WindroseWindrose Early Access Review So FarTaking to the high seas in a buccaneering survival crafter with deep combat.By Leana HaferUpdated: Apr 13, 2026 6:18pm UTC13 commentsYou ever had one of those days when Blackbeard boards your ship, shoots you and leaves you for dead, and you wash up penniless and alone on some uninhabited island having only survived due to mysterious, dark magic? Who hasn't, right? Windrose, a piratical survival crafter that just launched into Early Access, uses that universal experience as a starting point for some in-depth exploration and swashbuckling during a mythical reimagining of the Golden Age of Piracy.
And around 30 hours in, I'm having a rousing little time with it.Windrose takes after Valheim in a handful of ways, including the fact that you don't actually need to eat or sleep in order to survive.
Rather, food provides stat buffs without which you can easily get one-shot by any wandering wild pig.
So it's important, but you're not going to starve to death because you went AFK for a little while.
.
Scrounging up bananas and coconuts, I got to work on my first shelter, and the building system is pretty flexible – though everything looks very Robinson Crusoe-chic early on.Chopping down trees and gathering plant fiber is a familiar affair.
Once I worked my way up to mining, though, things slowed down a little.
Ores like copper and iron can generally only be found in instanced caves, and a lot of those are mostly empty.
No enemies, no treasure – just rocks to hit.
.
That can get a little bit monotonous.
But overall, Windrose has been fairly respectful of my time in terms of the amount of resources it expects me to collect to progress
## Editor's Note
We'll have to wait and see how this plays out in the coming weeks.
Source: [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/windrose-review-early-access)