Windswept

I was just recently informed that this game has 'accessibility' cheats that I didn't realize were part of the game when I first played it. This is the sole reason I'm leaving a negative review.

Great platformer. Played through with my kid and had a good time.

Completionist review: Difficulty-wise to 100%, it's a 8.5/10...sorta. A lot of the difficulty comes from two achievements which requires you to complete around 2/3rds of all levels without defeating any enemies and without collecting any collectibles (can be done separately). Collectibles persist through deaths so you don't have to flawlessly complete levels without dying either. Having said that, it can also be a 3/10 difficulty to 100%. There are accessibility options that either make you invincible or have infinite jumps, or even let you skip a level, so you can technically tailor it to however easy you want it to be, so it's a 3/10 and not a 1/10 purely for being tedious and requiring 3 playthroughs (there's a hard and super hard mode that both need to be completed individually; no overlap if you beat the latter unfortunately; you can't just start on hard or super hard either has there are some collectibles that can only be acquired in normal mode to my knowledge). I didn't use any of the accessibility options because I'm up for a challenge (and TBH I didn't even know about them until looking up if super hard mode also completes hard mode), and it took me around 34 hours to 100%. Ironically, I found hard mode more difficult at times than super hard mode because Marbles (the duck 🦆) has less mobility than Checkers 🐢. As for general sentiments about the game, I enjoyed it! Was really fun platforming, pretty decent music, and I like turtles! 🐢

Great

The game wears its influences on its sleeves but it very much manages to live up to the expectations it sets, even when it invites comparisons to the Donkey Kong Country series and other more modern indie precision platformers. For one I absolutely love how charming and cute the graphics are. That said, where Windswept undeniably shines brightest is in how deep and well tuned its mechanics are - the sheer complexity there is in how you can use them and chain then together and how the levels encourage you to explore the moveset. The hardest bits of tech are saved for the (really quite hard) optional bonus levels and postgame content and those feel absolutely amazing to beat. TL;DR for the longer review: if you like precision platformers, please do yourself a favor and play this game. It is a mechanically wonderful platformer with amazing levels that I absolutely loved to fully complete (despite there being a couple unreasonable difficulty spikes in the bonus/postgame levels). I would say it is a worthy spiritual successor to DKC2, and I hope that comes off as the high praise that it is! Despite the above, there are a few rough edges. A couple minor ones are the animal buddies and some lack of level variety in the beginning. The animal buddies are fun but most of them stay very close to the ones in DKC2 and suffer a bit from the same issues, namely that they can't help but feel like very much secondary to the main mechanics (although honestly, windswept arguably does a better job integrating them than even the original DKC series). On the latter issue: by the end of the second world I started feeling like the levels were lacking in variety and felt a tad samey. Fortunately, world 3 onwards very much departs from and I was very pleasantly surprised by how fresh the later levels feel in mechanics and design, especially in the postgame. The one bigger issue I have is with the difficulty curve of the bonus levels/post-game levels and how it ends up being pretty wonky. To be clear, the main game feels really well balanced, but the sheer gap in difficulty between those levels and the optional ones, does make the latter significantly less accessible. Even if you don't play the bonus levels as you unlock them and instead save them for the postagme (which you probably should) there are still a couple of levels that feel like unreasonable spikes in difficulty and which could have a better learning curve (either outside or within the level). I say all this but I do very much enjoy their difficult in isolation! If you're into hard-as-nails platformers and willing to grind those couple of levels out, it is absolutely worth it to do so, both to play the other cool levels in the postgame and because the levels themselves are really good - but you have to be fine with that difficulty grind. If you have less experience with precision platformers or simply don't enjoy that type of gameplay, that couple of levels (possibly most bonus and postgame levels, even) might end up being a lot more frustrating than fun. I don't think the game as good a job as Celeste, for instance, at welcoming new players to that level of difficulty, so they might not be your cup of tea. By contrast, as I quickly mentioned above, the learning curve of the main game feels amazingly tuned. It is absolutely worth beating the game, even if you feel like it is hard - surpassing yourself and overcoming difficult obstacles is 100% part of what makes the trip worth it and part of the fun. Overall, despite the couple of flaws, I absolutely loved playing the game to 100% completion (even if it is a little frustrating to find some of the last collectibles given how few online walkthroughs/guides are out there!). I would fully and heartily recommend the game to lovers of precision platformers!

Es hermosoooooooooo!

Windswept es un juego de plataformas 2d inspirado en los clásicos Donkey Kong Country, que son unos juegos muy buenos y a los que les tengo mucho cariño. He de decir que me ha sorprendido bastante en cuanto a la jugabilidad y diseño de niveles, que considero que no solo están a la altura de los títulos antes mencionados, si no que muchas veces dan "un paso más allá" de lo que vimos en estos juegos de Super Nintendo También he de decir que es un juego muy desafiante, sobre todo si buscas conseguir todos los coleccionables y superar los niveles opcionales. Aunque a mi me gusta un buen desafío, con el primer nivel secreto que encontré casi me vuelvo loco para completarlo, recordandome incluso en este aspecto la dificultad de Celeste. Así que, tras haber completado el camino principal y haber conseguido buena parte de los coleccionables, no se me atreveré a buscar el 100% del juego, que me parece una tarea complicadisima para lo mayor que estoy y la paciencia que tengo actualmente. Dicho todo esto y para terminar, recomiendo el juego a los jugadores que le gusten los plataformas en 2d clásicos y esperen un juego desafiante. Si buscas un juego de plataformeo más casual puede ser que Windswept te resulte abrumador, así que piensatelo dos veces antes de comprarlo

Rien a dire ! un pure banger !