izigame.me

Raft is one of my favorite games. I like to play in peaceful mode for a relaxing time. Collect, build, advance.
As a survival game, Raft strikes a reasonable balance between survival chores and fun. It's fun to figure out a sustainable path forward. That eventually gets tedious, then the next story location unlocks better technology to alleviate that. The game doesn't let you achieve full automation, but eventually the survival chores become somewhat infrequent.
If anything makes the game lean toward the tedious side, it's probably the game's inventory system. Things like having to move items from your backpack to action bar, then select it as the active item, just to put the item in a device. Even when it might be the only place that item can go. Fairly obvious things are also missing. Like a sort button, grouping stacks of the same items together, pickups fill the action bar first then have to be moved to backpack by hand, sub-item crafting tedium. And generally the game recipes outsizing storage density, requiring lots of containers with similarly tedious management.
There are some other rough edges. Edges, for example, are very easy to fall from. There appears to be no grace area or hint of being close. The edge also seems inconsistent based on the rotation and position of the object, so it's hard to develop a feel for it. I fall off the raft and other objects somewhat frequently, but I don't in other games. Progression is also stretched out too far. Several blueprints are found in the last area of the game. One after the story is all but finished. Also, a crafting material required for the last tier items is found in undersized quantities compared to recipe needs. So you are blocked from some of the most useful items in the game until the game is already over.
Much of this is acceptable from a reasonably-priced game and an initial release from a new indie studio. But I recently discovered something that was unacceptable. I was in a situation where my internet was out, and I put Steam in offline mode to not use hotspot data. Periodically, the game would pop up an error and open a game menu. Ok, minor inconvenience, click Ignore and keep playing. Then I encountered a bug. When I had a container or inventory open when the error came up, the game would no longer take my inputs. I had to kill the game each time, losing progress. I reported the bug and tried to work around it. But then I ran into the worst part, which is not a bug. Being offline blocked me from progressing the story, because some game objects could not be interacted with. When I questioned support about this, they said I had to be online to play. Even in No One Can Join mode where there's no functional reason to be online or block story. (So it didn't sound like that bug would be fixed.) They pled ignorance as to why it was designed this way.
The game's Privacy Policy makes the reason obvious: collecting your data. Among the ways they use your data, many of them are to weaponize your data against you for profit, aka marketing use. The policy also ensures Redbeet can collect your data by blocking access to the game you paid for, unless you make an account, provide personal info, and stay online. If you exercise your right to object or stop the data collection under the GDPR, Redbeet will revoke your license to use the game that you paid for.
Support told me I could disable data collection in Settings. I recall this being a checkbox option at some point during Early Access, but it no longer appears to be. Now when I click the Open Data Privacy Page button as suggested by support, nothing happens. If I were a gambler, I'd bet this button simply opens their privacy policy, which enumerates all the ways users are blocked from having a choice in the matter.
Because of this hostile "privacy" policy, I cannot recommend this game nor this studio.
Update: Support told me that the Open Data Privacy Page is supposed to take me to Unity's data collection page. They didn't say anything about their own data collection.