Recoil Offgrid – August-September 2019

BUYER’S GUIDE

RedBeet Interactive

Raft

Notes:

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Also, you have no food or shelter and a giant shark

keeps trying to kill you.

In Raft, you’re adrift on an endless ocean with

no supplies except what you find floating on the

surface. The good news is that there’s no short-

age of junk being carried by the current — enough

barrels, plastic jugs, wood planks, and other debris

to give a Greenpeace member an aneurysm. The bad

news is that you’ll need to retrieve the junk before

it floats away, either by swimming out to grab it or

by reeling it in using an improvised grappling hook.

The former option is dangerous, since you’re likely

to get attacked by the shark or drift too far from

your raft. Using the grappling hook lets you retrieve

supplies safely, but this takes careful timing and

precision to cast it in the right spot. At first, this can

be annoying, as many items slip from your grasp like

prizes from an arcade claw machine. With practice, it

gets easier.

The raw materials you collect from the ocean

surface are used to build tools, such as a hammer to

expand your raft, a spear to temporarily deter the

shark, and a fishing pole. Fish you catch — and other

food you find inexplicably floating in barrels, such

as potatoes and beets — must be eaten periodically

to keep your nutrition bar from dropping to zero.

Making a fire and cooking these items increases

their nutritional value. You also need to quench your

thirst, but seawater predictably hurts you if you

consume it, so you’ll need to build a purifier ASAP.

Eventually, you can grow your raft into an expansive

multi-level houseboat, and play online with friends

to divide and conquer survival tasks.

PLATFORMS

Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux

PL AY ER S

1-8 is recommended, although there’s no hard limit

PRICE AS TESTED

$20

URL

http://www.raft-game.com

Pros:

Water purification is surprisingly realistic. Your

character boils seawater and condenses the vapor

in an improvised still.

This “Early Access” game is affordable and

receives frequent updates, one of which added

large islands where you can anchor your raft and

search for supplies.

Cons:

After a while, trying to stave off dehydration,

starvation, and the irritating shark that con-

stantly pops up to rip your raft to shreds starts

feeling more tedious than fun.

The construction system is sometimes illogical

— build a planter from planks and rope, and soil

magically appears so you can grow crops.

ISSUE 32

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