Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands – Switch Review
Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a fun, carefree puzzle and adventure game. With a simple story, art style, and plot line, this game creates a quirky little world in which to immerse yourself, without requiring you to commit a large amount of time to thoroughly enjoy the game.
Stranded Sails’ story begins by setting sail on a ship bound for icy adventures. While sailing, the crew comes upon a storm that tragically shipwrecks them on a tropical island. The first few quests gather all of the crew members together, builds their houses, and puts them to work to make the best of the circumstances in which they have found themselves. This includes a farmer growing crops, builder creating blueprints for buildings and improvements, a chef cooking, a ship builder starting to build a new ship, and more. While the NPCs are working, a search for supplies on the main and surrounding islands begins. This search leads to an ancient mystery of the islands being discovered. Without solving this mystery, there is no hope of the crew ever going home.
Stranded Sails includes a variety of gameplay such as rowing boats, farming, sword fighting, creating recipes, solving puzzles, and more. These puzzles are hard enough to cause a challenge occasionally, but none are too difficult to figure out in a short amount of time. For the most part, the gameplay is straightforward. Each item carried can be used in a specific way and the game obviously hints to you what is necessary to use. This includes learning to use your shovel, fishing rod, telescope, map, sword, bucket, and axe. There are accessible menus to select these tools as well as food and seeds to grow crops. In game it is possible to quickly cycle through these menu wheels, or to go fully into the menus to make your selection. Sometimes an item needs to be crafted from supplies found around the islands so it is necessary to cut down trees, search the coast for boxes of supplies, and to defeat enemies in order to collect the necessary components for the items needed. These crafted items include simple things like ropes needed for the construction of houses as well as kits to create bridges and ladders to allow the continued exploration of the islands in the game.
With a minimalist, geometric art style, all of the necessary concepts of the game come together without any specific details standing out. The music sets the mood for the game without being too obvious, and the sound effects are just present enough to create an atmosphere reminiscent of tropical islands. This slightly vague style continues into the storyline of the game as well as the combat and problem solving aspects too. The quests themselves leave no guessing as to how to solve them; every quest lists what is needed in detail to complete it, as well as the specific location to finish the quest. This aids in solving overarching quest more quickly, but detracts some from the fun of discovering the solution to the quest. This can be seen as a detriment as the game basically states everything needed to complete it without much thinking necessary on the player’s part.
The most obvious annoyance in this game is the time necessary to complete tasks. Though there are ways provided to upgrade your equipment or give you shortcuts, it takes time to complete these upgrades – some to an extent that they never fully make you feel like you are saving time. Since the game does not have multiple save states, if you make a mistake or lose too much energy you automatically wake back up at the camp and have to go through the entire process of your quest again. It does save progress you have made prior to your failure but, at times, the annoyance of having to go find food, cook, row your boat to another island, and climb through a long hillside is enough to make you frustrated. There is always the option to fast travel to your camp, though that only solves some of these time issues.
On a whole, it is interesting to see a game with a more shallow approach to its gameplay, storyline, and aesthetic. There is definitely enough to do in Stranded Sails that it can easily be played for hours, but it doesn’t create too rich of a story to distract from this casual gameplay approach. As this game is not difficult, both casual gamers and kids would find this to be a fun game, as long as they have the patience to wait through a lot of the gameplay.
The reviewer was provided a copy of Stranded Sails by the game’s PR company, but this did not impact the opinion of the reviewer.
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
