Windbound is a fun experience that breaks the survival game mold. The boat crafting and sailing are innovative features that were exciting to explore. Altough the positives were very strong, the quality of life issues made the experience tedious. Windbound accels in standing alone in a saturated genre, but doesn't shine through enough.
The survival genre is one that has always interested me. I love the foraging and crafting aspects that are involved. Windbound offers a unique aspect to the survival genre, sailing. Using a boat in survival games like The Forest or Stranded Deep isn’t a foreign idea. Rather the act of crafting a ship that has balance and using the wind is something that I haven’t seen until recently with Windbound. I mean it says it right in the title, Windbound. Not only are we given this unique mechanic, but we also get an engaging story along with it. While it has an interesting story and amusing mechanics, Windbound is still not devoid of flaws. I encountered many bugs throughout my playthroughs. Windbound is an exciting experience, but it could use more polish.
In many survival games, I always want to start and get my shelter set up. Windbound does not have that usual gameplay loop. The loop is to build and upgrade your vessel. There is no day/night cycle so sleeping is not an option. You do still need to collect resources and hunt for food. When you start, you can receive a story related item that allows you to craft parts to a boat. The further your progress in the story of the game, the further you can upgrade your boat. Starting from just a canoe and an oar, then adding a sail, then to connecting multiple canoes, and so on. These upgrades will make your boat maneuver in different ways. Upgrading a sail will allow you to get more wind, more wind equates to moving faster on the water. You can add multiple canoes to a boat’s platform, but if you craft it incorrectly then the boat will not function properly. You even run the risk of it tipping over.
A huge part of Windbound is sailing. Using the wind along your sails to traverse through the water and get to your next destination. At first, you just row, when you get your sail it gets more involved. You can change the direction of the sail along with the height of it. I did not know the correct way to sail and it made it hard for me to progress. I am not sure how many people are in the Venn diagram of sailors and video game players, but I am not one of those people. I always assumed that if you the wind pushing your sail forward to go forward. I wish there was a little bit of a tutorial regarding the physics of using the wind and positioning of the boat. If the wind is coming in from your left, then you need to angle the sail more on the right to propel forward. I often grew frustrated with this since I did not know the science behind sailboats. I think there is a problem if I have to watch a youtube video on sailboats to learn how to play.
There is not a ton of story in Windbound, but the story beats that were there I enjoyed. You are the protagonist, Kara, who is looking for her tribe. Traveling from island to island, you will find three towers in each of the five chapters. In each chapter, you activate said towers. Once you have completed that task you sail to a shrine. The shrine then teleports you into a boss stage. The boss stage in Windbound is a unique way to tell the story. Once teleported you are told the stories of The Ancients with hieroglyphics. After that has been completed, you then start to sail through various obstacles. Water levels rise and fall at absurd speeds, obelisks block your path, and creatures lurking about. The later the chapter, the more difficult these become. In the end, you can spend the in-game currency on perks. You can only have one perk active at a time unless you purchase an upgrade. The Windbound story is the driving factor for you to progress. You won’t get better items if you don’t go through the story.
Exploration and crafting are a large part of Windbound. When you reach a new island, you will want to harvest the resources. You also need to acquire a substantial amount of food that you can cook and eat. Your hunger is tied to your stamina, and they both drain very quickly. If you sprint for too long, your stamina will be depleted which in turn hurts your hunger. If Kara becomes hungry, her health will start to deplete. Cooked food doesn’t last that long before it goes bad. It is easy to find an animal and hunt it for food though. There is a nice balance there. On the other hand, crafting resources are hard to come by. I found that it was really difficult to be able to upgrade my boat because of the lack of resources on each island.
There were quite a few bugs throughout my experience with Windbound. Many of these bugs were with my inventory. I found it incredibly hard to navigate and it would often flip back and forth between the crafting and inventory menus. There were times in the inventory menu that didn’t allow me to drop items or send them to a bag. These issues weren’t game-breaking but did diminish the experience.
