Drifting Together: We Played Raft!

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

It began with a few planks of floating wood in the middle of a vast ocean, with a couple of very confused survivors trying to survive our first day. @bemier and I were drifting away with the ocean current, and all we had was a hook to reel in the endless floating trash towards our raft to expand it, make new platforms, etc.

We played Raft some time ago, but I never wrote about that experience. I didn't think we would love this survival game this much. We had no plans... we were just figuring out stuff as we went. Soon, we were able to craft simple Fishing rods, simple wooden spears, plastic mugs to collect water, etc.

The ocean provided us with almost all the materials, and once in a while, our raft would get close to islands where we harvest plants, chop down trees, gather metal and clay, etc. We got the hang of it quickly.

There were some dangers in the game. One of them is the shark that stays with the drafts and attacks us if we try to swim in the water. It would try to destroy our boat one plank at a time. Once we knew how to defend the raft from Shark attacks and gathered enough resources. We started thinking about how to go about it in the long term.

The constant need to eat and drink was a bit tough to manage at first, but once we got the recipes to make the plastic bottles, it was much more manageable. We upgraded our grills to cook fish and roast vegetables.

The way the game rewards you for exploring the islands is good. We can buy new recipes and constantly keep upgrading, which makes life easier. Many islands have these stores, which can sell all kinds of nice stuff.

Once we got enough items to not worry about just surviving, we made a lot of chests to organise our items, and started to make the raft look livable. Because in these survival craft style games, my focus is never on making it look pretty. I am more of what works well practically, even if it looks so bad.

We should have used more lights and other fancy items to make it better. It was not just a raft, it was our home. We lived on it for months. We even found a way to see how many days we survived in this world.

We found out pretty late that there is a big story to all this game, where we need to make a radio tower, enter the coordinates of the islands and search them thoroughly, sometimes fighting the animals there or sometimes solve some puzzles until we get the coordinates of the next island and get to know a bit more about this flooded world.

We went from old sunken ships to abandoned settlements, trying to find clues and other survivors.

Our raft kept expanding, and we had collection nets installed so we didn't need to reel in materials from the ocean anymore. This gave us a lot of materials to build and expand the raft. It got so big that it looked like a big dragon at the top of a mountain.

The whole run was chaotic, unpredictable, experimental and a lot of fun. We enjoyed our time together in the raft, figuring out how the game works and what we can do with each new item. So many discoveries we made on our own. Some felt like such a lifesaver, while others made us feel like complete idiots xD.

There were a lot of funny and unpredictable moments. All those hours of drifting together on a Raft were enjoyable. I recommend this game if you have friends to play with. Figuring out the stuff, surviving and exploring while trying to solve the big story is rewarding as well as challenging.