![]() ![]() I'm not entirely sure how realistic the wind physics of Windbound are, but they're deeply intentional. The second thing you'll craft, after basic grass rope to help build it, is a canoe that you can row.But soon enough, you'll be needing more capacity and potential, and you'll end up making something you can sail. Speaking of the canoe, the game is, of course, built around boating and water navigation as a central element. These together ensure you have a certain bare minimum capacity you can always cut down some thick grass and turn it into a basic canoe, so you're never trapped or totally hosed unless something goes very, very wrong. Weapons, shovels, hammers and axes, all things you have to make in the field and that can break.īut the game provides a certain kindness in always ensuring you have a knife and, after acquiring it in the first five minutes of the game, your oar. This makes a lot of things difficult, and forces a lot of hard decisions, especially as your toolkit grows.At least, depending on the tools. Windbound uses one of those simple, classic tricks of not giving you enough inventory. The other half is construction, tools, inventory management, all that good stuff. Which is exactly where it should be.īut food is just one half. That's the core of it, and by boiling it down to simplicity like this, Windbound ensures that food is always at the back of your mind, but rarely actually distracts from your goal. Food re-expands the meter, and helps refill it faster. The meter's maximum length shrinks with hunger. Here's where Windbound makes one very important difference from the typical Hunger / Thirst Meter setups. You can swing it down at any time and still have all the usual challenge moment-to-moment, but play it like just a linear-story action adventure game. The game has two difficulties, and the thing it most heavily affects is the run-based side of the gameplay. ![]() Oh, real quick, before we talk the survival stuff. Because it's willing to start with a solid core instead of trying to go Full Immersion, its verbs and the expression of them line up better. This, honestly, is one of the things that help sweeten Windbound for me. You know, run around, A to jump, X to attack, that same basic set of broad controls that you get in so very many games. Mechanically, what you have is a pretty solid, straightforward "action-adventure game" model. ![]() You wash up on a deserted island after your boat capsized, your spirit saved by something tied into the game's lore, and you have to make your way forward with little more than your wits and what you can scavenge. Windbound starts not unlike a lot of these sorts of games. ![]() So why's Windbound different? Why am I going to speak so much more positively of it than a lot of its brethren? Why is it, to do some writer shenanigans, a breath of fresh sea air? Even I've leveled this criticism at a few titles, and I've definitely soured on the baseline of the genre. Survival-exploration games have waned deeply in popularity, and a lot of reviewers tend to look at them as meter management games. Windbound sits in a somewhat difficult place in the market. The sea calls, and by the wind we answer it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |