A BIGGER BOAT

Survive a waterlogged world by crafting a floating base in RAFT

- Christopher Livingston

Our oceans may be clogged with plastic trash, but here’s a small silver lining: all that garbage is keeping me alive. In open world survival game Raft, which spent four years in early access before hitting 1.0 in June, I used tons of floating trash to turn a tiny wooden raft into a floating base of operations – a big, cluttered, oddly shaped floating base, but it’s packed with life-saving amenities and I’ve slowly come to love it like a home.

Just like my raft itself, Raft the game took quite a while to fall in love with. The first few hours were so rough I probably would have just quit if I weren’t writing a review. With just four squares of wood to stand on, I slogged through the opening hours, constantly near death from malnutrition and dehydration, feverishly casting a brittle plastic hook into the waves to fish out every last bit of trash I could, piece by piece. I fought off a hungry shark with a crude spear made from planks, I scurried onto tiny passing islands to gather handfuls of fruit to eat, and drifted miserably across the sea on a little raft I couldn’t stop or steer or control. Those early hours were frantic, stressful, and not much fun at all.