My initial reaction to receiving Windbound was one of awe. The pure concept of a survival adventure title set across the high seas, with heaps of exploration and discovery sounds immense, and even more so on my PS4 Pro. I immediately found myself exploring autonomously, looking for the next material with which to craft, wanting to discover new weaponry, and wondering what mysteries and puzzles there are to be found. Having not heard much about this game prior, I was extremely enthused to give this game a whirl and I set aside some time to really engage with what this had to offer. I was ready for an epic seafaring adventure.

Starting out, you know that you have been shipwrecked and washed ashore--any more than that is left rather vague. Where did you come from, what happened, and who the heck are you? Armed with an obvious quest to find my way off the island from which I began, my outset island if you will, I started rifling through the menus to figure out my abilities and upgrades. You begin with a simple knife which you can slash with via the Square button, you can Jump with Cross, run with Circle or L3, and Triangle is your action button. Having collected more grass and rocks that I could feasibly carry, I was ready to ditch this limited little rocky grass filled starting island and get into something meatier. Close to me, across a very small stretch of water, was a second island, slightly bigger in scale and more intriguing than the last, purely because there were big girthy trees and I could see things moving around, live targets, something for me to slash to pieces in the hopes of finding leather, meat and bone. I figured to make a boat I would need wood, but I couldn't cut down trees without an axe, which to be crafted, ironically required wood and a tougher, sharper ingredient. Alas, it only requires you to turn grass into rope and bundles then, in turn, craft bundles of rope into a basic canoe. From here you have the option to build onto your boat extra items such as storage baskets, decks, sails and effectively upgrade it to a kind of kitted-out wooden catamaran.

Crafting, in general, is largely an obvious affair, with a menu brought up with the R1 trigger, and a selection of recipes to make items depending on your current holdings. For example, at the very beginning you have the knowledge to make a sling, but require certain parts before you can make one, whereas other recipes reveal themselves as you pick up new resources. Weapons such as spears and bows can also be augmented with further refinements, such as metal parts, and damage modifiers such as poisonous inflexion or the ability to cause beasts to bleed out when struck.

The menu system is oddly unintuitive too, with a muddle of bumper and trigger combinations required to navigate each page. You hit the R1 button to navigate from the left panel of options for crafting to the right panel of items that you are carrying.  I found myself huffing and puffing in mild disbelief that I could fail to navigate the menus every damned time. Once or twice sure, but every, single, time!? I had to press the R1 button to click on the left menu page, it cycles from the left panel to the right, the right panel to the left, but my brain said to hit the left equivalent to go left, and so I dropped in and out of the wrong menus, far too frequently. The input method didn't convey the visual layouts look and feel, and the disparity was infuriating.

Let us address the elephant in the room to fully understand what Windbound is and what it absolutely is not. If you think you have seen this game somewhere before, or that it borrows from a certain green-garbed franchise: you are absolutely correct. If you believe that it has a Breath of the Wild vibe, it sort of does in a visual way, but not in terms of content or possibilities. If you think that it is clearly a Wind Waker clone, it definitely takes more than a few beats from the seminal title, but it most certainly doesn't come close; it's not the same game at all. Essentially this is a survival simulator dressed as a toon shaded RPG, with so much promise and so little to actually do.

Having established this, and with Shigeru Miyamoto's masterpiece series firmly out of my mind, I tried to push forward with Windbound--but whilst sailing towards a small, pot-laden island and hauling anchor to dredge items out of the sea, I had an overbearing flashback. When The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker released in 2002, one of the many varied missions involved you discovering three islands that yielded the three beacons of the Triforce, and once all three were activated, you had your final objective. Windbound essentially borrows this one mission and runs with it. You have to find three beacons (lovingly styled like the hexagonal interlocking basalt rock formation of Ireland's Giant's Causeway), which happens to be incredibly reminiscent of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild thanks in part to the way you have to clamber up and navigate your way to the top to activate a neon blue shard of light in the sky. Having lit all three beacons, obtained the key and run up a bunch of stairs, you are shown a brief animation reminiscent of the intro to Wind Waker, but instead of a scroll and explanatory narration, you're looking at frescos, left entirely up to you to decipher. By my count, there were six frescos in all to unveil, and each one spells out a little more of the history of the environment as you progress.

It's a ballsy move to unscrupulously borrow from your contemporaries, even more so to base your entire game around a single concept and not include a single page worth of dialogue. Windbound is a very solitary affair due to absolutely no NPC's to interact with. At its heart, there is a fairly short list of prerequisites to adhere to: explore, hunt and survive. And this is where it veers away from its influences, where it could truly differentiate itself and stand out, proudly offering something amazingly different and tantalisingly playable. Well, it should have.

Following the three towers, and the using of the key, you have to sail through "the crossing," which has been described as a "dangerous, intimidating gauntlet" by the devs. You catch a glimpse of what looks to be an enormous Nautilus, which is a goliath pelagic marine mollusc, but beyond an ominous eye and a loud low pitch cry from this beast, the entire build-up of the scenario was all but lost on me. I had hoped that this was to be an interesting boss battle, or an epic puzzle to wrestle with in order to progress, but no. I found nothing to do other than hold the R2 trigger to sail towards the end. Sure there were a few unsettlingly large waves, but honestly holding the R2 trigger, again, for another long period of time was not what I had been hoping for. Forging through this section, it was like Groundhog Day: I was in another archipelago, doing the same thing again but everything was slightly different. Procedural generation is excellent in theory, but in practice, Windbound suffers from an amazing abundance of nothingness.

Windbound is a survival title, and that is the battle, the puzzle, the entire damned thing. Hunger is the enemy, poison is the looming danger, and sailing around aimlessly is the crux. Under the hood, this title is actually brutally unforgiving, and no; you cannot control the wind. Even the wind is against you more often than not, making your trawling around looking for direction a longer and more arduous affair than it needed to be, even with boat upgrades and extra sails. Within my first hour, I managed to find two of the towers out of three, I had filled my pockets with stuff I obsessively compulsively could not leave behind, I had even built a boat with storage and a sail. However, I encountered a slew of soul-crushing natural obstacles that caused me to restart several times, and, honestly, really ground me down. For example, I noticed the requirement for food meant that failing to prepare would be preparing to fail, so I stocked up on meat and set sail for the next island on the horizon. During this session my meat spoiled, my boat hit a reef and broke, and I got poisoned. If your boat so much as clips a reef you only have a couple of seconds to make sure it doesn't collide with another or it will explode into a cloud of wooden shavings leaving you squirming in the drink with as much time to find dry land as you have energy in your stamina bar. If you even so much as touch the reef you get poisoned, and your stamina is drained far quicker leaving you scrambling to figure out a cure or method to prevent you dying. But in the ocean, there is nothing to do but swim and die. Should you strike it lucky and find dry land, the island you have clambered onto might not even sport any of the required materials or animals that you could potentially use to rectify the situation. Twice I landed on a volcanic-looking, stone grey island, that was entirely devoid of grass to make a new basic boat with, and with no life forms on for me to harvest for sustenance. I was entirely doomed and it felt exceptionally unfair. I succumbed to the boredom of my slowly dwindling health bar and quit the game. It felt like the humane thing to do. This time I would go for the story mode option, and make it a little less difficult by retaining items if I should die again.

Giving it a proper survivalist attempt this time around, I upgraded my weapons to have crafted tips and blades, this time I hunted a far bigger animal than the smaller pigs (which weirdly only gave me bones when I managed to corner and kill them). I was aiming to obtain something more useful and more durable before giving it my all. I managed to clumsily slash about with a metal spear and took down a giant horned 'Gorehorn,' which yielded a special jaw bone and heaps of meat. I crafted baskets for my boat and a satchel to carry more items and meat. More and more semi-precious items would soon bloat out all the slots and I would once again need to decide if I wanted to carry grass and rope, or just preprepared rope and whatever the newest herb or material I would find on the next island. After a little island hopping, I made a fire. Building a rack on which to roast meat I was the Bear Grylls of this salty sandbox; I was prepped and destined for greatness. With all the gear and no idea, I set about circling the map. The outer edges are depicted by clouds and the basic shape of the map is that of a simple circle. I decided to try traverse every inch of the map, looking for everything this tropical paradise had to offer. After a small amount of rowing, I found small islands with a single tree and some pots to break. Breaking the pots is not as simple as slashing them either; frustratingly, you have to hit 'Smash' every single time when prompted by the action button to destroy the pot and loot its contents.

Getting bored with the length of time it took to find any new nooks or spits of sand to examine I decided to take one for the team and try to go outside the boundaries of the map. You will be pleased to hear that you won't die, but you will experience massive rolling waves that increase to the point that you can go no further and you will gradually be turned around and floated back into the map. Like a scratchcard, your progress around the circular map reveals the terrain as you visit it and the map fills with glorious detail. The problem with this method of exploration is that you are forced to eat your supplies, and eventually you run out. I got to a point where I couldn't make it back to land in time to restock and I died. It felt fairer, it was my fault if anything, and I was kind of expecting it.

Starting out again, for the 6th time now and having never solved the first three beacons, I thought to myself, perhaps I can outrun the hunger, avoid the poison and bang through the three towers and progress to the end. Shockingly, to a point, you can. I managed to smash through the first archipelago, all three beacons done and dusted in record time, I even found the final island swiftly, did the crossing sequence, upgraded a skill in exchange for some shards, rinsed and repeated. I managed to crush the first three chapters no issues. Repetition, no crafting beyond my boat and sail, and no stopping to hunt or kill anything. I managed to find a few health and stamina upgrades along the way and this seemed to stem the flow of needing to sustain yourself at all. After all of this 'speedrunning,' I needed a break. When I went back to it, I changed tact and realised that you could either run through the game without any exploration, essentially ticking boxes, or you could take your time, upgrade yourself for what has to ultimately be an end game scenario, and enjoy the solitude. Unfortunately for myself, I did not enjoy the solitude, the repetition, or the core gameplay of this title, and sadly I could not endure it to discover the ending. I probably won't ever go back to it to find out, and I'm ok with that.

Windbound should be far better than it is, and I cannot help but feel that the devs have simply not done the core concept any justice. Underneath the more than familiar facade is a game crying out to be evolved into something far more interesting, more diverse, and more engaging. Beyond the animation glitches, borrowed aesthetic and the gruelling nature of randomised 'exploration' is a game that could be absolutely incredible if it just moved in a more interesting direction. I get survival games, and I understand the differences between action-adventure titles, but Windbound falls flat by dressing to impress yet delivering only a hollow lonely sparse experience.