My time with Windbound was terribly frustrating in the beginning, terribly enjoyable through the middle, and terribly frustrating by the end. I was attracted to this game for the colorful, minimalist art style that clearly comes from a Journey-inspired lineage. Rather than braving a lonely desert with an anonymous friend, Windbound braves a treacherous ocean and islands teeming with hostile life. Windbound has taken inspiration from many different games, in fact, and achieved something quite unique.
Windbound’s Gameplay Feel
Windbound is a very simplified, Precision Action game. This means, yes, it is like Dark Souls. The patterns of both the enemy’s attacks and your own are very simple. For most of the enemies, specters and animals included, you will:
- 1- Figure out the right defensive option: Parry or Dodge
- 2- Respond with your own attack
- 3- Bait the enemy and repeat
Enemies each have their own gimmicks. While stiff controls make enemies difficult to learn, once you do the combat becomes much easier. However, health and stamina come at a premium. You are likely to die quickly to anything if you don’t respond quickly.
For animal enemies, using the ranged combat is often faster and easier. Post up on a rock, a stump, or your own boat. Enemies retreat when hit with ranged attacks while unable to path toward the player character, but they will not regenerate health. Take a shot and follow them for a safe fight, or, win or lose, go one-on-one melee for a fast fight.
Every stage concludes with a boss fight. They are typically stronger versions of specters you are likely to encounter on islands. Beyond that, most of your game-time will be spent on the other two pillars of gameplay.
Windbound’s Crafting and Sailing
Sailing across the ocean is the hallmark of this game. Bright colors, dynamically changing weather conditions, and dodging the rocks and coral make this game feel like no other sailing you will have experienced in a game. Nothing has done it quite this well since The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker. That feeling of sailing is driven by a very bold design choice:
It’s physics based.
The shape, size, weight, and sail placement on your boat dynamically integrate with the wind and the waves to determined how it feels to control your boat. You can build for speed, or for sturdiness, but every decision comes with its own, emergent advantages and disadvantages. Sailing with the wind is the most exciting of course, but if your play through goes anything like mine you will more often have to sail diagonally against the wind to make progress.
This was the most frustrating part of the game. Even as I refined my boat design, it would still grind to a halt right in the middle of Shark-infested waters.
Crafting, on the other hand, while slow to start, becomes intuitive after about an hour. Collecting, hoarding, and organizing your materials will be constant and necessary. Always keeping exactly what you need, but not more than you are willing to lose. If you are playing on either of the Roguelike difficulty settings, abandon the idea of saving that one, unique item that you are uncertain how to use.
The crafting also reveals the inspiration of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in this game. Weapons and items break quickly with use. However, different from BotW, not having the materials on hand means waiting a good amount of time before you can make a new one. While having backups clogs your precious inventory space. (I should also mention that the glider you can make in the game is also, clearly, a BotW inspiration.)
I would also be remiss if I failed to mention that, in the last two stages, I frequently encountered a nearly game-breaking bug. (Playing on PlayStation 4). While quickly switching between either the GUI menus, or between melee and ranged combat, controls would simply stop functioning. Menus would no longer appear. The only way to reset was to close the game and restart.
Thankfully, this never caused a lose of progress. It only occurred during combat once. In that case, though my character died and stopped moving, the game neither saved or reloaded the level. Only a few minutes of lost time.
Windbound’s Roguelike Aspects
The average playtime for a single loop of Windbound is about two to four hours. That’s, frankly, far too long for my tastes. This is a crafting game, meaning is actively demands that you save up materials in case you need them for an unforeseen circumstance. The procedurally generated islands with different biomes guarantees that you will constantly be in unforeseen circumstances.
However, losing your boat and your items is most often not a result of making a mistake. It is a guaranteed pillar of the design.
The Roguelite aspects of Windbound come from being able to trade in the game’s currency (a non-premium magic crystal called Sea Shards) for equip or passive abilities. Each item I found either replaced a weapon or extended the utility of an item, or extended my chances to complete a stage by increasing stats or giving me one do-over.
While often useful in the short term, they did not drastically change how the game is played. The core experience in the same regardless.
I believe that this game is far too slow-paced to view it primarily as a roguelike adventure. Unless you have bountiful free time, or a particular love for roguelike games, I very much recommend playing on the easiest difficulty. This, unfortunately, also reduces the numerical difficulty of combat. Resulting in some anticlimactic boss fights.
My personal preference is for games that de-couple numerical difficulty with changes in the mechanical experience of the game. Though typically you see this in the other direction. Such as God of War PS4 having enemy attack patterns only available at higher difficulties, or Fallout 4 only including survival game systems on the hardest difficulty.
Windbound’s Unique Take On Music
It’s best to tackle the story of this game, and how it relates to the game’s mechanics and the themes of death, in its own, separate writing. Before leaving this analysis, I really want to focus on something that not any reviewer I follow found fit to mention. The music of this game is amazing, but for a far greater reason than you expect. The music is emergent.
While the game absolutely has an original soundtrack that guides the calm, danger, and grand feelings of adventure, this is not where the game’s music shines. Rather, it is in the animals you hunt throughout the game.
Each animal has a unique, rhythmic sound effect that overlap as distinct tracks. These tracks then overlap with the base, combat music. This resulted in each combat taking on a unique level, that makes your emotions swell as the music swells in complexity. This means that, even without seeing what enemy is attacking you, the sound alone gives you complete situational awareness.
Nothing in my experience has created music in this way. It greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the game.
Overall, this game is a great and unique experience. It has a vision, and executes on it without compromise. Give it a try.
SocraTetris 