Dec 10

Dec 10 Review | Flotsam - Early Access

The first thing I noticed about Flotsam was how shallow the water was. You can see long strands of seaweed creeping up at you and rock formations submerged not too deep below your shanty town's floating foundations; a great piece of visual storytelling that informs the player they're among the flooded ruins of an old-world rather than being stranded in a vast ocean, as you are in other ocean-faring games like Raft. The game excels at subtle storytelling, more than making up for the lack of direct narrative.

I deliberately didn't look anything up, deciding instead to have fun with a friend playing through the game blind and managed to finish the game in just over three hours. I say finish… the game features multiple locations you can travel to and once you reach the "end" it teleports you back to the beginning. A sort of forced new game+, or purgatory, depending on your view of glasses of water.

The art style is phenomenal, my only criticism is the game won't let you zoom in closer to appreciate it more. I love the materials the town are made from, you really feel like it's all been scavenged from preexisting stuff collected from the wreckage of this world.

The cute style works well, masking the panic of running out of resources early on. It completely disarmed me. I quickly realised food was scarce in the first few locations but this works well to force the player to progress through the map; you can't just weigh anchor and set up shop, you have to keep moving, drifting, floating. This forced nomadic playstyle works with the visual storytelling to give the game a steadily flowing meandering tone.

I heard a mouse say “We’ll all float on, okay”.

Scrap metal and food are the hardest resources to come by initially. You have to advance up a tech tree to make your food more nutritious, preventing your rafts-folk from starving, but to do this you need research points. Flotsam's system of research was relatively new to me; you have to send people to islands and hope they find enough research points for an upgrade. It's another system that forces continuous migration as the research points available at each location are finite, and it makes planning the way you advance through the tech tree more important.

This is where the game really starts to feel like an early access title. The new technologies are dedicated to producing better food, more water, more storage, and a better place for inhabitants to sleep. I didn't find a need for most of it during my run, feeding my five drifters and seagull using just one cooking station. Storage was a big issue but one upgrade sorts that out. Some food sources use seaweed but in my entire playthrough I found about 50 pieces of it, whereas I had hundreds of fish that I could cook on their own. You can keep running through to get more of everything but, what's the point? I also found the game more than doable with five drifters and one gull. Anymore would have just meant I needed more resources to sustain them.

There were some strange glitches as I played; boats not travelling properly or catching fish while basically still docked. Sometimes the camera would send me halfway across the map after a short freeze and sometimes characters would hover ominously rather than walk. I also found the build system a tad fiddly at times as waves would interfere with the placement, making building at high speeds on the high seas difficult. One final complaint is that after a while all the locations look very similar, there just isn't enough variety in the game yet.

I really loved the tone and style of the game. I enjoyed filling in the details of the world the game didn't give. I was surprised when the first "house" you can construct turned out to just be a floating bed. Would my drifters not get cold? Or rained on? Speaking of rain, why can't I just build a rain collector, why do I need to desalinate seawater? Oh… It doesn’t rain, and it's always daytime… what the hell happened to the world? I like to believe Flotsam is set in an arctic summer after humanity has boiled off all ice and clouds and that's what creates the game's perpetual dry days.

The name itself lends to this theory; flotsam, as the game tells, is the maritime word for floating waste and debris. Flotsam serves as a happily packaged yet grim reminder of the potential future of not only our oceans, but our planet, if we don't work to stop environmental collapse.

Overall I enjoyed my time with Flotsam. It definitely has potential and I wish the developers the best of luck in finishing it up. Due to the lack of variety in the game and the short playtime, I'd suggest wither waiting for a sale or a few more updates. The game has potential, it just hasn't fully realised it yet.you have the spare cash, by all means, buy it now and have a go, then wait a while till some big updates come to play it again. Otherwise, I'd say wait for a sale before you pick it up.

Currently ⅖

Concept and potential ⅘