Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands Reviews
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.
Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a wonderfully colorful and relaxing experience for a more casual audience.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to like Stranded Sails, I am intrigued by a few of the artefacts I have stumbled across during my exploration and I am suitably invested in seeing the story through, however at present the game is unplayable.
Touted as a seafaring Stardew Valley, Stranded Sails combines farming, exploration, and survival in a neat yet flawed package. It’s fun and rewarding in parts but doesn’t hold a light to Stardew or Harvest Moon in terms of charm or depth.
In its current state, Stranded Sails is best left marooned on its island of sadness.
It doesn't drastically change the genre, but Stranded Sails is enjoyable. The stamina bar can be very annoying, but don't let it stop you from enjoying what the game has to offer. The straightforward approach to task completion is a benefit for those who need more guidance in their sim games. If you are looking to try out a simulation game, then Stranded Sails might be a good jumping-off point.
Once you have some meals to take with you, cooked using the things you grow, you can venture out in your rowboat (rowing devours your energy, especially with big waves) and explore the other islands for materials, crew, secrets and other plants/food that you can bring back with you and use in camp. This gameplay loop is fun, marred a little by the quick drain on your energy. Exploration is going to take you a long time, many repeated trips across the ocean and in some cases you'll only get a handful of materials for your troubles.