Windscape Preview: Fantasy Second Life

When boiled down, Windscape is effectively the product of Zelda, Skyrim, and Minecraft. It's an open-world sandbox game with throwback graphics evoking the style of the Nintendo 64/PlayStation 1 era, but with far better fidelity and a more cohesive construction.

In the demo I saw, the opening bit took place on a farm, where the main character is asked to make dinner for her family. After collecting all of the necessary ingredients, we put the meal together and completed the quest. Shortly after, we ventured beyond the fences of the farm, greeting the lush open world while armed with a crude club.

Windscape’s conventions will be familiar to anyone who has played a sandbox game before. It’s built around exploration, encouraging players to go out, explore, and collect everything in the world around them for later use.

Typically, this later use takes the form of constructing new tools, weapons, and consumable items to use when out in the world. Items collected are either found in the wild, left behind by dead enemies, or taken from chests and other storage containers. Items include animal sinew, metal, stone, food, wood, and plants, and a robust crafting system promises to have several recipes on-hand for people to use.

While there are no skill-based XP points to be rewarded, players can begin to determine which sort of path they wish to go down in gameplay, whether it's the hardened, heavily-armed warrior or the spellcasting Mage. The items you collect, create, and use will eventually shape the player into whatever sort of fantasy character they are. 

During exploration and taking side quests for various NPCs around the world of Windscape, you’ll also encounter dungeons filled with enemies, traps, treasures, and puzzles. In this way, we see the Zelda and Skyrim aspects of Windscape’s influence come to life. The dungeons aren’t quite as fanciful as those you'll find in a Zelda game, but instead have a more rugged, cool feel to them along the same lines as Skyrim. They’re full of twists and turns, bandit dens, basic puzzles to solve, and plenty of items to be gathered from within the depths.

It’s easy to see Zelda’s influence here especially. The boss character looks like something pulled straight from Hyrule, with a goofy, almost gleeful approach to combat and a dumb grin stretched across his face. The world of Windscape itself is airy and lovely, with a wistful, fanciful quality to it I enjoyed.

My biggest concern with Windscape is that it’s using ideas considered “old” at this point. It has a great art style and its own semi-apocalyptic story, but will the game be different enough to set itself apart from the rest? The open-world sandbox crafting game has been in play for a while now and has all but flooded online PC gaming spaces. I greatly enjoyed my time with Windscape and appreciate the world its single developer has done. But is it different enough to offer a fresh take on the open-world formula? Ultimately, we won’t know until it releases on Steam Early Access soon.