As anyone that follows the site knows, I’m not a huge fan of farming games. My wife on the other hand loves the likes of Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon. I usually have her play these and help me review them, or at least get her input, as I feel her opinion matters a bit more than mine when it comes to this genre. While the game got a “this looks cute,” I feel that’s typical as it was also said about My Time at Portia and Little Dragon’s Cafe. And that’s the only positive thing I heard from her about it.
Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands first caught my eye when it was pitched as Harvest Moon meets The Legend of Zelda. My thoughts were that this would have something enjoyable for both me and my wife. And honestly, there are not enough good clones of the latter, so I’m always looking for something new to satiate that hole. However, it seems that the game decided to leave out a lot of the best elements of its inspirations, creating a lifeless adventure that’s impeded by its own mechanics.
The game follows a captain and his child (you) with a crew setting sail for a new land only to be stranded on an unknown island after a very peculiar storm wipes them out of the sea. Shipwrecked and alone, you’re faced with finding the crew and surviving the perils of the islands. The game’s biggest enemy is promptly explained once you wake up on the beach – the stamina bar. I understand that stamina, hunger, weapon durability, and other meters that relate to these things are important in simulation games, but I’ve always found them to be annoying at best. With little in way of story until deeper into the game, it’s difficult to find motivation to continue on with exploring the islands bit by bit as you must keep coming back to sleep, grow food, cook said food, and eat. The nice thing about running out of stamina is that it hardly impedes your progress – you merely wake up at camp. But with such little punishment, it begs the question as to why have it at all, other than for necessity of other mechanics to be implemented and to string out the game’s length.
I had a bad feeling for what the game would become based on the opening sequence. The town was fine, albeit empty, but the tasks you’re required to do are mere fetch quests from the get go. I’m fine performing fetch quests in conjunction with other tasks, but the majority of your time playing is collecting things, using said things for farming or creating a tool, which then allows you to collect more things. To some this sounds wonderful, but to me it sounds like a drag unless there’s something pushing me to continue. If there was a compelling narrative, or the mystery of the islands was more prevalent than it is, I may have enjoyed my time more. Hell, if the combat didn’t take so long to get to and had a bigger impact on the game, that may have helped as well. Instead, everything feels like the devs wanted to play it safe, and ended up forgetting to make the experience fun in the process.
To go into more detail of what you’ll actually do in the game, you can expect to walk around islands and pick up items, plant seeds and harvest food, cook recipes and come up with new ones, as well as collect key items for different characters. This last one is harder than it seems as there have been bugs deleting inventory, making progression impossible. However, there is a patch on the way (if it hasn’t already been deployed by the time this goes live) to alleviate this. The farming is not all that appealing to me, especially when it feels like it’s in the game solely to combat the stamina bar. There are some portions of the game that technically require it for progression, but I feel like it’d be better to just cook for the crew of my own choosing and develop relationships with them by doing so instead of what the game actually does. That would not only be more interesting, but it’d also take away the need for the infuriating stamina bar.
At the end of the day, Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a game that wants to combine two beloved series, but ends up being something fans of either game wouldn’t enjoy playing. The premise is a promising one, but it lacks in both style and substance, leaving a bad taste in my mouth for the genre as a whole.
3 out of 10
Pros
- Strong Premise
- Low-Poly Art
Cons
- Devoid World
- So Many Fetch Quests
- Stamina Bar
- Boring NPCs
- Uninspired Gameplay Loop
Stranded Sails was developed by Lemonbomb Entertainment and published by Merge Games in association with Rokapublish. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on NS. If you’d like to see more of Stranded Sails, check out the publisher’s site.
Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.
Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.