Raft is an interesting twist on the survival/exploration/crafting genre by putting the focus on oceanic exploration. Stuck on a small raft with not much but a plastic hook and your wits, you gather resources, fight enemies, explore islands, solve puzzles and progress through a storyline that guides your across the sea in a gameplay that clashes often between how chill it can be, how involved it can be and how repetitively frustrating it can be. Deciding to build an immense raft-tower, I had a good time with the game, playing with a good friend the whole way.
Starting with only a minuscule raft, the beginning of the game is a story of resource collection, you manually have to pickup floating debris - leaves, planks, plastic jugs - in order to craft tools and to build up your raft by adding more foundations, walls, ladders and the like. Barrels floating around contain food that you’ll need to eat, and you get to purifying water pretty quickly - as seawater isn’t potable - as you climb through the various technologies of the game. There is a lot to discover; Some is gated behind story beats, other recipes must be discovered by researching certain items. Everything breaks constantly, so you can never rest on your laurels.
As the game is not finished, some categories of items you can craft are fairly thin. There are only two tiers of weapons and tools and everything has a durability meter that eventually runs out. At some point you get to engines and pipes and water tanks and you can create large systems to automate part of the tedium, but never entirely. You also never get anywhere close to making short work of the enemies…
Almost immediately, you are assailed by a shark. This is one of the seven enemies of the game, and it is relentless. The shark will bite at your raft to destroy it if you don’t reinforce it, and if you are in the water, it’ll come at you constantly. Even if you fight it for a bit, even if it’s close to die, the shark will keep attacking and you will have to defeat it exactly the same way every single time, it becomes quite tedious, as you have to spend some time in the water around each island to collect resources there, and the shark always comes back. It is a very boring kind of fight where you have to wait for the shark to be at the right distance, and then strike for what seems like way too many times. Then, when you defeat the shark, it respawns after a while.
Other enemies aren’t much better, boars that charge at you, puffer fishes that explode, weird rat monsters, bears that maul you and robots with electrical prongs. The worst enemy in the game by far is the bird. A large feathered creature that picks up rocks, tries to drop them directly above you, then flies back to pick up more rocks. It’s really annoying to fight, impossible with melee weapons and difficult at best with a bow. If you don’t fight them, you’ll have to constantly take care not to get rocks on your head while you’re chopping wood or exploring, it’s a real nuisance. At least in multiplayer you can revive your buddies if they are down, but if you’re playing by yourself? Death is permanent.
The story is interesting, but feels a bit jarring when contrasted with the otherwise purely survival/crafting side of the game. You go to various locations, usually by following radio signals at specific frequencies, and then discover a strange island with puzzles and obstacles. Sometimes you’ll have to scour a huge junkyard while trying to find batteries, other times it’s a classic spooky ship with mutated rats, at some point you have to do a crate-moving puzzle and there are a few bits of weird platforming here and there. It’s fun and it’s fine, but I feel like it belongs in another game in some ways. Or at least, I feel like it doesn’t incorporate itself with the rest of the game enough.
Otherwise, Raft is pretty fun. You have a lot of cosmetic things you can build to decorate your raft like you want. You can paint rooms around, plant trees, harvest fruits, take care of animals and even at hour 40 the loop of survival keeps going - you still need to eat, drink and not get mauled by sharks - although it does get much easier at this point. I’m really curious to see what they’ll add to the game - it’s still in early access - and I’ll keep playing it as they do!
