Wayfinder

I went into Wayfinder expecting a corpse. The game's history reads like a post-mortem case study: launched in 2023 as a free-to-play always-online MMO-lite under a publisher that later axed its entire publishing division, it was pulled from sale, stripped of its cash shop and online requirements, and essentially rebuilt from scratch. What came out the other side in October 2024 is a flawed but surprisingly earnest action RPG, and if you can look past the ghost of its first life, there's a real game here. The setup is straightforward but solid enough to carry the runtime. You play as one of eight heroes called Wayfinders, each tasked with rolling back the Gloom, a creeping interdimensional infection that has hollowed out the world of Skylight. None of that is genre-redefining, but the individual character stories are where the writing earns its keep. Recovering memories tied to each Wayfinder gives you bite-sized narrative arcs for the cast, and the approach of weaving personal history into the larger apocalypse works better than you might expect from a game that started life as an MMO lobby shooter. Wingrave the paladin-tank, Niss the high-mobility shadow assassin, Kyros the scythe-swinging burst mage, and Venomess the poison-stacking alchemist all have distinct voices and distinct mechanical identities. The roster gives players meaningful reasons to replay content rather than just grinding the same character to the cap. Combat sits closer to a character-action game than a traditional ARPG. There are no passive perk trees to lose an afternoon in. Instead, each Wayfinder carries a fixed ability set operating on cooldowns, and customization comes from the weapon you equip, the Echoes you slot (spirits of defeated enemies that provide stat boosts or secondary effects), and the Affinity and Talent trees that layer character-specific passives on top. Weapon types, including dual blades, sword-and-shield, rifles, and two-handed melee, each carry their own active ability that fires on a cooldown, so swapping Kyros from his signature scythe into a rifle genuinely changes your damage pattern. The build depth lands somewhere between a hero shooter and a light looter, not as bottomless as Path of Exile, but more purposeful than it first appears. The Crucible offers a late-game target for players who want to stress-test their setups, and three-player co-op remains optional throughout rather than mandatory, which is the correct design call. The cracks are still visible if you look. The overworld structure and dungeon loop carry unmistakable echoes of the MMO skeleton underneath, and the grind can feel padded in the middle stretch where content density thins out. The Steam review score sits at 60% overall, which is genuinely mixed, but that number is weighed down by reviews from the troubled early access period. More recent reception has been considerably warmer. Airship Syndicate is a small studio that makes games with obvious craft, the same team behind Battle Chasers: Nightwar and Darksiders Genesis, and that pedigree shows in the art direction and world design even when the systems creak. Wayfinder is not a deep narrative RPG. If you come in expecting Disco Elysium-level writing or BG3's branching consequence systems, you will leave disappointed. But if you want a character-driven co-op ARPG with a decent story backbone, a roster worth experimenting with, and the rare quality of having been made by people who clearly wanted to finish something instead of abandon it, it punches above its troubled origin.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

Be the first to comment on Wayfinder.