When you’re finally on your way to your new home, you are met with a terrible storm and are shipwrecked. It’s up to you find your crew (and find them one… by one… by one… by — you get the picture) and help build up your temporary home while also getting a new ship built (and no, your crew won’t be helping). Once you have found a crew member, they will teach you a new skill like fishing, farming and cooking and you will also have to build their shacks. Again… a worthless crew. Not only are you farming, cooking and building for them… you are also building a new ship too. The process of finding your lost crew feels like the longest tutorial I have ever experienced and to be honest it felt like torture.

With all your new tools, the game does a great job in allowing you to quickly select from your inventory by using a unique system. At first, this may seem a bit intimidating but becomes something you appreciate. Switching from your hands to shovel all while walking felt seamless and was a way to sustain your energy which is another element that can drive a sane person up the wall. Your energy slowly or greatly depletes as you do tasks or even walk. Once your energy depletes you are sent back to your cabin and are awaken on the floor. You can combat this depletion by eating food or sleeping. Hint: You can use your map to warp back to the camp if your energy is too low to make it back and you are out of food.

Now that we’re on the subject of food and a little hungry, we can get into farming and cooking in Stranded Sails. Farming in the game kept true to what is loved about farming sims. You can discover new seeds while exploring and must plant and care for your new crop. Caring for the plants didn’t seem like torture and it was obvious when they needed to be water and/or harvested. Out of all the mechanics of the game, this is one that didn’t feel cumbersome. Outside of farming, you can also get food by fishing. This is done by timing the outer ring of the ripple to the inner ring. As you time it perfectly, you can catch better quality fish at lower energy costs. All of these ingredients are used to discover recipes and cook for yourself as well as a stew for your crew. When cooking for yourself, you can discover recipes which only became available when you had the right ingredients on your person. Once available, you will see a question mark showing there is a new recipe to discover. You must now select the right ingredients in the right order and play around to get the right combination. This became more annoying than anything especially when you add the clunky movements when selecting ingredients. As for the stew, you will need to select an ingredient per crew member for your stew. Each member has ingredients they favor and once they reach a certain level of happiness they will reward you with a gift.

I didn’t play this all in one night and relied on Stranded Sail’s autosaving feature. Upon starting the game after finding a crew member,  I experienced a major glitch for me. It no longer recognized that I found Fritz (our fisherman) nor the fishing rod, Flora’s shovel or telescope. Those key items were missing from my inventory. I tried closing the game and reopening it but these items were still missing and Fritz was there in my camp but still not recognized as found.