[BLOG] Multiplatform Game Review:- Stranded Sails from Lemonbomb Entertainment

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Scarlet_Dragon
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Joined: 02 Feb 2014, 21:04

[BLOG] Multiplatform Game Review:- Stranded Sails from Lemonbomb Entertainment

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Stranded Sails is an open world farming adventure full of discoveries, quests and puzzles! Along with your crew you are ship-wrecked on a mysterious archipelago. Now it's up to you to secure your survival and solve the mysteries deep in the heart of the islands –and finally escape.


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Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands is an adorable farming RPG from Lemombomb Entertainment. It begins with a group of city dwellers boarding your father’s ship to set sail for a new snow covered frontier. Unfortunately, things don’t go to plan and you sail straight into a storm and end up ship-wrecked on a group of tropical islands. Your mission is to reunite your crew, build temporary shelters, farm crops and explore the islands to break the curse that prevents ships from leaving.



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The animation is bright and cute, and kind of reminds me of cartoon Link in the Legend of Zelda games. The story is simple, but fun and the dialog, though long, is entertaining. My favourite feature of the game was the controls. As someone who cannot use mouse and keyboard for gaming, the controller options were easy to master, replacing item bars with spin wheels to select and equip items.



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The start of the game was actually pretty tedious. I didn’t mind the hand-holding to find and settle the crew, but the limited energy bar was a huge drawback. Your options are to walk from one end of the camp to the other (which becomes boring after the seventh time) or run, which depletes energy faster and means you need a nap halfway through. This became less of a problem once you discovered cooking recipes and had a good batch of crops on the go.



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Your crewmates are pretty useless too. Crops need watering, so when you’re away on another island scavenging for their survival the neighbour overlooking the farm just watches the crops dry out rather than help. Even though there is a chef being amongst your number, she doesn’t cook despite the ‘Stew for the Crew’ mini game. Basically, you choose an ingredient for each islander and if they like it enough, you gain experience. Over time you level up and one of them offers you a free tool upgrade or similar.



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Discovering new personal meal recipes was a lot harder than it needed to be. After randomly throwing ingredients together for about an hour, I finally caved and checked the wiki. It turns out there are rules to cooking, e.g. any meal below Level 4 will be vegetarian. It would have been helpful for those tips to appear on screen, even if just a pop-up tip. Luckily ingredients aren’t used up when discovering. Cooked meals replenish energy and offer boosts which become essential when exploring the further reaches of the map.



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Once I got my crew settled, mastered cooking, fishing, and even managed to get a boat upgrade, I was finally able to explore the stormy islands. I was excited, the training wheels were off and I was finally going to make this curse my bitch, then disaster. As I landed on the beach, the game crashed. Well, not just crashed, it turns out I encountered a game-breaking bug that corrupted my save files. Loading up the game offered me a black screen with the normal overlay menus. I could switch tools, but couldn’t see my character to know what was going on.



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I contacted the developers and have been assured the latest update now fixes that bug, but the heartbreak of losing the 14 hours I had played so far was too much. I couldn’t get passed my frustration to find out what had caused the curse, and how I could fix it. I wouldn’t now know if my crewmates could become useful members of a castaway society, or if we would reach the promised land of snow. I will replay the game once my annoyance subsides enough for me to get through the settlement part again, but for the time being my crew can starve.







A cute Zelda like game thats marred by tedium and game breaking bugs.  5/10
~Scarlet_Dragon



Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands is available now on PC (STEAM, GOG and Humble Bundle), XBox One, Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch, for more info or to buy, head over to the games website here!
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