Windforge

My honest first reaction to Windforge was something close to wonder. A side-scrolling world built on floating islands, whale oil as a fuel economy on the brink of collapse, airships you assemble block by block from propellers, balloons, and gun turrets. The pitch alone deserved to work. Snowed In Studios set out to marry the frantic shooting of Contra with the open destructibility of Terraria, inside a steampunk atmosphere that genuinely earns comparisons to Dishonored's aesthetic. Cordeus, the floating world you inhabit, has a quiet lore weight to it: a society that over-hunted its sky whales to the edge of extinction, and a forbidden ancient civilization called the Aetherkin whose energy secrets you're hired to unearth. For a sandbox game to bother with that kind of world-building at all is something I respect. The four starting classes, butcher, sailor, prospector, and merchant, each skew your stats toward strength, agility, vitality, or wisdom, and you can soften those differences later by paying trainers in towns. The airship is the real character, though. Every component you bolt on has a physical function: propellers determine speed and lift, balloons keep you aloft, engines power your devices, and even decorative furniture adds weight that affects handling. When the camera pulls back during aerial combat and a sky whale starts battering your hand-built wooden hull, you feel the craft you put into that ship. Those moments are genuinely electric. The grappling hook on foot is satisfying in a similar register, letting you swing between floating islands with centrifugal momentum when it clicks right. The problems stack up fast, though, and they are not small ones. The mining tool, which should be the backbone of any block-building game, is notoriously unreliable, striking blocks seemingly at random regardless of your position. Temple runs follow a loop that wears thin: navigate a maze, fight passive-aggressive AI that either stands still or sprints in a panic, kill an overpowered boss, watch the temple collapse, escape, repeat. The story is delivered through static images and text boxes with no characters you'll remember. Enemy AI on hostile airships attacks on sight but offers almost no salvage reward for defeating them, which drains any purpose from aerial skirmishes beyond survival. The audio sits in a low hum of repetitive loops that the game never seems to question. And the infamous sky whale bug at launch, where whale carcasses turned invisible after death and became unusable for the whale-corpse-airship mechanic the trailers prominently featured, is exactly the kind of gap between promise and delivery that hurt the game's reputation most. For a specific kind of player, there is still something here. If you find flow in Fallout-style risk-and-reward exploration, pushing into tougher zones to jack more powerful enemy ships or loot better crafting materials from dangerous environments, Windforge quietly accommodates that loop. The procedurally generated world with its poison-gas lower zones and meteor storms in the upper atmosphere does encourage you to craft environmental solutions rather than just gear upgrades, and over 1,200 craftable items give you the raw material to do so. The game knows when to make you feel clever. It just refuses to get out of its own way long enough to make that feeling consistent.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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