Stranded Deep – Dave’s Diary, Day 5*

Day 5:

I'll admit it, yesterday was kind of a lowpoint for me with this game. I didn't really know how to make progress in a meaningful, survival-esk manner. But it all changed today, because today was fantastic! Not only did I find neat new items, no, I witnessed some amazing water-action and almost drowned on a boat! Let's get started...

I learned something new about my wristwatch: whenever it beeps in that annoying manner, I just need to look at it shortly and it stops. Mybe it has something to do with the time of the day or my stats. Or it is just an annoying thing you have to do, until you buy a booster-pack for just 4,99...oh wait, no, this is no free-to-play-game after all. Well, at least I know now how to get rid of that. Next

A freaking WHALE, I'm speechless!

thing on my bucketlist? Living for another day, or two. If I didn't want to die of crab-poising, raw potatoes, coconut-overflow or - the worst of all -boredom, I would have to give the "paddle-

to-another-island"-thing an additional try. So I was off to the sea again. Since this was a pretty lengthy ride (and since the ingamne-day-night-cycle is pretty fast), the sun set and the moon showed up in the meantime. And then it happend, probably the most beautiful moment in the game until now: I saw a big whale in the moonlight-shimmering water! What a sight! It even did that thing with his fishtail sticking right out of the water, things we all know from the movies. It really was delightful to witness that. The next hing I noticed was a buoy swimming in some distance from the next island. But I coudln't really do anything with it, so I kept going.

As I reached the beach of my destination, I wandered around a little while. Pretty standard pacific-stuff around there, too, if you ask me. But one thing stood out: there laid a "mysterious

I always say to the postman "DON'T lay packages in front of
my door, if I'm not home!" Ts.

package" in the sand. It has been delivered by DeadEx (hoho!) to EXACTLY my address: Pacific Ocean (check!), Stranded Deep Survivor Colin (check, now I finally know my name). While the nod to Castaway is omnipresent, I still wonder, how I can open it. Since it's mysterious, my curiosity peaked already.Will it contain my very own Wilson? Throwing it on the ground didn't do the trick, neither was my knife very useful. So I decided to never bother again...NO of course not, I will bring it home and figure something out. Maybe I can craft a pair of scissors out of crabs?! But this should not be the only great thing I was going to discover today.

At another place at the beach was a crate on board of a wooden shipwreck. And it contained DUCT TAPE! Boom goes the dynamite, right? A clusterfuck of ideas unfolded in front of my inner eye.

I didn't finish my Coconut-halves today, so I guess I deserve the rain.
But I'll hum the Travis-song anyway!

Helloho, Shark-Crabs anyone? I would be invulnerable riding on something like that. But before I could go home to pursue my wildest Duct-Tape-Dreams, I would have to loot on more thing: there was another old boat at the coast, half underwater. I paddled to it and on board I found morphine. It can be used to trat broken bones, it says. Or to make the last day of surviving one big party, I say. But this boat I was on, it had to offer so much more. At that point, I had no clue what a deathtrap it would become!

There was an openable hatch on deck. Since LOST I am fully aware of the fact, that hatches are
super-mysterious and not just doors for floors. I opened it and stared into the abyss. Well, into the below deck at least. And it was pretty much filled with water. The human skeleton-arm grabbing the edge of the hatch should have been a warning sign, but I ignored that, of course. Moments later I dove in the hull and took some pretty amazing itmes with me: a bucket to collect and the cook seawater (already planning to rename myself into James Cook), a spotlight and a lantern. I was more than thrilled and then it happened: how was I going to exit the hull? There was no ladder reaching down and I began to feel like on of those rich kids in Open Water 2, just INSIDE the boat, which is even dumber. There was no hope, I did my best, so I decided to load my last save. I spare you some steps in between but in the end I managed to chop down a palmtree, drag it onto the boat and use it as a ladder to get out of the hatch again. What a ride!

To sum it up, today I fully fell in love with Stranded Deep, because of the whale and the fact that there are so much more possibilities now for me to try out new combinations of items. One concern remains though: will I be able to find my home-isle again?




*Stranded Deep is available now as a Steam Early-Access-Game for currently EUR 14,99. You can find it here