Windblown is fast. Like, really fast. T✤hat might not surprise you, since the game comes from the studio that brought us speedru🥂nning giant Dead Cells, but when I finally saw it in action at GDC last month, I couldn’t believe the blistering pace it is designed to be played at.
Windblown centers the ubiquitous dash as a core mechanic in a way that roguelikes and action games usually take for granted. It’s fitting that its cast of anthropomorphic animals feel right at home in a Sonic game, but Iꦫ’m not sure the Blue Blur himself could keep up with these speed demons.
Windblown was revealed at The Game Awards last December, and if your first impression of it was ‘Dead Cells meets Hades’, you’re not too far off. The isometric action roguelike has a lot of Dead Cells DNA. On each run, you’ll acquire a variety of weapons and equipment that allow you to customize your build, and you can also discover blueprints that💞 will unlock new items for future runs.
It h💦as a branching biome structure that allows you to discover alternate paths you can take on each run. B🦹ut beyond the obvious comparisons to both Dead Cells and Hades, Motion Twin tells me it also drew influence from a number of other games, like The Binding of Isaac, Nier: Automata, Devil May Cry, and even Monster Hunter.
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What might surprise you is that Windblown didn’t start out as a Roguelike. The goal was to create a multiplayer experience that, like Monster Hunter, would let people play together regardless of their progression. Motion Twin didn’t want there to be any friction that would make it difficult for friends to party up, and they found that the roguelike structure was a perfect way to do that. The developers wanted players to be able to “flow” in and out of multiplayer, so they built a d🦩rop in, drop out system with🦩 scaling difficulty so that a run would never be interrupted, and there’d be nothing to stop players from joining a run at any time.
Windblown has an interesting approach to multiplayer. Some things are shared, like currency that you can use to buy upgrades at the shop found at the end of each biome, while other things, like drops from defeated bosses, can only be collected by one player and traded back and forth. This is supposed to make choosing builds and cooperating with other players more interesting. Other r✅oguelikes have had multiplayer, but being built around co-op from the ground up is part of what makes ওWindblown so unique.
You’ll see the Nier: Automata influence in the bullet-hell boss fights (Motion Twin’s devs told me numerous times how much they love Nier) and the Devil May Cry in the weap⛄ons. You’ll be able to equip two weapons at once and unlock synergies that will allow you to chain attacks together with both weapons and unleash devastating finishers. Every weapon pair has its own synergy, which should provide plenty of opportunities for deep buildcrafting.
Finally, there's The Binding of Isaac, which is the most intriguing of Windblown’s influences. Modifiers you collect throughout your run stack on top of each other just like they do in Isaac, allowing you to create some devastatingly broken builds. Motion Twin is intentionally designing the game not to have too much balance because it wants players to organically stumble upon completely overpowered synergies.
As beloved as Dead ꦡCells is, it’s🧸 always had a problem with item dilution. Unlocking too much stuff eventually makes the game harder because the good items become rarer. I intended to bring this up with the developers, but they beat me to it, offering up that they’re willing to implement a dilution solution if players feel like the item pool is getting too crowded. They’re not yet sure what that could be, but they suggested one solution might be the ability to remove or limit the number of items in your pool.
Windblown definitely borrows a lot of ideas from other games, but Motion Twin has a clear vision that gives Windblown an identity of its own. The studio’s brand of hardcore, twitchy gameplay mixed with a vibrant, playful tone and aesthetic is more fully realized than ever in Windblown, and it has all the markers of being the next big roguelike phenomeꦫnon.
