After watching the trailer for this game, I thought I was getting into an experience more akin to a Breath of the Wild style game. Instead, I was met with an unforgiving sprawling craft and survival game wrapped around an interesting mythos, and a strong sense of unseen lore about it. Windbound is a game that casts you into the middle of a wide wide ocean, dotted with islands containing secrets, resources, and most of all danger!
Windbound
Developer: 5 Lives Studios
Price: $29.99
Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
MonsterVine was supplied with PS4 code for review
Alone with not much more to go on than your wits and intuition, Windbound will put your skills to the test as you struggle to adapt to each new biome, and each new challenge. You will go from a small canoe to a multi platformed ship full of tools, riding on the wind across the mighty blue sea. Let’s talk a little bit more about Windbound!
This game starts out with a story sequence of you becoming shipwrecked and waking up on a beach, alone with nothing but a knife and the image of a shrine on the top of the island to guide you. You find various materials, long grass, rocks, sticks, and more to make your basic supplies like a sling, or maybe a spear that is a glorified sharp stick. As you continue to build supplies, and unlock more crafting recipes, you will eventually find your way to the top of the shrine, where you find a mysterious shell that turns to light, and enters your body as you see in the distance, pillars of light erupt, making it clear that if you want to figure out what happened, you have to take to the sea! Using a special oar, you will get what you need in order to make a canoe from grass, and with that, you set off towards the horizon in order to find your next clue. The sense of exploration in this game runs deep in its veins, there’s little to no real direction as you explore your set of islands until you can progress to the next chapter. Each chapter you beat brings you to arguably some of my favorite parts of the game, this celestial boat ride in which you get bits and pieces of the story at play. You also feel quite heroic, as you listen to the absolutely BANGING soundtrack during these scenes, and try to make it to the next location.
I want to personally thank WHOEVER on this team thought to put a more casual mode! In this game’s vanilla gameplay death means the loss of everything that isn’t in your pockets, and you get sent back to the start of chapter 1, washed up on that mysterious beach. I would say I certainly died a bit more than I’d like to admit at the start, as I warmed up to the mechanics and the playstyle the game expects. It would have been SUPER disheartening to have to return to that after my hard-fought battle to the next chapter, and thankfully a mode where death just returns you to the start of your current chapter exists, and honestly I HIGHLY recommend you go that route. This game uses stamina very heavily, for running, swimming, fighting, and more, your gauge will gradually decrease due to your hunger, culminating in you taking health damage due to starvation. The combat has you using a variety of melee weapons and ranged weapons to take down the local wildlife in your never-ending quest for tools and meat; you also have some dodges as well to aid you in your fight. The combat is… clunky. Most of your combat options have huge windows of committing to attacks, and that is coming from a Monster Hunter and Soulslike veteran. I often found myself getting hit trying to get out an extra hit here or there, where I very well should have been able to, just due to either wonky hitboxes or unresponsive gameplay. It basically devolves into standing around and waiting for them to do something you can capitalize on, and get in a hit. Some of the beefier fauna will have you breaking spears trying to take them down, it’s a little frustrating. Thank god for bows, I spent a large amount of my compat time perched on rocks or somewhere else where an enemy couldn’t hit me, peppering them with arrows to get their health down low enough where I felt comfortable enough to take them down in melee range. It just never felt very satisfying, even after many attempts to get the nuances of it down and make it more enjoyable.
Exploring the areas is worth it, you will find plenty of things to make your life just a little bit easier, and that is almost part of its roguelike element. Each chapter is randomly generated, so you will find different biomes, different treasures, and different challenges after death. Luckily, that includes permanent upgrades, as well as a currency that lets you purchase different blessings that you can select in between chapters to improve your character. There are plenty of moments as you explore this world and ride the waves, where you stop and take it all in around you. Lots of very pretty eye candy met with a standout soundtrack, making going between islands enjoyable, but playing it certainly made me wish for the ease of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker’s ability to control the wind direction. I hated having to fuss with deconstructing my sail if I wasn’t going in a direction that was made easier with a sale, and just rowing, while fine for shorter distances, really started to drag on going from one half of the map to another.
The Final Word
Windbound is a fun experience that often finds you wishing for a little bit more: more responsive combat, a few quality of life features, and the ability to control the wind to name a few, but if you came to set sail on massive sea full of mystery, dead set on surviving in a world that seems to be set up to work against you, Windbounds’ solid basis, pretty world, and strong survival mechanics might just hook you!
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
