Windblown Spins Up a Storm of Roguelike Brawling Fun With Friends

The first refreshing option in Windblown comes almost immediately, when picking your player character – a Leaper, sent into a ferocious vortex in the sky and able to cheat death thanks to a backpack with an RGB LED built into it.

Motion Twin, developer of acclaimed side-scrolling action roguelike Dead Cells – famed for its grimdark Castlevania-adjacent aesthetic – has taken an abrupt tack for its 3D follow-up. The tone is much cheerier, with candy-hued vegetation, fantastical sky islands, and heavily saturated chromatic aberration effects overlaid on the painterly shaders.

As such, your choice for your avatar in this sky-hopping adventure is between an axolotl, a basilisk, a fruit bat, a guinea pig, or a pangolin. All unconventionally cute characters, criminally under-represented in games previously. A real breath of fresh air in an otherwise familiar formula.

Roguelike players aren't easily put off by repetition. In some ways, the familiar is exactly what they'll be excited about, especially when the sources of familiarity are so well-regarded. Dead Cells arose after Motion Twin was influenced by indie roguelike icon Binding of Isaac, initially testing the waters for its own take on the genre with an early access release in 2017. It went so well it was still releasing content updates in 2023, including a collaboration with Castlevania itself, as well as fellow indie trailblazers like Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter.

This time, Windblown's influences seem more varied, and more targeted toward what works in service of the team's own particular brand of randomized action arenas. There are Hades-like choices between various upgrade materials as rewards for your next scrap.

The isometric view also brings the combat closer to Hades than Dead Cells, with AOEs to consider and tracking multiple enemy angles of attack. There's even what I suspect to be a sneaky little reference to Hades' bident – a two-pronged spear – in Windblown's shop, tucked away in a box behind the three aye-aye lemurs in a trench coat who act as its shopkeeper.

However it's clear that Windblown's DNA is triple-helixed around other original ideas, co-mingled in the tornado of its combat and upgrade game loop. Continuing Dead Cells' dual-weapon inventory, there are more options for build variety thanks to a new mechanic called Alterattacks. Perform one weapon's full attack string and you'll see an icon flash above your critter's head, indicating you can swap to your off-hand weapon and unleash a devastating bonus. Each weapon has its own unique alter, usually dealing some overcharged percentage of damage, but also beneficial effects.

The gigantic Heavy Blade, perhaps too slow to be swinging around as your main weapon, can be triggered after getting in enough hits with the much faster Fish Knife. This allows you to make use of its huge directional line of damage, as well as the stun that it inflicts on any enemies caught in the way. The reverse Alterattack – managing to get through the Heavy Blade's lumbering attack string to trigger the Fish Blade – creates a constantly slashing area directly in front of your character, letting you dash through enemies while still doing damage. Other weapons can instead buff you, adding a bleed effect to your other weapon.

This makes the loadout more interactive than just finding two weapons that deal the most damage, or feed into each other's buffs. You're encouraged to mix and match them more during the combo strings themselves. There's a phenomenally high skill ceiling here as well, as some weapons can perform jumping or teleport attacks if you charge them. Both count as dodges, replete with i-frames, allowing you to time your charge attack to begin just as an enemy attack is about to land. There's little more satisfying in the game than jumping into the air to land a coup-de-grâce and seeing the little "Dodged!" sign pop out as your gigantic opponent whiffs a swipe at where you just were.

Your rewards for combat vary from permanent upgrade resources to memory dust, used to unlock weapons and trinkets to add to the drop table for future dives into the vortex. Your forays into the ominous tornado on the horizon slowly reveal the overarching story as you progress deeper, rescuing key allies to bring back to your tranquil little floating base from which you fire yourself in a cannon whenever you are resurrected by some hand-waved magics.

It's not a terribly compelling narrative, and the dialog is about as stilted as Dead Cells', but just as it didn't matter too much there, you won't find it getting in the way of the enjoyable roguelike loop. Perhaps one place it does suffer is the areas between fighting. Unlike Dead Cells' sprawling castle map, there seem to be very few side areas and alternate paths to discover (at least early on) and your time between combat arenas is spent solely tapping dash until you skip across the requisite number of floating islands separating you from your next dance with death.

The biggest boon to that dance is the ability to call in friends or other Leapers to assist you in battle. The RGB LED in your death-defying backpacks cast an aura around your character, and so as long as you remember whether you're red or green, you can find yourself easily in the fray. A serious consideration given how flashy many of the attack animations are, and constant effects like the spinning scythe or bladestorm can easily multiply the chaos when there are a few more pangolins running around.

If you're waiting on your next roguelike fix while Hades 2 is still being built, then Windblown could prove to be a nice social multiplayer experience to constantly evolve alongside of it. Though the upcoming Steam Next Fest demo on October 14 won't let you check out the online co-op, perhaps it will help you convince a few friends to take the dive into the maelstrom with you when Windblown enters early access on October 24.

Windblown

Release Date: October 24, 2024

Digital Only

• Windows