Windswept

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Windswept is a Platformer released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of a young duckling and a small turtle who have teamed up as the two travel through various areas full of dangerous enemies and hazards.

The presentation in Windswept is lovely, using colorful, detailed 2D pixel art with a lot of charm. This is backed by a synthesized soundtrack that’s decent enough, but largely forgettable. There’s nothing truly groundbreaking here, but overall this game looks and sounds really nice.

This game seems to take clear inspiration from the Donkey Kong Country series, with similar Platforming and obstacle course-style level design filled with secrets to uncover. More specifically, I feel like this game takes its inspiration from Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3, in that it has gameplay mechanics where one of the game’s two characters can pick up the other to toss them, with different characters’ abilities acting in different ways.

I personally always felt like the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy games always had one preferable character, the more mobile one – Diddy was better than Donkey, and Dixie was better than Diddy and Kiddy, with the not-as-good character only came out when I needed their specific ability, or when I got hurt and couldn’t play as the better character for a while. I bring this up because Windswept circumvents this, as both its characters are good in different ways – the duckling can jump high and float, while the turtle can launch itself horizontally in mid-air.

However, this brings me to one of the parts of this game I’m not super-fond of: Windswept is surprisingly difficult. In Donkey Kong Country, the games famously used “coyote time” allowing players to jump after walking off a platform to give players more freedom of movement and provide a bit of grace rather than punishing timing that’s slightly off. In Windswept, making use of “coyote time” is an absolute necessity, and the game makes things more complicated by giving each character multiple moves and then multiple kinds of interaction with the other character, to the point where it can get disorienting. At some points in the game, I got to a bonus challenge I could not see an way to complete, and it had me wondering if there was some move in the characters’ lengthy move set I had forgotten, or if there was some sort of glitch or exploit the game expected me to know that I didn’t. This high challenge level spikes at times even early on, in ways that seem sure to frustrate some players.

If you enjoyed the Donkey Kong Country games but thought they needed a greater challenge and a more expansive move set, I think you may really enjoy Windswept. Just be careful because the difficulty spikes early and hard here, and that expansive move set takes some time getting used to.

tl;dr – Windswept is a Platformer about a duckling and a small turtle that has a lot of similarities to the Donkey Kong Country series, but with a more expansive move set and some massive difficulty spikes. This is still a really good Platformer, but be warned that this game wants you to throw your controller.

Grade: B+

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