A new survival game with pirates attracted over 22,000 players with a demo on Steam. Many of them are absolutely thrilled. MeinMMO author Ody also played the demo but felt more like Tom Hanks from Cast Away than like Jack Sparrow.
Windrose is a new survival game set during the heyday of pirates. In it, we take on the role of a sword-wielding pirate who battles through an open world alone or in co-op with friends – both on land and at sea.
Windrose seems to offer much of what pirate fans had hoped for from Skull and Bones: onshore excursions and naval battles with real boarding maneuvers, where you fight on board your ship, for example. Here, however, classic survival elements are also added.
On Steam, there’s a demo for Windrose that has already made quite a splash: On Sunday, there were 22,396 players in the game at the same time (according to steamdb.info). Most of them are already satisfied – 93 % of the 3,468 reviews are positive (as of February 23, 10:59 AM). It hurts even more that the pirate adventure hasn’t hooked me yet.
Here you can see a trailer for Windrose:
Quickly boarded and left on a deserted island
After creating our own pirate in the character editor and saving a game, we dive into the action: We wake up below deck on our own ship, which is currently under attack by other pirates.
On our way up, we first fight our way through the enemy crew. The “Soulslite” battles, as the developers call them, didn’t quite click for me. This may be due to the fact that the combat tutorial only tells you which buttons you should press. Some mechanics, such as the small shield symbols under the health bar, are not explained at all.
Once on deck, we find a strangely glowing artifact. Before we can take a closer look at it, we are shot down by the enemy captain. The artifact merges with our character, we are thrown overboard, and we end up on a small, deserted island.
What looked fresh in the first trailers and screenshots is a rather dull survival game in the first minutes of the demo: We pick up stones, wood, and other resources from the ground. For food, we hunt the other inhabitants of our small island – Dodos and wild boars.
What is a pirate without his ship?
The environment looks beautifully Caribbean and we are dressed like pirates, yet the feeling of actually playing a pirate faded away fairly quickly for me. I spent the first minutes doing exactly the same things I’ve done in countless other survival games.
I wanted to sail the seas as a pirate, even if it was initially only in a small skiff. Instead, I felt like Tom Hanks’ character from Cast Away, or Jack Sparrow without his Black Pearl.
After about half an hour, I lost interest during the first playthrough. It’s quite possible that it would get really good just then, and I would give the demo another chance – also because I might be quite alone with my criticism.
In any case, I would wish that Windrose lets us dive straight into what makes it special – namely ships and the feeling of being a true pirate. The survival aspects don’t need to be thrown out, but showing them first does not necessarily do the game any favors.
Have you played the demo for Windrose and do you agree or disagree? Feel free to write it in the comments. At the moment, it at least seems according to the reviews, that we have a new contender for our list of 31 best survival games 2025 for PS5, Steam, and Xbox
