Windosill

Genre: Interactive Toybox / Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Windosill is a family-friendly interactive toybox/puzzle game first released on PC in 2009, ported to iOS in 2011, then to Nintendo Switch in 2022, and more recently brought to Android mobile devices in 2023. This is a vaguely abstract Puzzle game where players are interacting with strange objects in a series of rooms, with the goal generally being to continue moving along a toy vehicle to each subsequent room to the right.

After an initial tutorial demonstrating the controls, all of this game’s gameplay is relayed to the player wordlessly, and the player largely figures out how the different objects and odd machines work through trial and error. However, where trial and error gameplay is often frustrating, here it just offers another opportunity to discover more about the fascinating and bizarre world within the game. And while this game contains some clever puzzles, none were so difficult that they took me terribly long to figure out or complete.

The presentation here is delightful. Windosill makes use of flat-shaded untextured 3D visuals for its rooms and the objects within it, which lends everything a cartoony abstract nature. There’s no music in the game, but every object has its own sound, really making everything seem unique.

What’s more, I can report that this game is a solid port to Nintendo Switch, with optional touchscreen controls as well as unlockable use of gyroscopic motion control to influence the gravity of objects within the game, with gamepad controls that work just fine.

There’s a lot to like in Windosill, but unfortunately this game has two glaring problems that overshadow everything. First, this game is depressingly short – the entire thing can be easily completed within a half hour. And second, despite other versions of the game selling for a very reasonable $3, the Nintendo Switch version is priced at $10, over three times the price on other platforms.

I would absolutely love to recommend Windosill to everyone – there’s a ton of imagination and excellent puzzle design that makes this Puzzle Game and absolute delight to play, even if only for a half hour. But that $10 price tag is an absolute insult – not only due to this game’s short length, but due to how much the price has been jacked up over what we see on other platforms. Unless you can get this game for a massive discount, I recommend you skip it. We shouldn’t encourage this sort of price-gouging.

tl;dr – Windosill is a family-friendly Puzzle Game and Interactive Toybox that has you fiddling with odd objects and strange machines to try to keep your toy vehicle moving on to the next room. This is a wonderfully imaginative game with some excellent Puzzle design, and it’s a solid port to Nintendo Switch with good controls. Unfortunately, the game’s extremely short 30 minute length is made even more unreasonable due to its absurd $10 price tag, over three times what this game costs on other platforms. If this game were priced more reasonably, it would be a truly great game despite its brevity. As-is, it’s an insult to Nintendo Switch owners.

Grade: C

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