Stranded Sails - Explorers of the Cursed Islands

In summation, Stranded Sails feels like a lot of potentially interesting combinations of systems and ideas that, in execution, is just too shallow and tedious to be all that much fun. The game certainly feels like it knew it didn’t have enough substance to stretch for their desired run time and thus slowed down and over-repeated the same loops to last longer. That’s really the only excuse I can think of as to some of the decisions made here.

Stranded Sails stands out among a growing field of farm life games by involving more survival elements than others. This gives it not only a unique look at the genre, but a fun one too, especially when the many mini-games are all so smartly built. There's a clear lack of friend-making in Stranded Sails which feels integral to the genre, but it makes up for that missing ingredient by going its own way and infusing almost as much adventure as there is simple pleasure.

Combining a farming game with an open world exploration game seems like a great idea. Unfortunately stranded sails fails to provide much fun with farming or exploration. There is way too much hand holding combined with boring progression and a disastrous stamina system. Stranded Sails is a game of fetch quests with no reward or enjoyment to be had in between. Exploring a desert island seems like fun, but the game doesn’t want you to have too much of that.