You could lock me into a chest packed with pieces of eight then toss me into a churning sea of pirate games and I’d still tell you there aren’t enough of them as I slowly sink toward Davy Jones’ Locker. Whether it’s Sea of Thieves, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, Monkey Island, or Sid Meier’s Pirates, if there’s a swash to be buckled or a parrot to be shouldered, I’m there. So when other nautically minded sorts started seafoaming at the mouth over piratical PvE survival game Windrose’s Steam demo a little while back, my metaphorical pegleg was pricked. And now, some time later, I’ve finally managed to set sail for Windrose’s treacherous waters – and I can see why this slick seafaring adventure is already one of Steam’s most wishlisted games.
First a bit of scene-setting: it’s the 18th century and a grounded, albeit more magically inclined, alternative Golden Age of Piracy is in full swing. There’s talk of Nassau and the fearsome Blackbeard stalking the waves, but for a good long portion of Windrose’s six-or-so-hour-long demo, it doesn’t so much play a game of pirates as desert island castaways. Your adventure begins with your customisable avatar shipwrecked on a tiny tropical island, splayed upon the sand as the sun beats down; palms sway in the gentle Caribbean breeze, and the ocean – stretching away to an endless horizon beneath shifting clouds and bright blue skies – breaks softly against the golden shoreline.
Ahead, dense jungle beckons promises of adventure, danger, and mystery, but given you’ve little to your name at this point – beyond a broken sword, a shredded shirt, and (hopefully) a thirst for survival – you probably don’t want to dash off too far. Not least because in this perilous world of charging boars, giant razor-clawed crabs, and bloated undead sailors, even a mildly irked knee-high dodo is liable to one-shot you if you’re not careful.
Quite a lot of the time, Windrose feels like an action game, and a slickly enjoyable one at that. You’ll bound through the thick jungle undergrowth in search of treasures, fighting off (or more likely fleeing from, in the early hours) perpetually peeved wildlife and more supernatural forces when night falls. You’ll loot ancient ruins or infiltrate pirate encampments, explore underground tombs and labyrinthine caves – all placed according to the whims of Windrose’s procedural generation, which does a good job of creating a convincingly natural open-world archipelago. As you go, you’ll uncover snippets of lore, challenge patrolling enemies, and perhaps even uncover some exotic (and useful) treasures. The demo might be pulling from a limited pool of premade pieces, but it still manages to conjure a compelling sense of discovery. And it’s paired with some tricky but tautly satisfying third-person combat; a kind of rhythmic Soulsian affair that delivers a pleasingly weighty mix of stamina-depleting swings, dodges, and parries. Oh, and there’s obviously sailing too. But we’ll get to that.
Beneath all this, though, Windrose follows the familiar survival rhythms of resource gathering and expansion, where new resources beget new tools beget new resources until you’re as fancy as fancy can be. You’ll fell trees and gather wood to build workbenches, so plants can become fabric can become a jaunty hat. Or you’ll gather stones to build a furnace, to make charcoal, to smelt ingots, in order to craft new weapons – I’m sure you know the drill by now. I’ll readily admit I’m enough of a survival game fiend that I could happily gather sticks to whittle into tables until the day I keel over, but even I think the genre’s starting to feel tired. But Windrose simplifies it, streamlines it, surrounds it with those far more interesting action bits, then delivers it with an elegance that’s both refreshing and immediately appealing.
It’s not just that Windrose feels incredibly polished for a game that isn’t even out yet, but that there’s clearly some proper thought behind it too. Its UI, for instance, isn’t just slick; it’s actively helpful. Find a new resource on your travels, for instance, and you’ll immediately unlock a bunch of associated recipes, all clearly labelled for later perusal in a handy Discovery tab. Or pick up an item and your total tally is displayed on screen so you don’t need to ferret through menus to see if you’ve collected enough of a thing. Small touches, perhaps, but they add up.
And I like the bigger stuff too, such as the way camp works. Place a bonfire anywhere on an island, and whenever you’re in its radius you’ll automatically heal, meaning you’re not constantly beholden to endless quantities of healing items. There’s hunger, but it’s unintrusive – mostly serving as a way to encourage you toward the boons you’ll get by cooking and eating food. And similarly, while you certainly can go all-out on your base, building elaborate stone structures filled with aesthetic flourishes (it really nails that ramshackle pirate vibe), Windrose is happy for you to keep things simple. Beautification improves a camp’s healing potential, but nothing more. Nor is the demo egregious in its demands; crafting doesn’t require absurd amounts of resources, and the few crafting timers are tolerable. You can even create your own fast-travel points, and it all makes for a survival game that feels respectful of your time.
It helps, too, that your leisurely exploratory meandering is given more propulsive focus through Windrose’s overarching narrative goals, the demo gradually guiding you back from the brink of death toward the first throes of oceanbound piracy. Once the tutorial bits are out the way, you’re given a puny sailboat, opening up the wider archipelago where you’ll search for kidnapped crewmates and restore wreckage on neighbouring islands.
At this early juncture, sailing is torturously slow, so you’ll want to set up new camps and fast-travel points as soon as you reach new land – but it’s a promising start: the physics of it all feels good as you bob across the swelling waves, and the shifting water looks the part too. But eventually, toward the end of the demo, you’ll get your first proper ship. And it’s here, careening across the ocean with cannons ablaze – your early castaway adventures finally taking a properly swashbuckling piratical turn – I went from optimistic to completely sold.
As streamlined as Windrose’s sailing is, it’s also a blast – thrilling in its accessible, arcade simplicity as it adopts a look-and-shoot approach to ship-to-ship combat that’ll feel very ‘Ubisoft’, if you’re familiar with the likes of Skull and Bones or Black Flag (boarding and hand-to-hand combat, I should note, are key parts of ship battles too). And there’s more I haven’t really touched on, like the fact all this supports four-player server-based co-op with adjustable rulesets, or the expansive skill trees and future biomes teased in the demo. But even without that extra stuff, Windrose already has my piratical heart aflame. The full game is set for Steam early access before a proper launch, and with developer Windrose Crew teasing an appearance in next month’s Triple-i showcase, it might not be long before we get some release date news.
