Once you actually fashion a sail for your canoe - the canoe handles like most vehicles or boats in other video games - you’ll have to get to grips with reading the wind. Provided you don’t get stuck in the raw end of the loop, you’ll spend most of your time sailing. And nothing regenerates especially quickly in Windbound, so after half an hour of frustration, I restarted my save. Which wouldn’t have been a pain, except the island I was stuck on had bugger all resources, nothing to fashion new arrows with, and Kara was fast running out of stamina trying to get in melee range of the tiny boars that were there. Smashing against the rocks of a nearby tower, the resulting fall damage knocked me out cold - and also meant I had to rebuild my boat, because you lose that when you die regardless of the difficulty setting. Upon returning, I sat down to see a massive rhino send Kara flying 30 feet into the air, obviously unimpressed at her carnivorous ways. Nothing was around me at the time, so I let the game continue and went to get a drink of water. So I popped up a fire and started cooking a piece of meat, acquired from an unlucky furry creature bouncing around the nearby island.Ĭooking items can take a fair while - sometimes around 30 seconds or more. In my first playthrough, I’d rowed over to a nearby island before Kara’s hunger pangs started to critically lower her stamina. The procedural generation is especially hit in miss. This Gloomharrow happily let me pepper it with arrows, which was much easier than dealing with its teleporting attack. But there’s no advice or guide on where those creatures might be, and the game’s procedural generation means you’re never really guaranteed a steady ramp of all the creatures, resources or supplies of food that you want. This is probably the most annoying element, because you need to kill certain creatures to get certain recipes. But you’ll also want to explore just to find animals and new resources, because that unlocks the recipes you’ll need to make bigger bags, better boats, and crucial exploration tools like axes and bows. You can’t leave each chapter without unlocking three towers, so naturally finding all of the islands - because the game gradually gets larger from chapter to chapter, with more procedurally generated islands - is a core part. Kara’s stamina doesn’t last long, at first, and it’s easy to quickly deplete it by sprinting too much. Once you unlock the ability to sail, you unlock the ability to basically forage from one island to another - which you’ll need, because food is an ever pressing concern. The meat and potatoes of Kara’s journey is really in three parts. You start out with a small canoe, which can be upgraded to a larger boat made of different materials. With that, Kara’s sailing journey begins. The game doesn’t provide any waypoints or general bearings, but before long you’ll find a Zelda-esque tower, which ends up granting you the ethereal equivalent of an oar that never breaks. You play as Kara, washed up on a small island following a vicious storm. What that means in practice is that it’s a game without much handholding. A product of the Satellite Reign creators 5 Lives Studios, Windbound is basically dripping in Zelda influences, most prominently Windwaker but also with a strong touch of design ethos from Breath of the Wild. Windbound has been on my radar since it launched, and the visuals make it pretty clear why. Windbound is the kind of game that sounds a delight on paper, but in practice leaves you feeling lost at sea.
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