This week I am going to give my final thoughts on Raft. I have put twenty-plus hours into the game and I had fun in the beginning but the story and the lack of gameplay options towards the end outlasted my interest in the game.

When I started Raft I was fully invested in the world that it gave me. The world has flooded and it is up to you to find your sister and, along the way, figure out the cause of this global disaster. It introduces the player to a number of interesting areas: The remnants of a national park infested with bears, a floating city, and even the crumbling remains of a skyscraper that was going to be outfitted to be a community. The first two of these areas had piqued my interest but as the game kept going, the story beats just began to feel more and more unimaginative. As you make your way to the end of the game, one of the last areas is in the artic that has been infested with… Polar bears instead of just regular bears like the National Park. It just felt like the game wanted to be over by then but it, in some fashion, just kept going.

Another point that I want to dwell on is the dependence on puzzles to forward the story. Every chapter involves some sort of puzzle, which is fine, I just wish it wasn’t a treasure hunt every time. Grab enough tape, grab enough light bulbs, grab enough berries, grab enough berries, grab the parts to make the thing x2. Every locale is interesting until you have to go through the same drab treasure hunt. It is fun to explore the area but I’m not really going back to explore the area if I am tasked to painstakingly traverse it looking for items to complete a puzzle. I never went back through those areas and it’s a shame because the collapsed skyscraper had some really beautiful sections to it.

Building the raft is and will always be the best part of the game. Having total control of building a floating home to call your own has the best feeling attached to it. I was finished building my raft by the tenth hour. I experimented with paint but felt like it was too time-consuming stopping by deserted islands looking for flowers to grind into paint and I personally did not want to build any planter boxes. After my paint just randomly disappeared from my inventory I just stopped painting.

After all of this complaining, do I recommend Raft? Yes, I think that it is a great game. I had an enormous amount of fun playing it with friends. Having more people co-oping on an adventure makes the game at least ten times as fun. The tools and resources given to the player to create their own unique raft are insurmountable. The once wood raft can be turned into a fortress that does everything through electricity, granted if you have the resources to do so.

I like Raft a lot, and I am so close to finishing the game. Maybe one day, when I feel less burnt out on the same, I will go back and finish what I started and figure the whole thing out. For now, I think I am okay with where I am at with my thoughts on the game.