Windbound Preview Survival Looks Stunning

Windbound Preview: Survival Looks Stunning

Deep Silver’s upcoming Windbound is a gorgeous survival game with slight roguelike aspects, featuring island exploration, combat, and boat travel.

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Windbound Preview Survival Looks Stunning

There’s something so calming about cooking at sea adrift in a faint wind. The sound of the waves lapping against the hull, smoke rising up into the clouds, the next distant destination in foggy view. In 5 Lives’ upcoming game Windbound, these moments are plentiful, further helped along by a gorgeous visual design and sparkling soundtrack. It’s a game of contrasts, of beauty and survival, stress and serenity, the desperate scramble for resources versus the constant lack of inventory space.

Meet Kara, a white-haired warrior separated from her group and abandoned to the ever-changing Forbidden Islands. Equipped with a mystical nautilus pendant and The Oar of the Ancestors, Kara will gather resources, cook food, craft items and weapons, fight off dangerous wildlife, and even build boats to escape the archipelago and unpack the dark backstory of these sea swept environs.

Anyone turning on the game for the first time is going to immediately think of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of its most apparent inspirations. Later, they might also consider The Wind Waker, but only for a moment; while Windbound shares that game’s lunge for exploration and depth, it’s very much a survival-first, story-second experience. There’s also a roguelike-leaning procedural generation mechanic, a frequent pairing with survival games that does risk interfering with this game’s peaceful façade.

Windbound Preview Survival Looks Stunning

Regardless, Windbound’s art style is truly dazzling, full of bright colors and silky-smooth animations that make exploration feel satisfying and vibrant. The musical soundtrack emphasizes every moment as well, including at least one theme generously harkening back to Zelda, though it also knows when to fade into the background to let the sounds of the ocean or a crackling campfire take center stage. An infectious piano theme arouses whenever Kara sails out on the big blue, a dramatic orchestral piece autographs a perilous trip through the rapids, and a light drum medley accompanies jungle island sojourns. There isn’t a tremendous amount of music, to be clear, but its quality meets the generally high bar set by the visuals.

What screenshots and gameplay snippets can’t really impart is the basic rhythm of the game, which is surprisingly stringent. After the prologue, players are thrown into a large circular area dotted with islands, a map which transforms with each new attempt. Building a boat is usually one of the first requirements and easy enough to do with common resources, with stronger and more elaborate boats available further on into the game. Even the lowest-level boat lets players travel to various islands and scan the horizon for places of interest, subject to time of day and weather conditions.

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Every chapter in Windbound features a varying number of islands, though three specific ones must always be found, each with a tower to climb and a pendant-powering nautilus shell at the top. A final, easy-to-spot rock temple will then open the portal to the next chapter. There aren’t any real puzzles to solve or tricky labyrinths to explore (a la Wind Waker), and the towers are all essentially similar, built of the same grassy hexagonal blocks and requiring some rudimentary platforming. The gambit is mainly to locate them and successfully traverse the potential dangers of their surroundings.

Windbound Preview Survival Looks Stunning

Crafting in the game is comparably basic, which still doesn’t quell the excitement of discovering new ingredients and recipes. Some are just there for the picking, while others – especially lifesaving nutritious meat – require combat, which is a definite stumbling block. Kara can protect herself with her knife, some crafted spears, a sling to hurl plentiful rocks and special ammo, and bows and arrows for more precise projectile attacks. These weapons currently feel rather rubbery and imprecise, with combat and AI behavior still struggling to meet the admittedly high bar set by Breath of the Wild and comparable games. Newer, more lethal enemies appear in later chapters, and surviving an attack by an unprecedented threat is a trial-by-fire, since dying means starting the whole game over with a clean slate.

That’s for Windbound’s default “survival” difficulty mode, though activating the optional “story” mode makes failure a little less severe, allowing players to restart from the current chapter. It’s important to note, however, that creatures and items on each island do not repopulate mid-chapter, potentially turning harder sections of the game into a careful resource balancing act. Suffer too many hits or spend too long dilly-dallying and there may not be enough food for the finish line. On one playthrough, we steadily explored the edges of the map looking for treasure – tiny islands often contain special sea shard currency in breakable pots, but can also hide a strong weapon or two – only to discover that we were starving to death and struggled to find anything to eat. While there’s no visible hunger gauge to track, Kara regularly gets hungry and takes a stamina hit, making it more frustrating to run and fight effectively.

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Windbound Preview Survival Looks Stunning

Note that this apparent pressure does seem directly tied to the game’s intended purpose, since this isn’t a survival game where the player can just toil over a massive bamboo fortress and tower over any and all threats. It’s in the title: Windbound is about motion, about always pushing forward and never tarrying for too long, despite the beauty and tranquility of a given island. Don’t get too distracted picking flowers, because the next chapter beckons and the cooking pot will be left wanting.

Front-facing promotion for the game indicates an emphasis on storytelling, though this also leaves a lot to be desired. Occasional text appears when reaching the top of a tower or traveling through certain areas, and an interstitial mystical zone presents an emerging painted narrative, but it’s all hiding in the background of the Windbound experience. The islands themselves don’t possess any provocative mysteries, so it’s more a matter of enjoying the naturalistic stories that occur during survival stress.

Other than the island randomization, the other roguelike element involves blessings, which activate certain bonuses that can be accumulated with enough sea shards paid out. None of the blessings we activated made any significant impact, though, and unlocking them takes time (and failure). It would be nice to see a few other roguelike aspects added to Windbound, only because what’s included seems too rudimentary when considering its permadeath aspects.

Survival enthusiasts should be excited all the same, since it’s rare that the genre pairs with an experience that looks and sounds as good as this. Screenshots will abound, especially while sailing the seas on a crazy boat creation while curing leather on the deck. The only hope is that some of Windbound’s rougher edges are polished prior to launch, which is expected at the end of the month.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/windbound-game-preview/

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