Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands Reviews
Games like Stardew Valley and Minecraft can provide players with hundreds of hours of entertainment with their farming survival gameplay. Yet, it's sometimes nice to be able to play a game in the genre that leans into the more relaxing aspects that it can provide. Stranded Sails never feels overwhelming, and the pirate aesthetic is welcoming and unique while still pushing forward that sense of adventure.
Though it's a bit more survival-focused than other games of its kind, Stranded Sails is still a mostly quaint and worthwhile farm life sim any genre fan will enjoy.
I preferred playing this game docked rather than in handheld mode. A peaceful adventure game like this begs to be played while relaxing on the couch and enjoying the vibrant colors on a big screen. While it isn't the most gripping adventure, fans of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing will probably enjoy it.
Despite some of the non-enthralling parts of the farming and cooking, they are still fun enough to keep me repeating them over and over and continuing through the game, even if the plot lost my interest pretty quickly after the excessively long prologue and first few days getting oriented on the island.
Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a fun and relaxing title that allows hours to simply tick past as you walk / run or row your boat from one island to the next. Exploring sandy shores is just as relaxing as going into caves or fishing underneath a stone outcrop. There’s nothing really hard about it as everything will come to you in time, you just need to get there first.
Developers of the game were inspired by Harvest Moon and many similar games, but they created something different, yet familiar. The game offers nice graphics, relaxing gameplay with plenty of survival and base building mechanics.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a wonderfully colorful and relaxing experience for a more casual audience.
Stranded Sails is a great survival experience for young gamers or people new to the genre, but experienced players will find little in the way of appreciable challenge.
If you can get past the somewhat slow returns on quite a bit of grind, it has some survival appeal
Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is an absolute wannabe that only hardcore fans of this genre could possibly enjoy. Tedious exploration full of repetitive tasks.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Even though we ran into the occasional bug (nothing that couldn’t be fixed by rebooting), this is a fun game if you just want to relax with something nice and easy.
Stranded Sails offers some terrific farming simulation which does the majority of the game's heavy lifting, but it's held up by middling RPG-esque mechanics. Mixing things up and throwing a selection of genres into a pot to see what comes out is arguably commendable, and there's an awful lot to like about Stranded Sails, but some frustrating and bizarre choices in regards to recipes and the energy meter system hamstring the game for those hoping for a less taxing castaway experience.
Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is an interesting adventure RPG with plenty of mechanics that involve resource-gathering, cooking and exploration and which features a world with a soul of its own. Where Stranded Sails disappoints is in what regards its rather shallow combat and repetitiveness of some objectives, as well as the technical bugs that affect the experience. A work that's aimed at those who are very much into gathering and production of resources.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Stranded Sails will be too simple for most players, yet kindly welcoming for those new to the survival/crafting genre
Stranded Sails I would say fits just right in the genre with its own take. If the intro hours were a little quicker I think the pacing would feel much better and I worry some folks will stop before getting there. It reminded me of the first time I played Harvest Moon 64. I had no idea what I was doing, but slowly and surely I came away feeling accomplished and satisfied. Stranded Sails gave me that feeling of heart and charm with a pirate twist.
Stranded Sails is an okay exploration game that rewards you for adventuring into the nooks and crannies of its tropical islands.
In summation, Stranded Sails feels like a lot of potentially interesting combinations of systems and ideas that, in execution, is just too shallow and tedious to be all that much fun.
Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a solid entry into the farming and exploration space, and a perfect entry level title for younger gamers or those new to the genre. Its simplicity helps it stand out in the crowd, but not always for the best reasons.
I can’t find the entertainment in Stranded Sails. The quests aren’t fun, what little progression that exists is there to help ease the tedium of completing the repetitive fetch quests in the first place. I can’t even say it is a relaxing game because the energy bar is frustrating and the sole means of combating it lacks any kind of interesting engagement. Yet if it was removed the game’s existence would be that much more mindless bordering on an idle game.
Farming, crafting, exploring, discovery… all check-boxes marked. Unfortunately, Stranded Sails never introduces enough depth or reason for fans of the genre to really dig in and stay a while.