. And this isn’t helped by its dull menus and cluttered UI. Not only do they not really make any sense, but they don’t gel with one another for a smooth experience. Navigating around the menus are, again, made even more challenging by the controls.

The best example I can give of Stranded Deep‘s terrible control scheme appears before you even play the game. In the laughably simple character/settings new game screen, I instinctively pressed X to select a menu item to customise. Oddly, this launched the game. Upon quitting and reentering the new game screen, I see square is the button to make changes. It might seem harmless at first, but where’s the logic in that? And it’s symptomatic of what is to come.

Chore like crafting and building

Fashioning tools, items and buildings is at the heart of Stranded Deep. Be it the coconut flask, a refined knife, or lashing a raft or spear, making the best of the scarce items available to you is key. After all, these items could literally keep you alive. I found myself hurriedly trying to construct a water still in Stranded Deep to help stave off dreaded dehydration. Regrettably, the exercise was such a dizzying chore, I ended up not caring if my man died of thirst. And that’s the problem at the root of Stranded Deep‘s pretty awful gameplay – it actively puts you off playing.

Crafting and building in games is something that can be fun and hugely rewarding. I’ll admit, setting up a shelter and campfire on my first night on Stranded Deep‘s procedural island was pretty satisfying. Beyond that, though, it’s a chore.

Vital meter galore

If you love vital meters, Stranded Deep may be just the game for you.

Often, the sole reason for constructing anything in the game is to keep your status meters from depleting. This is a fairly common approach to a survival game but amounts to nothing more than meter watching in Stranded Deep. Ironically, there’s absolutely no depth to it.

There’s life (health), food, water (thirst) and SPF (heat/sunstroke/sunburn) vitals. Varying environmental circumstances and changing activity levels seem to have no impact on said meters, with them depleting over time. All you need to do is keep an eye on them and craft relevant items and perform necessary actions to stop them from going down. If you’re thirsty, find water (a coconut or water still is often the easiest way). When you’re hungry, cook up a crab or boar. If you’ve got sunstroke, harvest some aloe vera and craft some aloe salve. And if you need to heal poisoning, combine a coconut flask and a pipi plant to make an antidote. It’s simple stuff made maddeningly tedious by the endless repetition and frustrating controls.

Stranded Deep cheats, please?

The game makes you wish you could use cheats to end the tedium. And on PC, you actually can use console command cheats. But that would only serve to undermine the game’s survival premise. Perhaps a Stranded Deep survival guide for noobs would help teach the basics and might overcome the intense and dizzying annoyance of the opening few hours. Alas, you must rely on Google to teach you how to survive – because the game certainly doesn’t help you much.

Is Stranded Deep multiplayer on PS4?

No. Stranded Deep PS4 does not have multiplayer. Stranded Deep co-op is possible on PC – but the PS4 and PS5 versions do not have co-op for some reason. Explain that one…

Stranded Deep review: Graphics

Stranded Deep‘s graphics are bad at best and abysmal at worst. I’ve seen better on the PlayStation 2. It is unbelievable to think this game released for the PlayStation 4 in 2020.

As a free indie game, consideration needs to be given to the budget the studio is working with. And to be fair, I wasn’t expecting a AAA graphical experience here. But surely, they could’ve done better than this. From the second you see your character in the creation screen, you know what you’re in for. Every environment I saw during my time with the game was pretty much awful. Be it the plane at the start of the game, the ocean, the sandy island or the interior of a rusted ship. None of it stood out to me as anything other than the bare minimum required to release a game.

Stranded Deep‘s graphics aren’t bad in the lovable Minecraft way, either. They are just bad. The only exception is the sunlight at dusk filtering through the trees. That looked OK. So, well done on that one… I guess.

Graphics settings and FPS

I haven’t played on PC (Stranded Deep for PC is, as of 2021, still in early access), but the PC version does have graphics settings that can be customised (unlike on PS4). Amazingly, some people seem to recommend setting these to low to avoid lag. Given the fact I was playing the PS4 version of Stranded Deep on PS5 and I got frame rate dips and lag, I don’t have high hopes for ultra settings on PC. This clearly isn’t a processing problem for the PlayStation 5, it’s just that Stranded Deep is poorly optimised. Near constant graphical glitches, problems and issues only make this fact more obvious.

Stranded Deep review: Glitches

OK – so I’ve mentioned that the game experiences a number of graphical glitches. Well, it doesn’t stop there. Remember how I said (repeatedly) that the inventory management system is frustrating? It’s actually made even worse by glitches that cause items and tools to disappear. There were a number of times where I’d drop a couple of things to make room for something else. My intention would be to return later and get my stuff back. Often, I’d be unable to find them. Gone, for no apparent reason. Even more annoying is that it happens when you place items in containers, too.

Funnily, Stranded Deep also caused my PlayStation 5 to make strange, differently pitched whirring noises while navigating through menus. I even managed to play a tune with it!

How, after over 5 years in development, this game has been released with such game breaking glitches is anyone’s guess.

Stranded Deep review: Is it worth your time?

As a free game, Stranded Deep may give you a couple of hours worth of fun. That is, if your idea of fun is muddled controls, off-putting graphics, and repetitious gameplay. It’s a shame, because there’s a great premise behind Stranded Deep. The combination of procedural generation to create a dynamic ocean of islands and Minecraft style crafting and construction could be so awesome. Imagine starting out as a stranded cast away, only to build yourself a castle in the middle of the sea. As a result, Stranded Deep feels like nothing more than a missed opportunity.

If you persevere, there may be some small enjoyment to be found in Stranded Deep. After all, it is (mostly) functionally playable. But most, including myself, won’t be in a hurry to load it up again after their first few hours.

Overall rating: 3/10

Version played: PS4

Do you agree with our Stranded Deep review? Let us know in the comment section below and don’t forget to check out our other gaming articles…

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Featured image credit: Beam Team Games