You know how it is: You log on to your PlayStation, realize another month has come and gone, and then suddenly bolt upright because you forgot to mail off the rent check again. But then, once that adrenaline spike has been properly disposed with, you start thinking about the fact that there’s a new batch of free PS Plus games being offered up in the PlayStation Network store, as Sony’s marketing team continues to trawl through the “Too cheap? Not cheap enough?” calculus that apparently powers its monthly picks for giveaway games to keep its online subscribers happy.
This month, that math includes Stranded Deep, a 2015 survival title from Beam Team Games that looks genuinely interesting, in a “living out our worst nightmares” sort of way. The gist of the game, from what we can tell, is Castaway as a survival sim, placing you as the sole survivor of a plane crash on a tropical island that seems to be disproportionately surrounded by sharks. Given that we’re not allowed to stream any other survival horror games you might have heard about at the moment, we figured it might be fun for the A.V. Club Twitch channel to dip into the game this week to see how it holds up, and whether it’s worth players’ time, as well as their, well, total lack of money. (Also, given our previously stated, uh, apprehensions about games that take place on or under the water, this should be an especially fraught time for our stream. Hooray!)
We’ll be going live with a fresh playthrough of the game today, May 5, at 2 p.m. Central. You can follow along at our Twitch channel, www.twitch.tv/AVClubTwitch.