Forsaken Isle

Lately I have had a terrible, terrible open world/sandbox/crafting/building/farming/exploring itch that I cannot scratch, and I needed something to tide me over. I have since determined this thing I crave is a survival farming sandbox. I want to forage for seed and tame livestock, which is why I sometimes have a deep, unrelenting need for HOTT+++ FARM ACTION that Stardew Valley cannot satiate.

But at the time I had not yet reduced my longings to this specificity. I just knew I needed a sandbox to play in and, by god, it better have seeds. I also wanted something new, so Terraria, Starbound, and Wayward were out. In my desperation I bought Forsaken Isle, and early access title that languished on my wishlist because I was pretty sure it was abandonware.

Forsaken Isle has an overhead perspective and cute graphics. You can explore across forest, desert, and swamp biomes, farm and hunt, and dig down to mine ores or find better loot and more powerful enemies. It’s a much more populated environment than Wayward, with lots of chickens, pigs, and sheep roaming the map, as well as snakes, turtles, pirates, etc. There are many, many resources, so the survival aspect of this game is a bit thin. A traveling merchant visits occasionally. It might fairly be called a friendlier, cuter Wayward.

I’ve been meaning to post more screenshots, so here’s one of my farm after I discovered animal husbandry was a thing and put out a bunch of troughs and a coop. Shortly after this the chickens got out of control, as they do, and I ended up slaughtering several dozen of them and relocating the coop.

The game has a lot of negative attention on Steam, both from people who feel it’s too unfinished and people who are annoyed at the dev’s apparent abandonment. I think one issue is people just scratching the surface in some instances and not seeing the full extent of the content. I had a, “Wait, this is it?” reaction until I really started to dig into the underworld and the crafting system. The craft system is a bit non-intuitive, but once you get into it and start uncovering new things it really opens up. I “get” the recipe discovery system, and it’s one of those things that sounds ok on paper but I find myself consulting the wiki a fair bit. I would recommend all players cruise the wiki before putting the game aside, especially if they feel they’ve run out of things to do. That being said, there are a lot of issues, like the overabundance of surface animal spawns and the apparent low spawn rate of underground structures, that could easily be balanced to improve play and make it more enjoyable.

The developer hasn’t updated in a while and went MIA on Twitter months ago, so the meager forum posts are mostly people asking if the game is dead. The word “promising” gets thrown around a lot. It is what it is and, frankly, I’m not sure how much content people expect to wring out of a $7 game, but I find the cost of entry reasonable for the experience. Forsaken Isle has the makings of a great sandbox but a solo dev can only do so much. Whaddayagonnado.

This is a prime example of a game that would flourish with a strong modding community. Forsaken Isle appears to be built with Monogame and XNA. It should be moddable and the developer was apparently open to the idea but never implemented Steam Workshop. If Steam Workshop had been implemented I think the state of the game would be very different right now. As it is, Wayward is a better choice overall because it has more complexities, can be modded, and is actively developed, but I was pleasantly surprised with Forsaken Isle and I enjoy the ways the games are different. They both satisfy different moods.

An Update 5 Years in the Making

Imagine my surprise when I opened Steam and saw this:

It turns out Forsaken Isle isn’t abandonware after all. The developer said there were too many changes to list, but after 5 years my memory is pretty spotty and I’m not sure how many changes really stand out to me.

The title screen says it’s now at v0.10.3, and the game feels about the same except crafting recipies are now unlocked with resource collection and the combat is more polished. World generation still feels too random and there is not a real sense of a meaningful progression to more difficult areas. I looted a fairly powerful sword early on, which made combat trivial. There are no obvious goals beyond the usual, “gather sticks until you can make an axe, so you can cut down trees.” You can build bases and tame animals as before. There is no weapons decay or anything that requires much resource management, you can just hoard whatever you find. I was able to craft some nice spider armor from spider bits and webs, which was cool.

Overall, the game still feels pretty underbaked which is understandable since it’s at 0.10. The game froze on me multiple times and I had issues trying to build workbenches like the alchemy table. It was fun revisiting this one, but I will wait a bit to see how it shapes up.