My co-op gaming group has logged a few hundred extra hours in Deep Rock Galactic since I wrote about it a year and a half ago, but we’re always looking for another game to fall in love with.
We’ve tried a bunch of things in the last year, guided by a combination of positive reviews and “whatever is on sale in Steam at the time.” We’ve logged time in Back 4 Blood, Payday 2, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Sea of Thieves, Diablo III, Risk of Rain 2, and Borderlands 3, and each has had its charms. But the one that has stuck with me the most is called Raft, a game about building a raft.
Raft isn’t new—it went into Early Access in 2018—but its formal 1.0 release happened this past June. The pitch: You begin the game drifting across an endless ocean on a tiny wooden raft cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam. Armed with only a trusty throwable plastic hook, you must comb the ocean for planks, plastic, and other bits of scrap that you can use to expand your raft and stay alive. And once you’re no longer in constant danger of starving to death (and once you can steer your raft instead of just letting it drift), you can begin sailing to the world’s remaining islands to figure out what happened to everyone else.
The surest sign that you’ll like Raft is if you like Minecraft (or if you want to like Minecraft but find its general aimlessness frustrating instead of freeing). Building is all done on a grid system, you’re constantly combining and recombining materials to build and improve your tools, and the way the game gradually advances from an early survival-horror phase to a more free-form building-and-exploration phase is distinctly Minecraft-y. The game includes combat, and what is here feels fine (it flows a lot better than the clunky, boring combat in Sea of Thieves), but it’s all subordinate to building, exploring, and resource gathering.
In the early game, you’ll be driven almost exclusively by hunger and thirst. The two meters are ticking down all the time, and starving or dehydrating will slow you down and eventually sap your health until you die (you can always revive or respawn, but the former requires a teammate to haul you to a bed on your raft and the latter comes at the cost of 2/3 of your inventory at normal difficulty). Further complication circles you in the form of an aggressive and omnipresent shark, which is always ready to bite you if you hop in the water (or to take a bite out of your raft, if you’re out of its reach).
You can play solo, but the game is less intimidating with friends—it means more mouths to feed, but you also don’t need to stop collecting precious planks and palm leaves so you can take a break to fish or refill your water desalinization rig. There are no specific character classes, but there’s enough to do that you and up to three of your friends can find a distinct lane depending on what you like the most. I focus mostly on actual raft construction and caring for our steadily growing menagerie of domesticated animals, while others in our group prefer navigating, collecting food and materials, and advancing the game’s tech tree.
