Sail Forth has been depicted as a chill sandbox adventure game with survival elements where you sail a boat between some islands, fight pirates, do quests, do fishing, search for ancient items and photograph diverse animals. The devs at Festive Vector have made an extremely simplistic game (i.e. cozy game) but it is so polished and incredibly fun (i.e. for people who don’t like the aimlessness of most cozy games.)
One thing to keep in mind is that the forms of gameplay at the beginning of the game are much different from the middle and endgame. At the beginning of the game, you’ll be doing a lot less combat and a lot more fishing, breaking open crates, and trying to locate clams since money will be scarce. But you’ll soon get access to stronger ships with room for more crew, which makes combat as well as boarding and capturing enemy ships more viable. In the mid game, capturing enemy ships will be important to unlocking new ship blueprints and designs since you will invariably get bored of sailing the same ship.
Also, boarding actions are based on pure probability. You can tilt the odds in your favor by having high ship health while damaging the enemy ship, by having more crew members with a specialty in crew attack power, or by equipping a modification, but the pure probability determination has led to situations where I, despite having an overwhelming advantage on the enemy crew (i.e. outnumbered 2:1) with a 90% chance of success, fail the boarding attempt and have to try again.
I was amazed by the inclusion of a proper wind system. It really did take a bit to level up on this aspect. While proper sailing and tacking simulation is nothing new, not many games go all in to make the sailing have elements of realism. This game did the sailing part a lot better than other games that feature sail ships. Bottomline, the sailing mechanics are in-depth enough without being unintuitive. Ship customization is also good. Being able to add a wide variety of weapons on different hard points depending on the ship as well as adding crew with different stat bonuses encourages the kind of experimentation that I love. The AI for your fleet’s ships are surprisingly good at navigating around obstacles such as islands and rocks (granted they are a minor annoyance in combat but that’s true for every game which involves AI in combat of any kind.) Huge props for the ship designs. They are utter eye candy and it’s a pleasure to sail them.
Everything about this game in one way or another is utterly adorable or hilarious, whether it’s dialogue, character names, the sea life roaming around the open waters, or the character designs. In a nutshell- epic boss battles, amazing soundtrack and mood to each biome, lots of collectibles and side activities to find, semi-realistic ships and sailing mechanics, and a somewhat deep system of weapons and mods with tiers and stats. It will no doubt become a favorite to just sit and relax with.
Sail Forth is available now on most systems.