Windbond will instantly draw comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker thanks to its ocean theme and cel-shaded graphics. But the gameplay is rather unique to itself, and after looking past some of the rough edges of the game, Windbound becomes a pleasant and enjoyable experience.
The story of Windbound is told through cutscenes, vague text, cave paintings, and with the environment itself. The game opens up with Kara and her clan sailing the seas during a violent storm. Kara is tossed out of her boat and left for dead, with a sea-creature seemingly being her doom. However, Kara wakes up marooned on an island, with a mystery to unfold.
With each completed chapter, Kara learns of the history of her clan, and its interactions with the sea creatures. Although very cryptic, the story points to the sea creatures being worshiped and then abandoned by her people. Eventually, they even seem to be in conflict with monsters in a war.
The gameplay is a natural part of the story in that Kara washes on the shores of a desert island and is tasked with using the resources around her to survive. Players can choose to play the game on two different difficulty settings, one of which will soften the blow of dying in-game. Survivalist mode is very difficult, with permadeath features built-in, while the Storyteller setting is a bit easier and safer. Each death simply resets the progress of the current chapter, and resources and crafted items remain with the player.
What players find throughout the island world is a part of the fun, but it also can be frustrating. The collecting of resources and discovery of new crafting recipes has a domino-like effect in Windbound. For example, a stick can be found and then used to create a spear, which becomes a helpful weapon to take down animals like a wild boar. The wild boar can be killed for its skin, which can be turned into the leather that can be used to make more items. That same boar could have instead produced bones for creating other items, or meat to be eaten for survival. Discovering new items is a part of the enjoyment in the game, but early on it feels like a chore thanks to the inventory system.
The menu screen – navigating through the material and crafting items – does not feel intuitive at all. The game can take around 30 hours to beat, and halfway through the game the inventory system still doesn’t feel natural. Early on Kara can only hold a very limited amount of items, which makes it frustrating to need to drop items with regularity because other items need to be held for crafting purposes. Eventually, players can craft bags of different sizes but even those can fill up rather quickly.
There are different types of islands to explore, and as Kara cannot swim long distances, she needs a boat to discover what the world has to offer. Through crafting, the player can slowly build up their boat to better serve that exploration. It feels rewarding to start out with a slow and wobbly creation, but eventually build up a reinforced wooden boat that can cook food, hold more bags for item management, and even hoist a beautiful sail to roam throughout the ocean.
Speaking of sailing, the mechanics are both solid and annoying. Because of how unpredictable the wind is, it can be frustrating to move from one island to another. When the wind is at the back of Kara, Windbound is fun. However, it feels like the wind is always headed in the wrong direction. The sailing mechanics are rather realistic, in how the boat is affected by the wind, but it’s not exactly enjoyable to take 10 minutes to move from one island to another when it feels so close.
The fighting in the game is rather simplistic, but it gets the job done. Kara can strafe, dodge, and roll around incoming attacks, and she can fight the enemy with a knife, spear, and even bow and arrow. Crafted weapons will break after extended use, but there are ways to access weapons that never fall apart, which is helpful. It can be a bit scary to fight most creatures in the game, however, as dying is the worst-case scenario. Because many of the stronger weapons need to be crafted with items that the stronger monsters drop, the game becomes a cycle of barely surviving just to get craft a new weapon that may make the next fight easier.
The main goal of the game, other than simply surviving and exploring, is to find three towers with orbs on them. When Kara reaches the top of the location, her necklace absorbs the energy. When all three locations are found, Kara can then go to a massive island where she can finish the chapter by pressing three switches (that cannot be hit unless the orbs have been consumed) and then traveling up to the top of a mountainous like alter. This is where a small portion of the story is revealed, and the chapter is wrapped up. Before the end of the chapter, however, Kara travels in a mysterious waterway that is filled with massive waves, rocks to dodge, and even sharks. The first time this is experienced, with a pretty melody in the background, it is moving and enjoyable. But this exact series of events happen repeatedly. And the fact that the game is a permadeath experience means that this is even more tedious. If a player were to get to chapter 4 and then die, it means they would have to re-do every aspect of the journey, and by the time they finally make it to chapter 5 with the second run, they would have climbed 24 towers, sailed to countless islands, and traversed the mysterious waterway 8 times.
While the repetition is disappointing, sailing the seas is mostly enjoyable, and discovering new resources on an island is great. Additionally, the game’s two biggest weaknesses are a bad mix with each other. On one end, the game takes a while to get going thanks to a (initially) restrictive inventory management and crafting system. On the other end the game gets repetitive, so as soon as things finally get going, it starts to feel like a drag.
Windbound is a pleasant oceanic indie. It does a very fine job of balancing itself between being a calming experience in a deserted island world and a title that is genuinely tense thanks to its survival and permadeath nature. The inventory management is extremely frustrating early on, but eventually, the crafting nature of the game clicks and it becomes enjoyable to create helpful tools and a resourceful boat to explore the world. The objective of the game, unfortunately, becomes repetitive just as the other aspects of the title come into their own. But simply traversing the islands, discovering new materials and recipes, and surviving in the charming world of Windbound is fun enough to outweigh some of the game’s shortcomings.
Windbound is available now on Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Stadia, and PC. Game Rant was provided a PS4 code for this review.
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