Finally, a new pirate game that's actually good: I can't stop playing the Steam Next Fest demo for this open-world survival game with Assassin's Creed Black Flag sailing, Sea of Thieves combat, and Ark crafting

It's been a few years of rough sailing for fans of pirate games. Without naming names, I feel like there hasn't been a whole lot of treasure on treasure island recently, but it looks like a cask of salvation has washed ashore in the truly shipshape Steam Next Fest demo for Windrose, an open-world PvE survival crafting game blending influences from genre titans like Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Sea of Thieves, and Ark.

In my many seasons playing Steam Next Fest demos for work, I've scarcely come across one as well-optimized as Windrose, which is really saying something for an open-world survival crafting game. This thing is a full-blown PvE base-building sim with resource and health management, in-depth sailing, naval combat, boarding and melee battles, and a story with beautifully animated cutscenes, and yet, in my 30 minutes with the demo it ran like an absolute champ on my ancient, RX 580 desktop.

Developer Windrose Crew says the game's SNF demo offers about 4-6 hours of gameplay, so needless to say I hardly scratched the surface. That said, I pinky promise you I legitimately can't wait to get off of work so I can play more. It's that good. The story, which involves supernatural elements as well as characters inspired by real-world history, kicks off with a pirate captain (you) being attacked by the fabled Blackbeard and becoming a castaway after falling from his ship and contracting a curse that seemingly saves his life.

You start out by creating a character, slashing your way through a few basic combat encounters, and then waking up stranded on a tropical island. The demo walks you through your first steps toward redemption, including setting up base by gathering resources and making essentials like a tent, cooking fire, and crafting tables.

I learned pretty early on that Windrose does not play around. "Kill a bore and obtain its hide," read an onscreen quest objective. Easy enough, I thought, I have a big ol' cutlass and pistol. Man, that pig F'd my S up. Thankfully, I had already established my tent as a respawn point and managed to find the same pig, its HP still slightly drained from the one sword attack I managed to land before it gored me, and still, it took two or three respawns to finally take that sucker down.

Naturally, I was a lot more cautious approaching my first encounter with a "drowned" enemy, which looks and behaves like a zombie. It was during this battle I learned that the Ctrl button acts as a backwards dodge, a massively useful tip that the demo didn't alert me to (either that or I just missed it). Combat feels a lot like Sea of Thieves, with a basic slash move and block assigned to the left and right mouse clicks, and a gun you can pull out and use in ranged encounters. That said, enemies are a lot spongier than Sea of Thieves, and dare I say, they're a little smarter too, with unpredictable movements and devastating attack points that make encounters tense and dangerous.

Here's where I disappoint everyone: I did not actually make it to the sailing parts of the demo today. The game makes you craft a bunch of stuff, including crafting materials themselves, before you can summon your flagship, and unfortunately the time allotted to me was gone by the time I had made everything. That said, I watched a few gameplay videos and it reminded me a lot of Black Flag, which is about the highest compliment I can pay this game.

Yes, all I've seen and done is the opening to the game and the very beginnings of base-building, but already I can just tell there's something special in Windrose. I don't know if it's the immaculate level of polish, the story, the simple but fun combat, the beautiful tropical sunsets, or just the fact that there's a new pirate game with real potential, but I'm not the only one with the same feeling. Wishrose Crew recently celebrated a million wishlists on Steam, and if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go max out this demo and then twiddle my thumbs at my desk while I wait for early access.

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