Windswept is a title by Australia-based studio WeatherFell, and a game funded through a Kickstarter campaign. One of the developers explained that, having grown up with the SNES and old RPG Maker titles, the goal with Windswept was to create a fun, retro-inspired 2D platformer.
You can immediately feel the passion behind the game: Windswept is a game clearly made with love. This already shows in the presentation, one of the game’s stronger aspects. The pixel-art aesthetic looks great, even gorgeous, and fully commits to that retro platformer vibe it’s aiming for. Every world has its own identity, and while the visuals aren’t revolutionary, they have been created with a lot of care for detail, and give Windswept a very charming look. The soundtrack is excellent as well, with varied, lighthearted and happy (for the most part) tunes that somehow never become repetitive.
The inspirations are obvious right from the start. As mentioned in the Kickstarter, games like Donkey Kong Country 2, Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island or Celeste shaped the end product, and Windswept proudly wears those influences on its sleeve. I hadn’t seen this list before finishing the game myself, but there is an outlier in this list… Can you spot it? And that “clash”, as we will see, will turn out to be one of the main factors that shaped my overall impressions of Windswept.
You begin your journey as freshly hatched Marbles, a duck protagonist, in a fairly standard introductory level that teaches the basics: jumping, collectibles, optional secrets, and so on. In this level you then meet Checkers, a turtle companion lying on its back and unable to move, and by helping it the game suddenly reveals its central mechanic.
From that point onward, you’re not playing as a single character anymore, but as a duo.
Marbles is agile, jumps high, and can glide. Checkers is heavier, can ground pound, and cancel that move into a long jump. You can swap between the two characters instantly, throw one another around, combine moves, and even perform advanced techniques like mid-air character swapping (with all the movement-related consequences). It’s genuinely creative, and mechanically there’s a lot going on here.
Beyond the basic moveset, Windswept mostly leaves players to figure things out on their own. Some people will love that experimentation. Others will find the game more frustrating than fun, at least once they get to the later levels.
Gameplay
This is where Windswept completely lost me.
Going into the game, I expected a modern take on the classic retro collectathon platformers. Something in the vein of old-school Mario games. Multiple themed worlds, lots of collectibles, companion levels to spice things up… basically a challenging but accessible adventure platformer.
And these elements are here, but instead of a classic platformer, Windswept plays like a full-blown Mario Kaizo hack.
And to be clear, I don’t dislike difficult platformers at all! I love games like Celeste, Super Rude Bear Resurrection, Super Meat Boy... In fact, 2D precision platformers are probably (among) my favorite genre(s). Tough movement challenges can be incredibly satisfying when designed well. The problem here is how Windswept combines its ideas.
Mechanically, the game demands a lot from its players. Mid-air character swaps, advanced movement chains, shell-jump-style techniques later in the game. This is hardcore precision platforming disguised as a casual retro collectathon. And that clash in design philosophy didn’t bode well with me. Levels are long, often taking several minutes to clear. The toughest levels take over seven minutes of uninterrupted platforming. Pair that with most levels only featuring one or two checkpoints, and with the fact that the intended path through stages is often unclear. That combination is brutal in a game built around such demanding movement. Exploring for collectibles quickly stops being fun and instead becomes exhausting trial-and-error. And there are a LOT of collectibles… Optional challenges that must be completed for Moon Coins, five C-O-M-E-T coins, a Cloud Coin, potentially a Music Track or an Arcade Cartridge…
That’s why I kept thinking about Celeste while playing. Celeste can be brutally difficult too in its endgame, but its screens are short and very easy to read. You always understand instantly what the game expects from you. In Windswept, I constantly felt unsure whether I was even going the right way, or if I was following a sidepath leading to a collectible. Or worse, leading nowhere. And in a precision platformer, unclear pathing is a huge problem. I cannot stress enough how much this aspect hurts the experience. Trial and error combined with punishing checkpoint placement is simply frustrating.
The optional postgame levels become even more demanding, introducing techniques like bouncing off Checkers against walls to perform improvised shell jumps. Yet these stages are still stuffed with collectibles and side objectives.
The companion gimmicks are also very hit-or-miss. Some are fine (none are amazing), but others are genuinely awful. The dog companion stages were easily my least favorite part of the game. You cannot stop the dog from dashing forward, which turns its stages into autorunner levels filled with gaps. Success here comes from repeatedly trying and trying until you memorize the layout and where to jump exactly. Fortunately this is the rarest companion, but I found these stages incredibly frustrating rather than challenging.
What made things worse for me were all the tiny design issues that gradually pile up over time. A good example is how horizontal movement gets restricted after interrupting a barrel launch mid-air. That sounds minor, but it just feels awful when you experience it.
The weirdest part is that the game includes extensive accessibility options like invincibility and infinite jumps. So… who really is the intended audience for Windswept? This is a hardcore Kaizo-style collectathon with no story or narrative hook, yet it also includes options that trivialize most of the challenge entirely. To come back to Celeste, the reason accessibility options are included there is that even players that cannot overcome its challenge should be able to experience the game’s message and narrative. If you don’t have any of that… What’s the point in trivializing the only aspect that makes your game worth playing in the first place?
And even those options are inconsistently implemented. They don’t function in the Arcade stages, companions don’t gain the infinite jumps when enabled, the camera doesn’t follow you if you fly upwards in vertical levels… The result is a system that feels half-committed and strangely thought out.
To the game’s credit, the collectible hunt itself is surprisingly convenient. You can track missing items fairly easily: the Arcade machines and CD collection hint at where these collectibles are hidden, and Laamp, an NPC, can reveal coin collectible locations for currency. I appreciated that the game at least avoids forcing players toward external guides for basic completion.
Not only that, there are plenty of very fun stages, too. Especially Laamp’s Shade levels, of which one can be unlocked in each world, are usually designed around one gimmick or movement mechanic, and nicely divided into multiple subsections with checkpoints in-between. They still feature collectibles, because of course they do, but they are focused, and with a much clearer layout. They feel like what the game should have been primarily.
There are also a lot of interesting gimmicks in other regular levels. Besides underwarter levels you will also swim in poisonous water that can be purified temporarily by beating nearby axolotl. There are stages where platforms are covered in honey, slowing down your movement and making it harder to outrun sawblades. You can also stick to honey-covered ceilings. The Arcade stages themselves are also pretty fun as small side distractions. They’re inspired by classic retro games and work well enough as one-and-done levels.
There are also several alternate difficulty modes hidden in the game. Hard Mode forces a solo Marbles run, Super Hard Mode uses solo Checkers, and Hero Mode deletes your save file upon death.
Platinum Trophy
The Platinum Trophy is difficult to evaluate because the accessibility settings completely trivialize any challenge.
Without them, this could have been a genuinely brutal completion. You need to clear every level collecting everything within them, complete a Hard and Super Hard run, finish 40 pacifist stages (that is, without killing any enemies), and clear 40 levels without collecting a single coin. On paper, it sounds like a very demanding platforming Platinum.
But because accessibility options don’t disable trophies, most of the difficulty can simply be bypassed with invincibility and infinite jumps.
Ironically, the hardest part of the entire trophy list ends up being the Arcade games, because those are the one area where accessibility settings don’t work properly. Though they are still quite easy to beat.
So the Platinum ends up in a really strange place. Players seeking a hardcore challenge can impose one on themselves, while everyone else can trivialize most of the list. Whether that’s a good thing probably depends entirely on your perspective.
