Survival games have always been hit or miss for me. Most survival games become vastly easier when you have people to play with. Some are even very difficult to play alone. However, Windbound is a Single-Player Survival/Exploration game that breaks these conventions.

Windbound puts you in the role of Kara, a young member of a seafaring clan who is torn from her clan by a storm and finds herself in the Forgotten Islands. You must traverse through five sets of procedurally generated islands to find resources and food. You then craft tools, build and upgrade your boat, and tackle difficult sailing/seafaring challenges in order to progress to the next set of islands.

This review took me a while to put together because I wanted to play through all five chapters and understand the progression better. In truth, it is best described as Breath of the Wild meets Wind Waker, meets a survival game. The developers compare it to Don’t Starve or The Forest, but I don’t entirely agree. Windbound isn’t as difficult or daunting as either of those games.

The survival elements in Windbound can be punishing at times if you aren’t careful, but most of the time they don’t ask too much of you. Essentially, Kara has a health bar and a stamina bar. Over time that stamina bar depletes and also serves as a hunger bar. If you don’t eat, you begin to take damage and will ultimately perish. However, after the first few islands, you are equipped well enough (or should be) to kill, cook, and eat enough to survive.

Of course, there are ways to eat that don’t require you to kill things. Mushrooms grow on trees and berries grow on bushes, but these two forms of food heal less hunger (and health) than meat. Combat against the (mostly) hostile wilderness can be a challenge, as it is very timing based. Every enemy has behavior patterns that you must watch and contend with. Dodging to minimize damage is essential, but you also have to be sure that your weapons aren’t breaking in the middle of a fight.

Oh yes, I should have mentioned this sooner. Tools and weapons break. You can use things like spears, bows (eventually), and rock slings (think David and Goliath) to take down creatures and collect resources from them. Certain resources can only be obtained by killing various enemies, such as the Gloomharrow Jaw which is used for crafting an axe.

Different harvesting tools such as the axe, bone shovel, and hammer are required to harvest certain materials, which add a layer of progression to the game. Until you get access to the right tool, you may not be able to harvest a certain type of material to upgrade your boat/gear. The problem is, not every creature spawns in every set of islands. I went an entire chapter with no axe to harvest wood with, because an island on which a Gloomharrow should spawn, didn’t show up.

Before we get into my problems with the procedural generation though, let’s back up a little. Food goes bad over time as you play. So you are always balancing whether you carry enough food to get by, at the risk of not having enough later, or carrying more than enough and risking it rotting. Luckily, if you find an island with lots of animals, you can drive back there later, because animals respawn on a 24 (in-game) hour basis.

Resources do not respawn, however, or at least if they do I never encountered it. This makes resources for repairing/building your boat or crafting gear somewhat scarce. You have to be very careful what you do with your resources and when you use them so you don’t screw yourself later. This actually became a problem for me because I found that certain island types didn’t spawn as often during my playthrough.

This made it difficult to repair my boat and still have resources to build onto it or upgrade it the way I might have liked. Granted, when it comes to crafting and things of that nature, I have very specific (sometimes excessive) needs. Let’s get into the boat building so I can explain what I mean.

Okay, so boats in Windbound are modular. You can build them in multiple ways, using things such as hulls, decks, masts/sails, bag stands, hull armor, spikes, and more. As you collect new types of resources, you learn new recipes with which to craft new things for your boat or character. You start out with a grass canoe and eventually, you can build grass decks, hulls, and more.

After a while, you will graduate to bamboo and wood. These types of materials are more durable and can take more damage from rocks, coral reefs, or even sea creatures you may encounter. Every part of your boat/raft/etc can take damage, so you’ll constantly need to keep materials on you to repair it if it takes damage.

This is most important during the challenges that mark the end of each chapter. As you progress through the islands, you climb towers that have keys. Once you collect the keys and take them to the final shrine, you are whisked away to a “crossing” area where you pass through a sailing challenge to get to the next chapter and set of islands. At the end of the challenge, you can redeem sea shards (which you collect over time) to get blessings.

Blessings are randomly generated from a select pool and can be anything from using less stamina when swimming, getting more sea shards, or even being given an unbreakable spear as long as you have the blessing equipped. You can only purchase one blessing during each challenge, which includes a blessing to give you a second slot.

The problem with sea shards is that’s the only use for them. I had over 4000 sea shards at the end of my first playthrough and had barely needed them. Granted, exploring other islands also gets you things like Stamina shrines and Health shrines to increase your max stamina and health respectively.

Now, back to boat crafting and why this matters. You only have a certain number of inventory spaces at the start. You can make and equip a bag to your character and can use bag stands to add extra bags to store things on your boat. There are also storage containers you can have on your boat as well. However, say you have a bag stand with a bag full of items on a part of your boat, and you can’t repair that part due to a lack of resources.

You then have to do the challenge and hope that you don’t accidentally break that part of your boat, and lose your bag stand and all of your items inside it. It also doesn’t help that in order to upgrade your boat, you can’t just swap materials out for a better tier. You have to build a new boat out of the new materials from scratch, then dismantle the old one.

When dismantling parts, you get all of your items back. However, it is a very time-consuming process and clunky in practice. I should also point out here, that when traveling through the portal at the end of the sailing challenge to reach the next set of islands, the game is prone to crashing. Save often as you play Windbound because at least on the Switch version I had around 8 crashes in my first playthrough, one of which caused me to lose about an hour and a half’s worth of progress.

This seems to be an issue on the PC version as well. However, the developers have addressed this in a recent Steam announcement and will be updating both the PC version and the console version accordingly. They also plan to add autosaving options and some alterations to how quickly food goes bad, etc.

Also, sometimes when loading the game, you may not load up exactly where you saved. You may have all the accomplishments or items, but you might have to sail back to an island that you saved on. Before we get into my final thoughts, let’s talk a bit about the story of Windbound because I have mixed feelings.

It is clear that the developers intended for players to resonate with the story, considering the steam page says the following: “Embark on a personal journey and discover the history of the idyllic Forbidden Islands; each holding the key to a mystery and unexpected revelations.” However, there is a problem with this, since the storyline is very subtle.

You unlock a mural piece after each crossing trial, but there is no text to explain it. Most of the other storytelling is entirely subtle and based on finding lore throughout the islands. I am sure they meant for this to be a profound story, telling us something about the consumption of resources or something in that vein. However, it is really hard to get invested when the story is so vague and open to interpretation.

With that said the gameplay more than makes up for it. I know I’ve been somewhat hard on it, talking about the downsides of things so thoroughly. However, Windbound is still very fun and enjoyable. There is something charming about the art style and soothing music. While I do think that there are some issues with how many things you have to manage, somehow it still succeeds [n providing a fun experience.

I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the combat, but I personally find it to be enjoyable. It isn’t unfair, but it also isn’t too easy either. There are a few difficulty options for the game too, in case you want to turn up the heat a little. Windbound may have missed the mark for me in the story department, but it is still a fun, soothing, relaxing sort of survival game.

It honestly made me wish that Nintendo would put Wind Waker on the Switch. There are a lot of great Zelda vibes in this and I can only applaud the Windbound devs for creating such a fun experience. Furthermore, if they continue to update it, fix bugs and crashes, and adjust things, I can only see the game getting better.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Windbound was provided by Deep Silver for this review.

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Windbound

$29.99 USD

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Beautiful Environments
• Smooth Combat
• Deep Crafting and Boat Building
• Sailing Feels Responsive and Fun
• Variable Difficulty

Cons

• Bugs and Crashes
• Resources for Crafting Seem to Be Limited
• Story is a Bit Too Subtle