Sailing seems like the only real way to get away from it all. Unlike hiking in the woods, where there are bugs and bears (and possibly bugbears, if you're in a fantasy forest), taking a ship out on the open ocean seems like your best option for solitude and silence. As long as you don't fall off the boat and get hassled by a bunch of fish, you can spend days, weeks, or months at sea without having to interact with another living creature, human or otherwise. In a world of smart phones and social media, it sounds utterly blissful.

In theory, anyway. In practice, I lasted about six minutes in open-world multiplayer sailing simulator Sailaway before I suddenly became desperate to talk to another player. Which is weird for me: I don't play many multiplayer games, and when I do I sort of hate talking to people anyway. And for the first few minutes of Sailaway I was perfectly content to see other ships but not try to communicate with their captains. That is, until I got the feeling other captains were actively trying to avoid me, at which point I became obsessed with getting their attention.

Sailaway can be a simple sailing experience—just steer with a couple of keys and let the sim do the rest for you—or a complex one, where you do all the line hauling and sail trimming and knowing what genoa furlers are and all that other stuff I didn't bother to learn. I appreciate a game with depth, but also one that doesn't require you to know everything before you can get your toes wet.

It's a persistent online world: you can even log off and your boat will continue sailing, meaning you can take simulated months-long voyages across the sea. Luckily for the casual sailor like myself who may not want to spend months playing, you can teleport, too. Pick a spot in the world and you'll arrive there a moment later. I bounced around for a while, checking out coastlines, islands, and landmarks while I (sort of) learned how to sail. 

But then I noticed in my global notifications that several people had teleported to locations near me, and then promptly teleported away or simply went offline. What's more, when I teleported near someone—not to talk to them, just to look at their boat—that person also blipped away a moment later.

It happened a few more times, and it started to bother me. Why does everyone seem to be avoiding me? Does my boat suck or something? Granted, my boat is named "My Boat", so perhaps I'm labeling myself as a newbie (or newbuoy), but still. It's not that I even want to talk to anyone, but now that people are deliberately not talking to me all I want to do is to force someone to talk to me. I suddenly feel like I've walked into a crowded party and everybody has suddenly gone quiet and are now looking at their phones, turning their backs, or leaving to use the restroom.

I start trying to talk to other captains. Nothing major, just greeting people nearby over the text chat. That's all, just a simple hello. And I get no responses back. I become something of a boat-stalker, searching the map for other ships, teleporting over to them, saying hello, following them around, and then teleporting away to find someone else. In some cases I sail directly behind them, beside them, and even teleport in front of them at attempt to collide with them. 

It turns out, you can't collide with them.

But still, you have to notice some guy repeatedly teleporting around you and then steering his ship right through your hull. Say hello! Swear at me! Call me a name! Something! Anything!

I tail someone for long minutes under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco but they don't respond to greetings, then I teleport to New York's Liberty Island and get ignored in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. I teleport to the Nile River, but it's nighttime so I can't see the person I'm trying to harass, so I head to the Florida coast for a while. Still nothing.

Eventually, I do get some responses. Someone I hailed with "bonjour" fifteen minutes ago finally responds with "bonjour" but then adds a string of other French words I can't understand. Someone I said hello to in the Caribbean an hour ago finally says hello back. One sailor issues a greeting but says "hello to 'MY BOAT' owner" which I think is probably an insult. I still feel a little better that I'm not just sailing around in a purgatory filled with ghost ships. 

Naturally, once people have greeted me I find I have nothing useful or interesting to say as a follow-up, and a moment later I feel immensely guilty for bugging players who are probably doing what I was there doing initially: trying to get away from annoying people who never shut up. So, I do what they all did: I teleport away and log off. I hope they don't take it as personally as I did.

I presumed that reading 20 books in Patrick O’Brian’s AubreyMaturin series might give me an innate understanding of sailing. I was wrong. Sailaway proves one of two things: 1) things have changed significantly in the 217 years I’ve been away, or 2) that reading historical fiction about flaxen-haired naval heroes is a poor foundation for learning. Perhaps both. 

My journey starts well enough. I understand that sailing into the wind requires me to tack, and some of the terminology sounds familiar—backstays, jibs, the sea, etc. But as I progress through the tutorial, I get the sense that instead of being a natural Jack Tar in the mould of Jack Aubrey, I’m more like Stephen Maturin, the physician-cum-spy from O’Brian’s books who’s famously terrible at sailing. By the time I get to the tutorial about different lines, I’m lost at sea. They all sound like they’re named after school bullies from Just William. Didn’t Cunningham and Vang lock poor Archie in the pantry? Mayday. 

Despite this, I’m enjoying how complicated it is. Most ships in games control like bumper cars, sliding in whichever direction you press, but Sailaway is honest. You won’t go anywhere without the right knowledge. I might not know my genoas from my spankers, but with time and patience I could learn something. Sadly, I have neither, so I turn on Sailaway’s buffoon mode, which handles all the difficult stuff while I concentrate on steering. Wrapped in my buoyancy aid of ineptitude, I decide to try some challenges. What could go wrong? I can’t capsize. At least, I don’t think I can.

The first challenge is about tacking, which is something I’ve read about and conceptually understand. It’s the process of zigzagging into the wind so you can move forward even when it’s blowing in the wrong direction. I’d explain exactly how that works, but I respect you too much. When it works, I feel magnificent; I’m controlling nature, harnessing reckless forces like a cowboy breaking a wild stallion. I’m the master of gusts; the baron of breezes. I’m feeling good about myself until I realise my goal isn’t getting any closer. This is because I’m moving at about six knots—roughly the same speed as a raft made of corpses. 

I reach the goal eventually, and I’m filled with a sense of false confidence. I’m taking the next step. In the following challenge, I’m controlling how taught the sails are. It feels amazing when they’re filled with wind and angled correctly, like I’ve mastered something elemental. This lasts for a minute, before I have to change direction and I spill the wind from my sails like a feckless lubber. Spools begin unspooling. Sheets flap. With lots of guessing, I start moving again, but the message is clear. I’m not ready for the sails. I crawl over the finish line in twice the time it was meant to take me, like a wheezy boy on sports day. A horn sounds, and for the first time I’m relieved that this is a one-person boat rather than a ship of the line full of seaman looking to me for guidance. 

If you've ever thought to yourself that spending months aboard a digital sailboat making a simulated journey across the Pacific Ocean in real time would be no end of fun, then the newly-announced "ultimate sailing simulator" Sailaway might be just your thing. It promises to recreate the world's oceans "with unparalleled accuracy," in a persistent online world built featuring real-time weather data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

“Sailaway started as an experiment to see if it would be feasible to create a sailboat that responds to sail trim changes” solo developer Richard Knol explained. “But it soon transformed into a full time passion project, in which every aspect of sailing was being implemented in the most comprehensive way possible.” 

The game will have three ships—a 38-foot Cruiser, a Mini-Transat, and a 52-foot Classic Yacht—each with accurately modeled sales and controls. There will be a range of difficulty settings to accommodate sailors of all skill levels, and global, local, and group chat options to give players something to do while they're sailing the ocean blue. You can invite other people onto your boat to help out (or just hang out, I suppose) or create races and compete for pride of place on the online leaderboards. 

Sailaway isn't likely to crack the top ten on Steam, but just like games like Bus Simulator, American Truck Simulator, or Bridge Project, I think it's great that this kind of sim can exist in the PC gaming ecosphere. I probably wouldn't be down for spending weeks on a real-time trans-Pacific crossing, but I can think of worse ideas than a full-contact sailboat race through a raging Antarctic storm. 

Sailaway is headed to an Steam Early Access release in April, with a caveat from the developer that there will be "bugs and server bumps along the way," so don't buy it unless you actually want to take part in working it all out. Find out more at sailawaysimulator.com.