Stranded Without A Phone [Review]

Stranded Without A Phone is an iGadget game from indie developer Gilligames, set in the same universe at their previous release Space HoRSE. (No knowledge of Space HoRSE is required to play and love Stranded, but it does explain why the protagonist is wearing what looks like a stylish dress-shirt-and-diaper ensemble.) I enjoyed the island survival and crafting found in Sims2 Castaway and Lost In Blue 2, so I went in with high hopes for Stranded Without A Phone.

Story:

You play as the lone survivor of a rocket crash en route to a new colony. You have no food, no water, no shelter, no way to call for help, and apparently no pants, either. On the upside, you’ve landed on a tropical island and not, say, a gas giant with a methane atmosphere.

In describing Stranded Without A Phone, it’s hard not to think of the Golgafrinchans, the space ark full of middle management, telephone sanitizers and customer service reps, in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide. The premise managed to be silly and endearing, making me feel a little bad when I didn’t take good care of my castaway.

Gameplay:

stranded_screen2 In the beginning, the search for items was underwhelming. You can turn on an autosearch to hunt for certain items, but the start of the game is entirely based on inventory space management. You begin with six inventory slots, and most things you’ll need to craft to survive require several parts, so it’s a dull round of filling bags with items and dumping them back at camp to craft. At this point, you’re relying on coconuts and fish for sustenance, so you’ll also fill up precious bag space with an axe and a spear, the items essential to coconut-opening and spear-fishing.

I was mentally copy-pasting everything that annoyed me about Lost in Blue 2Stranded. Fishing. Picking coconuts. Sleeping to regain health. Waking up hungry and thirsty to begin a day of fishing and picking coconuts. Poor little guy.

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But, slowly, I started to get ahead of my survival meters, and I could craft storage bags to reduce my trips home, or a lean-to to make my sleep more refreshing. Once you craft a bow and arrows, you can hunt the island boar, leading to roasted boar, a more filling meal than a coconut or a fish. If you can hold off instead of immediately devouring picked berries, you can plant them for new berry bushes.

I usually enjoy ingame crafting, but Stranded offered a particularly good crafting system, managing to be both straitforward and challenging. You can always see what new goods you can make with currently available items, there are no recipes to remember or confusion about what makes what. Items you can practically make with current items will appear in your crafting menu, too, with an unavailable component or two greyed out.Components can be found at any point and as soon as you have the materials, you can craft. If you want to build radio batteries while you’re still sleeping on the ground and eating raw fish, go ahead! No forced progression or crafting levels will stop you, eliminating a common frustration and allowing for a lot more personalization.

One downside to crafting is that too many final items involved building the same parts and sub-parts multiple times. For example, players need to harvest six Reeds to make a Twine, make six Twines to make a Net Section, make six Net Sections to make a Net, so you’ll need to harvest Reed 108 times before you can fish with a Net… and you’ll need to fish repetitively to fill your nutrition meter. When games require the same action too many times, I start to feel like it’s filler content.

Bits of salvage from your space wreck, like bubblegum, canned ham and radio parts, wash up on the shore, just waiting to be used in a makeshift radio to phone home. When life hands you lemons, use some zinc and wire to build a battery!

Style:

The island is a random map each time you play, and there’s a 5% chance each day of each item washing up. The random element really added to the feel of exploration.

There’s als oa a downside to randomly I prefer penalties that teach you something – you took serious damage because this area is too high-level, or you forgot to equip your weapon – I found it frustrating that random damage would occur while I was doing required things. Picking a coconut? Axe injury! Fishing? Jellyfish sting! These injuries weren’t teaching me to avoid coconuts and fish, they were just random negatives.

Everything Else:

The game became less responsive as I played, pausing for longer and longer periods before performing an action, and finally crashed to the iTouch menu a few times. The system requirements listed on the App Store are OS 3.1.2, on the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, and I’m running OS 3.1.3 It’s worth pointing out that I have a 2G iPod Touch, not a new one. Let me know how it runs for you.

Overall, I could not stop playing this game, and I’d sit down for just a few moments of Stranded and play until my battery ran out.

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