by Brandon CrawThe art style of this game deceived me. The blob-like and playful character designs had me thinking this would be a silly friend-slop (using this term in an endearing way) game. My misconception aside, Lazy River is a co-op crafting roguelike game where you and up to three friends must survive an infinite lazy river plagued by water-soluble zombies and security robots gone rogue. You must craft a raft, build weapons, and survive the lazy river to escape.
This game feels like it was made for me: an unserious run-based crafting-focused game with some light survival mechanics. Yet, I felt quite conflicted by the end of the preview.
With survival crafting games, I typically like to have a set base that me and my friends can build out. Acting as both a hangout area to craft and upgrade, and a safe defensive structure, your base is something you grow attached to. In Lazy River, this concept is flipped on its head as the base you are building is a raft that continuously floats down the lazy river.
This run-based gameplay loop inherently means you cannot grow attached to your base. There are locations and methods to dock your raft, but doing so is temporary as you need to keep moving to collect more resources. And you must harvest those resources quickly, otherwise your base will float away without you.
During my time in the preview, my co-op partner was one of the PR representatives who was quite familiar with the game. He provided me with a quick introduction, but there was barely enough time to catch my bearings before we were ushered onto a raft and floated down the river. Each run contains a procedurally generated world, and we apparently got quite unlucky with what the proc-gen gave us. This created a wild and chaotic experience that consisted of us scrambling to find enough resources to build weapons or any defenses, and quickly became overwhelmed with the zombies. Our run was short-lived as my partner died to a zombie hidden just out of his view and I had nowhere near enough resources to revive my buddy.
Lazy River threw me into the deep end, forced me to reevaluate how I approach crafting games, and to let go of the things I’m attached to. I’m curious to see how this game plays in its full release. Lazy River will be released in Summer 2027 in early access for the PC.
Lazy River
