Stranded Deep, created by Beam Team Games, is a rather straight Survival Sandbox title set in a vast, randomly generated ocean of islands and shipwrecks. You're tasked with finding and managing resources, building a shelter, and eventually, finding means of rescue.
The game was released in Early Access
on Steam on January 23rd, 2015. The complete version of the game was released on April 21st, 2020. A Nintendo Switch version released on September 2, 2021. The fully feature complete, full release of the game, finally coming out of Early Access, was on August 10th, 2022.
Provides examples of:
- Awesome, but Impractical: A huge barge-like raft is very slow and extremely sluggish to steer. Plus, you'll get caught on rocks and shallows which wouldn't be a problem for a smaller boat.
- The boat motor takes a lot of rare components to build, but in the end, it's truly not worthwhile. It requires fuel (precious in the early-to-mid game), and it has very slow turn control. You're far better off building the simpler (and much easier to build) sail, which can be made with common items and is just as fast.
- An Interior Designer Is You: While it's not required to beat the game, you can build a multi-story house and decorate it with trophies and furniture you make out of palm trees and scrap metal.
- Bat Scare: At night, fruit bats will swarm in the sky. While they are harmless, their screeching can be frightening.
- Book Ends: The game begins and ends with a plane crash.
- Bottomless Bladder: Played straight with a notable exception. If you get diarrhea from food poisoning the effects are near-instant and will constantly dehydrate you until it passes.
- Breakable Weapons: Justified Trope, given that many of the creations are crude and handcrafted.
- Clothing Damage:
- The player character's shirt, pants, and necktie are in tatters from the crash. In the early access, they were already before the crash.
- Creepy Crows: Seagulls, but they serve the same function.
- Critical Annoyance: Albeit less annoying than most. Your watch will beep when you have less than one unit of health, and a somewhat panicky musical theme will begin playing if you're near death.
- Early Game Hell: The first few days are probably the hardest. Without a solid raft sharks can easily tip you over, if you are poisoned pipi for antidotes are risky to find if you do not have any available, and clean water can rapidly become a rare commodity. Get a solid raft going and victory is more of an eventuality than anything else.
- Endless Game: In Early Access, the only mode of play is a Sandbox, and it only ends when the player dies.
- "Far Side" Island: A subdued variant. Many of the islands are extremely tiny and have few resources available.
- Flare Gun: Can be found in shipwrecks. Mostly useful for brief illumination of dark areas and warding off predators.
- Gadgeteer Genius: The protagonist develops into one. Once your crafting skill gets high enough you can jury-rig a speargun out of an oxygen bottle and some sharpened sticks, make a working gyrocopter out of spare parts looted from underwater shipwrecks, distill biofuel out of potatoes, and repair a seaplane to make your escape.
- Gainax Ending: You repair a Cessna Seaplane to escape the area. Three hours later, you collide with a private jet midair. Specifically, your jet from the beginning. The plane crash happened because of you.
- The implications are disturbing: namely, you are forever stuck in a cycle of crashing, surviving, escaping, and causing the crash. If this isn't Hell, it's a good approximation.
- Giant Enemy Crab: Giant crabs the size of medium-sized dogs can be found on some of the islands. They're very aggressive and their pincers can really hurt.
- Giant Squid: One serves as a boss battle. Notably, it is the only one of the three bosses that actually currently exist in real life (the Megalodon is long extinct and there is currently no eel in the world anywhere near as big as the one in this game).
- Guide Dang It!:
- This game does not hold your hand past the tutorial. And even then doesn't mention that coconuts are to be used as a stopgap for meals and drink, as you can and will get diarrhea from them.
- There is an achievement for completing the game without using a compass. What it doesn't tell you is that you fail the achievement if you even have one in your hand. If you're emptyhanded and you pick one up, it automatically equips it and you're locked out of the achievement for that playthrough unless you load a previous save. Furthermore, the gyrocopter (which you need to build for another achievement) has a built-in compass, so you also fail if you ever actually fly the damn thing.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Not quite to the "eat to heal" extant of other games, but once the cause of your damage is dealt with if you keep yourself well-fed and hydrated for long enough you will recover health over time and you can eat/drink as easily as using any other tool. As long as you don't give yourself food poisoning anything edible should do the job, though food and fluids are treated as separate problems you need to address. If you do eat the wrong thing it doesn't take too long for it to sort itself out if you can survive the side effects.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: You can get quite a few things into the backpack that are the size of you to begin with. Sheets of scrap metal, wooden planks, even a chest can get in there.
- Infinite Flashlight:
- Averted with the Flashlight, ironically. Played straight with the Torch, the game's hands-free variant.
- The lighter. Though the light it emits is rather pitiful, its fuel never runs out.
- Item Crafting: The game's main gimmick is its crafting menu. Uniquely, it also counts items in a radius around the player, not just what is possessed in inventory.
- Leitmotif: While the majority of the game lacks music, an ominous, low theme will begin playing whenever sharks are nearby...
- MacGyvering: Four engine parts, a stick, and some duct tape to make a functioning motor. 'Nuff said.
- Minimalist Cast: Just you and the sea life.
- Misplaced Wildlife:
- A downplayed example with the Goblin Shark. Real goblin sharks swim well below free diving depth and are no danger to humans.
- While not misplaced as far as habitat, the Hammerhead Shark's is definitely misplaced as far as ecological niche; its behavior toward the protagonist is far more aggressive than it would be in real life. Hammerheads eat fish, cephalopods, and crustaceans; not large mammals. There are only 17 recorded attacks on humans by hammerheads since we began keeping records in the 16th century, and none were fatal. The ones in this game will actively hunt you and only you if you're anywhere in the vicinity, and even try to capsize your raft.
- The Giant Crab which harasses you on most beaches seems to be modeled on the Red King Crab, which in real life lives much farther north and does not leave the water. Strangely, the Coconut Crab is nowhere to be found despite being a large terrestrial crab common in the South Pacific.
- Hogs seem misplaced as well, since it's unlikely they'd be able to swim to a remote Pacific island, but it's plausible that they or their ancestors escaped from one of the shipwrecks.
- Mundanger: The game has no supernatural elements (other than the Gainax Ending), and even the game's 3 boss creatures, although larger than any extant real-life examples, are not so large as to be physically or biologically impossible to exist.
- No Name Given: Your character is not given a name.
- Non-Idle Rich: Your character apparently owns a private jet and also possesses enough survival and engineering knowledge and training to build an assortment of wilderness survival equipment as well as repair and fly an airplane.
- Notice This: Most items/objects bear either a light glowing outline or an overlaid name text to indicate interactivity.
- Robinsonade: Deserted islands and all!
- Scenery Porn: The islands are positively beautiful.
- Sea Monster: Three of them, which serve as the game's bosses. A Megalodon, a Giant Squid, and a car-sized Moray Eel.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: After all your efforts to find a way to escape back to civilization, not only do you end up dying in a plane crash, but to add insult to injury, this also somehow also involves a time loop resulting in your death also causing the accident that marooned you in the first place.
- Shout-Out: A volleyball with a bloody handprint can rarely be found on islands.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Sharks will go out of their way to try to capsize your raft, hogs will not stop trying to kill you until they succeed or die in the attempt, and even some crabs will chase you all over the island.
- Survival Sandbox: The main mode of play.
- Threatening Shark: There are sharks in the ocean. And they are bad news. There are several kinds of sharks, the harmless Black Tip Reef Shark and Whale Shark which serve as food, the Tiger Shark, Hammerhead, Goblin Shark, and Great White which serve as enemies, and a single Megalodon which serves as a boss battle.
- Tropical Island Adventure: The game is set throughout various tropical islands in the Pacific.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: This can potentially happen in hard mode. Since you don't start with the life raft in this mode, there's no way to get to another island until you build your homemade raft. Palm trees and the coconuts they provide don't respawn, so if your starting island is low on resources, it's possible to run out before you're able to complete the raft and start traveling. Cloth and rocks in particular are scarce in the early game, and you need quite a few of both in order to build your essentials.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: The only method of play in the Early Access.
