Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands Review

• Platforms: Nintendo Switch (Reviewed), Playstation 4, Xbox One, PC
• Developer:  Lemonbomb Entertainment
• Publisher: Merge Games/Rokapublish
• Release Date: October 17th, 2019

There’s just something about a good survival/farming simulator that is so addicting. Somehow games of that genre can turn mundane tasks such as harvesting vegetables, cutting down trees, or foraging into enjoyable experiences. Lemonbomb Entertainment have taken these addicting qualities to the high seas with Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands, a tropical island survival sim about a crew being shipwrecked, albeit with extremely mixed results.

In Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands you portray a young man or woman who accompanies their father and his crew on an adventure to the other side of the ocean, to a place of wild forests and frozen glaciers. Along the way however, you’re confronted with some rough waters which ultimately leaves you shipwrecked on an island. You’re tasked with rounding up all the stranded crew mates, providing them shelter and food, and eventually finding a way off of the island.

As a survival/farming sim, Stranded Sails does two things well, the first being the exploration. Paddling out to undiscovered islands and scavenging for vegetable seeds, spices, and other ingredients is when the game is at its best. There are even some well-hidden secret artifact pieces to collect if you really comb through every nook and cranny of the islands. The islands aren’t that grand in scale, and for the most part they feel pretty linear, but they are fun to explore for what they are.

The farming and cooking can also be enjoyable, once you get past the clumsy UI and inventory system. Stranded Sails offers a pretty diverse range of vegetables to grow, fish to catch, and spices to collect, which makes the experimentation to find which ingredients mix together intriguing. You can also freestyle a bit with the ingredients to make a stew for all the other crew members, with varying results depending on the crew’s fondness to what ingredients were chosen.

Unfortunately, the two things that Stranded Sails does well are bogged down by some major issues surrounding the game’s stamina system. At the time of writing there has been a post-launch patch implemented that has improved this issue by removing the stamina drain while simply walking, however running and paddling your rowboat still drains your stamina meter like there’s no tomorrow. Because your stamina is diminished so quickly, it really puts a damper on the sense of exploration, and you’ll often find yourself caught in a loop of cooking meals out of necessity rather than enjoyment, just so you can venture out on even the shortest of adventures or else find yourself passing out from exhaustion.

The tasks involved with progressing the story can also feel very fetch questy and tedious at times. For the most part you’ll spend a lot of time going to a destination to rescue a crew member and then return to base camp, followed by gathering materials to build that crew member a shelter. At one point the game will have you paddle out to a sand bar to rescue a crew member standing beside an unopened crate, only to have you paddle out to that same spot minutes later to retrieve the item out of that same crate. These monotonous “point A to point B” type tasks aren’t helped by the lack of personality shown by the crew members, who do very little to connect with the player in any meaningful way.

Stranded Sails does have some charming visuals with adorable little character designs and some bright vibrant colours. Overall the game both looks and runs great on the Switch in docked and portable modes, and the soundtrack has some relaxing and upbeat tracks that mesh well with the game’s setting.

While it shows glimpses of promise during its 10-15 hours, Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Island lacks the secret sauce that other farming/life simulators offer. In such a crowded genre, Stranded Sails doesn’t bring anything extraordinary to the table to make it stand out amongst its peers, but could be a good option for players who are looking for a shorter, more linear experience.

A Nintendo Switch review code for Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands was provided by the publisher