Stranded Deep

31% of the longer reviews mention bugs or glitches, more than any other complaint. The same examples turn up across years of reviews: items that disappear when dropped or crafted, inventories full of phantom items, boars and crabs floating in the air, sharks swimming through sand, and rafts that flip, drift off or fly. "Crafted a tool to use, said it had been stored in my backpack - it was gone!" one returning player wrote. A player in a co-op pair wrote that "the raft we spent 2 hours creating launched into the air and spiraled in circles until it reached outer space." That reviewer found it funny, up to the point where the pair lost the raft for good. Some players shrug the bugs off as minor; for others a bug is the reason a run ended.

The backpack is small and stacks are tiny ("you can hold like 10 items and some stack to 4"), and swapping items often means dropping things first. 23% of the longer reviews talk about the inventory, crafting menus, interface or controls, and most of them are complaints. The radial and tabbed crafting menus hide recipes in sub-menus that new players miss: "Felt stupid as hell trying to find that damned consumables tab on the crafting menu". Some players call the controls awkward and say there is no way to tell whether a hit lands. Others say it all clicks with time: "Once you get used to navigating the UI and the ins and outs of surviving, the game is quite easy."

18% of the longer reviews describe technical trouble in co-op or multiplayer, which is 62% of the longer reviews that mention co-op at all. Joining a friend means a world sync that players time in minutes, and it repeats after every disconnect or when both players die. Builds, items and even players turn invisible to one partner. "You can wait as much as twenty minutes to load into a game with your friend, and then play for ten, desync, reload, repeat," wrote one long-time player. Another, who has owned the game for years, ended up here: "I can only recommend the singleplayer experience as the multiplayer one is very buggy".

Co-op still has fans. Couples, parents and friends describe good sessions together ("Buggy, but enjoyable with a friend"), and parents give split-screen credit ("local coop makes it fun with my 10 year old"). One long-time player says couch co-op with two controllers no longer works: "This game worked in Coop with 2 controllers in the past. Now its impossible to play."

11% of the longer reviews say the game is unintuitive, that the tutorial is thin, or that they had to look things up. New players get stuck on early steps such as the coconut flask, a campfire objective or skinning a crab: "I had to search online to find out you have to DROP the item onto the ground to use your knife on it". Several co-op players say the tutorial doesn't appear at all when they start together. One new player wrote: "I can not recommend a survival crafting game that feels this dated with its clunky and unintuitive gameplay mechanics and poorly designed tutorial."

You can only save by sleeping in a shelter or on a bedroll, so a bug, a stuck character or a death can wipe a long stretch of play. 9% of the longer reviews discuss saving. Players describe getting trapped in shipwrecks, stuck on rafts or ladders, or reloading into a save next to hostile animals. "No unstuck option, no manual save, no way to recover," one wrote. New players hit it early: "Learn that you need a shelter to save the game, but you don't have enough materials on the starting island to make a shelter".

9% of the longer reviews say the game feels unfinished, has been abandoned, or got worse since early access. Returning owners say known bugs are years old and that features they remember were cut. One player who remembers the early-access launch wrote: "This game looked better 10 years ago when it first launched as early access." Others point at the lack of patches, for example that "it's bugged and the most recent update was 2024". Some reviews defend the game as the work of a very small team, and even those often ask for a bug-fix pass.

4% of the longer reviews say there is no in-game map, that they got lost at sea, or that the only map is the cartographer in the main menu. Players chasing the story say finding the bosses and the final location is close to impossible without quitting to check it: "the gameplay is impossible without using the cartographer option in the title menu". One asked: "why is the map only available if you quit the game?"

"Limiting co-op to only 2 players severely limits the enjoyability of a survival game." 2% of the longer reviews complain that co-op stops at two players and ask for room for a third or fourth friend. One player who likes the gameplay still puts the cap next to the bugs: "The gameplay is fun and I like that there's an ending to the game. But the glitches and 2 player limit ruin the game for me."