Windrose (formally Crosswind) is really exciting

I played the Windrose demo both in singleplayer and two and three person co-op. Although I am putting up a couple of posts about the Next Fest demos I have played, I felt that this game was too good to squeeze in between the other demos and felt it needed a more in depth review. The game is really good, and it is an early access/demo game that has sucked me in. The last time I could not stop playing a survival game was Valheim. This has many similarities to Valheim and is basically in the broadest terms Pirate Valheim. That is very easy way to explain it and has no nuance to it, but it certainly gives me the same vibes and sense of wonder and exploration as Valheim does every time I play it.

The story goes that Blackbeard and his crew have taken over the Caribbean and he has declared himself King of the West Indies after destroying the British Fleet. Rumour has it that he has made a deal with the Devil himself and now Tortuga is the final bastion of freedom and independent ports that is left.

You were a pirate captain whose ship was attacked by Blackbeard’s pirates while trying to escape and was destroyed along with you and your crew. During the battle on your ship, you encounter two of Blackbeard’s pirates that have discovered an artifact on your vessel and they are discussing it. After you kill them, you pick up the artifact only to be shot from behind by a huge pirate with a pistol and a club. As you lie there dying the artifact that looks like a skull or a mask starts to meld with you. The large pirate orders all of your crew to be thrown overboard. You wash up on an island with the bullet wound completely healed and your body laced in patterns that hurt to touch. All of this is told after the basic combat tutorial via a beautiful comic style cutscene  

Once on the island this is where the survival game starts and you progress through the usual procedure of collecting sticks, stones, food items and fibre to use to craft items. You do start with a broken sword and a musket in a divergence from usual survival games where you start with nothing although you don’t have any shots for the musket. Before you can build anything else you need to set down a bonfire that dictates your camp area and then build various workbenches where you create and update tools, meals, gear, potions and weapons.

There are various enemies on the first islands in the demo, these include animals that give you resources to cook with (boars, dodos) and some undead enemies (giant crab creature and drowned sailors) as well as Blackbeard’s pirates. Other food sources to be collected include bananas, chili, sweet potato, coconut and dodo eggs all used to cook dishes at the cookfire. There is already a decent amount of food items and these work similar to Valheim. You can eat 2 food items at a time, and each food item gives you different buffs, some increase one of your stats (strength, endurance, vitality and so on) and others just give flat health increases. For healing you can create bandages and later brew health potions. The systems is quite deep currently and they are still working on it.

The combat is tutorialised during the opening sequence and is a mixture of light attacks, heavy attacks, blocks and dodges. This is not Dark Souls like but far more actiony. Where this is Dark Souls like is your pirate has different stats (strength, agility, vitality and so on) and you level these up. Your weapons, like Dark Souls, have affinities towards these stats (A being the highest in the demo). Combat is stamina based and swinging and dodging all use stamina forcing you to conserve your stamina (or not as I tend to do). There is also posture damage indicated by shields on both the enemies and you which if it is reduce down enough staggers you or the enemies, but I never really managed to do this as I tended to find they die before their posture was broken.

In the demo I came across a selection of weapons. When you place down the weapons bench you can craft a small selection of initial weapons which include a rapier, a club, a musket and a sabre. No cutlass for some reason. I know a cutlass is a type of sabre from what I have read, but a broad short cutlass is synonymous with pirates. There are also polearms and distinct variations of the base weapon varieties you can craft later. I found a halberd in a chest and there are other special weapons squirreled away on the islands. These weapons have a bonus to them (such as added crit chance or added posture points). Once you find a weapon you can from then on craft it at the weapons bench. The armour bench allows you to create one of the five armours items head, arms, chest, legs and boots. As with the weapons you can find armour in places around the islands. All of these weapons and armours have rarity and some of them have set bonuses. I have always liked set item systems in games as I enjoy mixing and matching in order to fit the situation. The upgrading of these items is done at the associated workbench and you are able to upgrade the level of the item as well as its rarity using various resources and specialised components.

A big surprise and a massive bonus from me to the developers, is the ability to walk up to your storage and push ‘Q’ while looking at it and the game will automatically deposit the items from your inventory that are the same as the ones in the chest. Now I would like them to tweak this so that if you were to create a storage room and place storage containers in there, when you walk into that room and push ‘Q’ it would do the same thing for all the storage at once. Looking at it in order for it to do it is fine but it would save so much time and energy if you didn’t need to look directly at the storage container. The second big thumbs up from me is a big one: crafting from storage. I am waiting for Valheim to add this feature as in 2026 I feel this should be a standard feature.

There is a main questline that guides you through the stages of the game and there are also a few side quests and challenges as well (kill 40 boars and 20 dodos). In a way these feel like it is from an MMO and it kind of leads to my first grip with the game. You do not get any experience for killing enemies. All your levels are gained through completing the missions in your journal. This means there is no grinding for levels and people I have spoken to have agreed that there is not really a reason to stop and fight enemies other than the fun factor or if you need the resource they drop.

When you do level up you are awarded talent points and you can add points to your various stats. Increasing your states increases your health, or stamina or damage depending on your weapon and so on. The talent points are used in the skill tree to add bonuses to your pirate, these include things like less stamina drain for various activities, more health, bigger crit chances and so on. From what I have seen you can respect at any time but I believe it costs money although this may be subject to change.

There are a few issues I have with the game, some are a me thing and are really just design choices from the developers that I am not fond of, other items do ruin the experience for me. Firstly the food bonuses are lost on dying. This makes sense, but if you are fighting a fight that is more difficult and you die a few times, you very quickly go through a lot of cooked food. This also adds to the decision not to fight everything you come across and the risk is too high for very little reward. Having said that, on death your top row of your inventory stays with you and the rest of the items are in a glowing storage where you died, and if you die multiple times you will have multiple corpse storages to go and collect, it dies not disappear.

Secondly the amount of resources you receive from chopping trees, mining stone, claypits and so on, is just too small for me. With upgrades and building and cooking being quite resource intensive, you end up running around to find a boar for it’s hide, and ironically hiding is exactly what happens.

Third I really wish all games used the rule that there was no stamina drain while running outside of combat. The stamina drain is very lenient while chopping trees and running around, but it would be good that if you are.

Fourthly, the camera can go a little wonkey when you are in a tight spot. This is an old soulslike issues, but it can be a pain later on.

There is much more to that is packed into this demo. I have played 18hrs of it between my solo run and the two co-op games I played with friends, and yet I never even really tried the building system, but that has a system for everyone from what I have done. It is similar to Valheim and many other games and it is a good system. If you are not the kind of person that need a well-built base of operations that has been lovingly and skilfully built from the ground up from hours of harvested materials, then there is a prefabricated building for you to build, but if you are the kind of person that likes the above, there are tools for that as well. I am waiting for my brother to test it out thoroughly as he is one of those people that has to create a show home.

There is a lot to this demo, and I have refrained from going into too much detail as it is part of the fun to find these things out. I haven’t spoken about when you get your ship (not a huge spoiler as this is a pirate game after all) and how good the naval combat is aside from the boarding as it seems all the enemies rush you and you end up getting attacked from all side by them. But the one thing that does need mentioning about the sailing is the sea shanties and just how good they are and how much fun atmosphere they add to the game. I am unsure why you need to turn them on though. I am all for the op in approach rather than the opt out approach, but in this case why would you sail as a pirate and not have a sea shanty going in the background?  

This game has it’s hooks into me and many other people from what I have seen. I will try to not play this again until 1.0 as I wouldn’t want to burn out on it, but Valheim is still calling me and I often succumb to its siren’s call and I imagine this game will be the same.