Flotsam: A Raft-Style City Builder in a Waterworld Meets Cities: Skylines Type Deal

By goukijones — December 12, 2025
Tags: blog city-builder flotsam

A 10 hour tour.

Flotsam boasts beautiful graphics and wonderful animations. Drifting from tiny island to tiny island to scavenge for materials and find other survivors sucked me in like a whirlpool.
At the start, you pick your three main pirates. I don’t think it’s super important to min-max classes or stats here. It’s much more important to choose ones with a cool look and a cool name—like Skindeep and Riffraff.

I restarted 3 or 4 times during my 10-hour sea voyage. Each time, building a new raft seemed to take forever. But once I had a solid start and felt like I was on a good run, famine struck the community, and almost everyone died. We scraped by, got the basics running again, and continued to survive.

Then a radio signal popped up, announcing that a doctor was available at a specific location. Excellent news—my last doctor had starved to death!

When we arrived at the hospital, though, the doctor wasn’t there. Apparently, I’d already picked her up. I was hoping for a new character to recruit so I could keep growing my town. Nope—that didn’t happen. I floated off to rescue the next survivor instead.

Some time later, I decided to scour the map for anything I might’ve missed. I couldn’t get energy production going and was stuck in place—everyone had died of starvation, and the six survivors were doing everything they could to keep the raft afloat. That’s when I spotted the hospital way off in the distance. I bolted over, opened it up, and realized it was the same exact place I’d just left. No survivor in sight.

Catch the full tragicomedy in my replay vods [here]—complete with live screaming, creative swearing, and the exact moment Skindeep contemplates swimming away forever.

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Flotsam: A Raft-Style City Builder in a Waterworld Meets Cities: Skylines Type Deal

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