Raft

A genuinely satisfying survival-building loop

Raft's premise is simple and immediately legible: adrift on a small raft with nothing but a hook and a raft net, players scavenge floating debris to expand their home, craft tools, and eventually sail between islands while a persistent shark circles below. Reviewers across a huge review base consistently credit the building system specifically as the game's strongest element. "I really liked this game as an alternative between minecraft and subnautica, the building aspect and the music makes for a peaceful and relaxing experience," reads a 2020 review. Even critical reviewers tend to agree on this point before raising other concerns: "Designing rafts in this game is amazing, I could spend all day designing boats or houses in this game," reads a 2023 review before pivoting to its own reservations about other systems. That consistency, across reviewers who otherwise land on very different overall recommendations, points to a genuinely well-executed core mechanic.

A serious, verified historical security concern

This review independently verified one of the more serious complaints found in the review base: a publicly disclosed, remotely exploitable vulnerability. Checking the original security advisory directly, published by the French firm Synacktiv and assigned CVE-2022-47530, the technical details are unambiguous — Raft's networking code deserialized untrusted data from other players using an insecure .NET class, allowing "an attacker to send a crafted P2P packet to the target and run arbitrary code remotely, without any user interaction." The advisory's own timeline shows Synacktiv first attempted responsible disclosure in July 2022, followed by two more unanswered contact attempts through November 2022, before going public on 13 December 2022. Redbeet Interactive shipped a fix nine days later, on 22 December 2022. "The developers did not fix this breach so far, even thoug they were informed Months ago," reads a January 2023 review written during that gap, and a separate 2023 review adds important context after the fact: "The vulnerability was fixed after the developers were forced to do so by a third party releasing the information about the vulnerability to the public." This review confirms that account against the primary source directly. It's worth stating plainly what this means for a buyer today, more than three years after the patch: the specific network vulnerability described is resolved, and there's no evidence of it recurring. The original advisory does note one narrower, still-relevant caveat worth repeating: the game's savegame file format used the same insecure method at the time of disclosure, so downloading and loading unfamiliar .RGD save files from untrusted sources carries a similar theoretical risk and is worth avoiding as routine caution.

A well-corroborated complaint about the ending

Separate from the security history, the most consistent gameplay complaint in the review base concerns the game's final story chapter. "If you don't like puzzles, this game's final 10 hours are ALL puzzles. It goes from a survival, exploration, building game to a Mario World jumping puzzle game," reads a 2023 review describing an otherwise "excellent co-op experience." A 2025 review reaches a similar conclusion independently: "still bad ending + you get the best tools after finishing the game, like what's the point?" A 2025 review frames the broader arc: "The premise of the story is good, but it turns out to be really lackluster. The ending is not satis[fying]." This is a specific, structural complaint about pacing and genre-shift rather than a technical problem — reviewers aren't describing the platforming sections as poorly built, but as a mismatch with the open, methodical building-and-exploration loop that drew them to the game for dozens of hours beforehand.

A genuine, if lower-stakes, repetition complaint

A further, more general complaint concerns mid-game pacing. "Raft is a game about juggling a constant stream of mundane and repetitive tasks. You are never really given the freedom to relax, think, or explore," reads a 2019 review. This complaint is raised less universally than the ending or security concerns, and several reviewers specifically credit multi-year content updates with meaningfully improving pacing since early access — but it's worth naming as a real, if more subjective, criticism that recurs across the review sample, particularly from players who engaged with the game primarily solo rather than with a group.

Weighing single-player against the game's clear co-op focus

Steam's own achievement data, checked directly for this review, shows roughly 80% of players have triggered the "played with a friend" achievement — a strong signal that co-op is how the large majority of the audience actually experiences the game, consistent with the developer's own framing. Reviewers who play solo report a distinctly different, often harder experience: "Singleplayer just has a lot of busy work and an early game curve that kinda sucks. Many of the early threatening animals are just a bit too irritating to deal [with alone]," reads a 2022 review. That's a fair, specific piece of guidance for a prospective buyer: Raft's difficulty and pacing appear tuned with a group of two or three players in mind, and a solo player should expect a rougher, slower early game as a direct consequence rather than a design oversight.

Final verdict

Raft delivers a genuinely well-loved co-op survival and building experience, and the specific, serious security concern this review independently verified is resolved and no longer a reason to avoid buying the game today. What keeps the score short of the top of its genre is a well-corroborated structural complaint about the game's final story hours pivoting away from what made the preceding dozens of hours distinctive, alongside a real, if less universal, repetition complaint in the mid-game. This is a strong, easy recommendation for a group of friends looking for a relaxed ocean-survival building game; solo players and anyone hoping the ending matches the strength of the core loop should temper their expectations accordingly.