Thank you Popcannibal for sending us this game to review!

Make Sail is a physics simulation where the majority of the game is spent designing and redesigning a boat to navigate stormy waters. It has a story, but it is very basic: there is a Tower that once had several Chimes and there were people living on the island with it. These people were happy with the Tower, until one day they set off for distant islands and took the Chimes with them. The Tower got lonely, and a huge storm broke out as a result.

The game has very good audio and visual components, and seems to have a sort of cultural theme, as the beginning story is told on cloth. The graphics quality is adjustable, but the quality at default is incredible, and the surround sound is very good (I played this game wearing headphones). Make Sail also has a nice soundtrack; it fits the theme and is pleasant. It can be bought as DLC for $9.99. At the bottom left corner of the screen, there is a map, an indicator of the angle your boat is facing, and an indicator of how fast your boat is going in knots.

There are quite a few components to the controls, but the gameplay seems to revolve around the construction and reconstruction of boats. The controls aren’t changeable, but there is a tutorial that helps you learn them, and a cheat sheet can be accessed at any time. As you sail around looking for Chimes, whose location are indicated by red pillars of light, there are control hints at the bottom of the screen for steering the boat. Every time you collect all of the Chimes for a ring of islands and bring it back to the Tower, the storm is pushed back and you can go grab more Chimes. The game saves every time you crash into an island and rebuild your boat. To go into the menu to edit your boat, the player’s character has to step into a circle reminiscent of a magic circle. The player can also change the name of their boat.

When building the boat, the player has a variety of useful tools at their fingertips; most, if not all of these features have corresponding keyboard shortcuts. Some of these features include panning, zooming, and symmetry mode. The player is rewarded for completing the tutorial with new options for boat parts and decorations, and these parts and decorations can also be acquired by exploring every island. The items that a player has in one world do not show up in the others, except for the defaults that every world starts with. The building of the boat consists mainly of dragging the parts you want over the existing parts of the boat and attaching them wherever pleased. However, there is a limit to how many of one part you can have on the boat, and it will tell you when that limit is reached.

Make Sail offers quite a bit of replayability, as it runs on a world system and every time you generate a new world, you start completely from scratch. The basic story is relaid, and you have to redo the tutorial, too. The world name is generated as well, and the worlds seem to generate differently too. When you launch the title screen, the game, by default, will have you start from the point you left off from the last world you played.

The game also starts off with a config to adjust the graphics quality, and, upon launching, it will also let you know if any part of your computer is not sufficient for running the chosen quality of the game. (It says my graphics card is not powerful enough, but the game runs fine for me.) Once, I went to the bathroom, and came back to the title screen to find out that the menu song doesn’t seem to loop. Another time, I paused the game for a short period of time only to find that the game crashed. Right before you leave the game to go back to the title screen, you can save a GIF of the last 5-10 seconds of what you played, if desired. When you exit the game, you can report bugs, since it is still in Early Access.

There is also a Creative Mode offered, where you can control the weather of the game, such as the roughness of the ocean, strength of the wind, and strength of the storm. You can also control the time of day, and how fast time passes. To access this creative mode, the player presses C. You also can access all building materials in the entire game in the boat building menu. The downside of this mode is that the only island in the world is the spawn island.

If you are the type of person who likes sailing-related activities, and you have a lot of time on your hands, then this game may be for you!

-Kittycathead