You wake up below decks, blood streaming from a wound on the back of your head and your ship’s falling apart around you. You take your cutlass to a few invading pirates before you’re shot through the stomach by a rival captain. This is your glimpse of pirate life, rum and all, before it’s all torn away from you to start again.
Hold this picture in your mind, though, because this is your motivation to emerge from your desert island anew, with a new ship and rescued crew, after dozens of hours of graft in the jungles of the Caribbean. Yo-ho, me hearties, let’s play one of the best pirate games to date.
Humble Beginnings
Windrose is a survival game, hence the need for you to start off stranded on a desert island. Your first experience of the fearsome wildlife, however, is a Dodo. For anyone at least slightly-versed in natural history, Dodos were famously hunted to extinction because they had no predators on their native island of Mauritius and therefore no defences to – or reasons to defend themselves against – the humans who killed them.
Dear reader, I died to Windrose’s first Dodo encounter three times. Transplanted across the globe and clearly existing in some kind of hyper-violent parallel universe, Windrose’s Dodos are vicious beasts with sharp beaks and devastating attacks to a former pirate captain who has washed ashore with torn clothes and a broken rapier. Eventually, though, you get to grips with the physics-based combat, you kite the flightless bird onto the beach, and you dodge its nips to create openings. Let me tell you something you didn’t know about the Dodo now: it tastes delicious.
Windrose doesn’t stray from the standard survival loop. Harvest materials, build structures, craft new tools, harvest new materials, build new structures, upgrade your equipment, rinse and repeat. However, it does it well. Progression is well-paced, and quickly you’ll not only be skewering those pesky Dodos, but taking on fearsome boar, other pirates, and bloated corpses returned to life. Suddenly those Dodos don’t seem so fantastical, huh?
There are some interesting decisions here. I was surprised that your tools and weapons are indestructible. They don’t fatigue, need repairs, or replacing. You also don’t have to build your first ship. Ship may be an overstatement for the dinghy with a mainsail you unlock in the early hours, but it seems like something that could feasibly be constructed from wood, rope, and sheets – all materials easily harvested and crafted in the early stages of the game. These additions would likely provide some friction, but as it stands you’re offered no explanation of where the dinghy came from or who sailed it here. Eliminating all other possibilities, my only assumption is that it’s some sentient, Wind Waker-esque king of the ocean depths.
Littered through the swordfights and construction, however, are little tidbits of story. Whether it’s a scrap of paper found on a skeleton or a crewmember pointing you in the direction of revenge, there’s enough here to keep you interested in the larger plot. Disco Elysium this is not, but who can turn their nose up at a classic tale of revenge on the high seas?
Sailing the Seven Seas
Once you’ve escaped destitution, you gain your own ship. A proper ship this time, that you find wrecked and repair yourself. None of that King of Red Lions crap. This ship is the same size whether you’re playing solo, with friends, or you’ve formed an alliance with some friendly pirates on an online server. And it’s decent. It’s no galleon like the one you had in the beforetimes, but it’s got cannons and a helm and you can call yourself captain while blasting Blackbeard’s boats to smithereens.
This is one place the game could be improved. While ship combat is as satisfying as that in Black Flag, it’s only really suited for two players per ship. One to steer, one to work the cannons. There’s no engaged system of reloading or carrying cannonballs from the lower decks like Sea of Thieves, you just press the right button and it does everything for you. It’s smooth, frictionless, and doesn’t get any more complicated or difficult as you upgrade to bigger ships. Things are a bit more involved if you’re sailing solo, as you have to nip back and forth between steering and shooting, but if there’s three of you aboard? One of you may as well sit back and relax, sipping a Pina Colada in the ship’s hammock. You’ll only get in the way otherwise.
I’m again surprised that firing cannons doesn’t require the physical act of hauling cannonballs or lighting fuses with this being, you know, a survival game and all. While you’re only ever battling the CPU as Windrose eschews PvP encounters in lieu of a more friendly pirate experience (an oxymoronic statement if I’ve ever heard one), it could again take notes from Sea of Thieves here. The hectic busywork of combat seriously bumps up your heartrate as you try to manage everything at once, and would be welcome here.
I respect Windrose’s commitment to a PvE experience, but naval combat never quite has the same urgency or excitement as in its cartoonish cousin. While the music crescendos into a Hans Zimmer-esque anthem and your foe sinks to the murky depths, Windrose never captures the same sense of relief when you limp away from a fight, bruised but victorious. It’s as if the survival mechanics stop as soon as you hoist the rigging and lift anchor. You go from survival game to arcade broadside simulator and back again as soon as your feet touch the next sandy shore.
There are a few other areas where the survival mechanics of Windrose have been sanded down. There’s fast travel, for one, and the weight of your pack isn’t calculated. Weapon degradation also has its detractors, but it’s nothing if not immersive when you’re crafting every axe from a rock and a piece of driftwood. Everyone will judge these tweaks to the survival formula differently, and I’m sure that these smooth edges are what has already attracted so many players to the experience already. If you’re happy with a survival-lite experience, put on your tricorn and set sail for the horizon, but if you want a true test of your skills, look elsewhere. Subnautica, this is not.
It’s worth noting I’ve played on the recommended difficulty thus far, but I’ll be sure to bump it up for my next character. And that’s the thing: I want to make another character. Windrose is keeping me up past my bedtime and pulling me back in for more the next morning. But it’s a little confused. I like more friction from survival games, I like to know that the game doesn’t want me to survive. Windrose is forgiving, kind, and fundamentally unpiratical. Even when you die, it packages all your loot in a nice treasure chest for you to pick up again – it doesn’t even do the Dark Souls thing of despawning said chest when you die the next time.
Windrose is great fun, but never challenging. This could all change through the early access period, of course, but it seems like developer Kraken Express has set out its stall as a chilled, switch-off-your-brain adventure to play with your friends. A true pirate survival experience, however, would spit in your face and burn your throat as you take a hearty swig of its rum-soaked offerings. Is that too much to ask?
