Following Seas

The sailing mechanics in this game are genuinely impressive. Trimming lateen sails, feeling the wind catch, watching your caravel heel over in a gust - it's the closest I've felt to actually being on a sailing ship. The ships themselves are beautiful, and the graphics overall punch well above what you'd expect from a solo dev project. The navigation tools are a nice touch too - triangulating your position with the sun compass, plotting courses on the map, figuring out longitude from solar noon. It's nerdy and satisfying when it clicks. But the core gameplay loop has a problem. Islands are far apart and ships are slow. In a game like Sailwind, long voyages have a rhythm - you trim sails, cook, fish, navigate with the quadrant, sleep, wake up further along, check your position, adjust course, repeat. There's always something to do and sleeping actually moves you forward. Here, sleeping only passes time without moving the ship, so it's useless for travel. You just... sail. For hours. Staring at the horizon with nothing to do between ports. The nav tools end up feeling like wasted potential. Since islands are visible from each other in clear weather, you rarely need celestial navigation. If voyages were longer and sleep moved the ship, you'd actually need to plot your position mid-ocean - and that would make the quadrant and sun compass feel essential instead of decorative. Provisions drain fast. Brace points bug out. Ballast resets between saves. The rope physics fight themselves. It's early access, so fair enough. There's something special here under the jank. The dev clearly loves sailing and ships. It just needs a better at-sea gameplay loop to match the quality of its mechanics.

The first 10 minutes of gameplay should be cut out - this is how lame they are. You should just spawn in front of the ship. Build a meaningful introductory experience first instead of dumping a barebones sequence you waste time exploring. Nice clouds. Barrels, nice. Okay, the ship, equipment instructions. I don't see the instructions for sailing itself but that's fine, I know the basics and all this other stuff is useful gameplay information. Hmm, okay, makes sense, decent systems. But why did I spend 20 minutes of refund window playtime reading what could've been multiple web pages? Oh, it's night time already, you can't see stuff unless you are sitting in a dark room. Let me poke around the deck before I remember there should be a handheld lantern, find which button opens the inventory and squint at the small icons in the small UI to find the lantern. The hull apparently cracked while it was rubbing against the shore, let's fix it in darkness, awkwardly switching between tools. The rope system and sail control is very nice, you can forgive and ignore all the fiddlyness. Okay, let me deduce what each rope's controls do with awkward camera angles that don't let you see immediate feedback of your actions. Okay, after 5 minutes it's clear enough. But why is it "A" to extend, "D" to retract? Let's skip the time until morning. That's a beautiful sunsrise. I started moving towards some lighthouse on the horizon. Hey, I think my ship is taking on water. Why? I am just attacking the wind at an angle. Are there any holes? Nope. The water is splashing overboard like someone is pumping it inside. Pump it out. Okay, let's hold the course while I re-adjust the sails for the wind that changed direction in the last two minutes since last adjustment. Locomotion over the ship starts to get really annoying. Now I get why the jump is so unnaturally high - to help you get on the quarterdeck because the ladders are too fiddly. Doesn't quite do the job though. I'm sorry, you took too much time to move between the different ropes and quarterdeck, the hull has taken on too much water, the patient is beyond saving. Let's re-start the game. Ok, skip all the intros, rush to the ship, throw in the barrels and I am good to go. I keep reminding myself to look at the flags and not the wind particles because the latter is just a visual animation in a completely different direction. Easy does it, moving towards the lighthouse, on one, now two sails. Again, some sidewind you attack at an angle, the boat starts to take on water again. Did I miss a hole in the hull? No, all clear, let's quickly go back and pump the water out. Adjust the sails to the changed wind. Oh, let's help ourselved with the rudder, the sail alignment caused our heading to drift in the wind, that's fine. Straighten out, re-adjust, the ropes. Oops, sorry, too slow, we already pumped your hull full of water, again, better luck next time. The movement around the boat is finicky, which is frustrating when every second matters when you are sprinting to the next equipment to avoid losing your ship. Frankly, from my limited experience I don't know if this is a realistic rate of taking on water, but it doesn't look like it - as soon as your boat banks the water starts splashing up and inside as if it's pumped, not just spilling over. And even if it somehow were - it desn't look like a reasonable balance for a gameplay mechanic, unless you are designing for a hard-core game. All this is not a learning curve, it looks like it's just the beginning of getting to know the game's flaws and learning to work around them. I can imagine it being an enjoyable experience if you have unlimited time to learn to work around these flaws. At this point I don't recommend buying this game if you don't have that. No amount of content matters if you don't get to it. I was hyped for the experience and learning and ready to suck at the game, but it felt like the game sucked instead. This was an unnecessarily frustrating experience.

this is a very powerful and wonderful sailing experience; but it's absolutely ruined by the bugs. You never know if it's going to waste hours of your time. Saved the game? Pray that it will actually load it up again! I'm going to have to uninstall this and maybe revisit in time. Absolute shame, but how many hours do I waste on it to have it all go poof, again, and again.

Can't recommend as of yet. 137fps as long as there is a window in front of my game but as soon is the game is brought forward, 13fps. It's not hooking properly on Radeon 6900XT

Gave it a go because I was into the idea of another in-depth sailing game. Sadly it needs a fair amount more time in the oven. It has a lot of bad stutters, my rig is no longer top-of-the-line but it shouldn't be having this many issues with a game (it was also put on a fast SSD). The sailing mechanics also seem... a bit buggy. I had a full tailwind and had the sails set up to catch the wind and remained completely motionless until the wind changed to be from the side. The job mechanics seem to work okay, though I didn't play long enough to complete one after seeing that there was a whole side mechanic of needing sail, wood and oil if you wanted to have any hope of a long voyage and had unintentionally softlocked myself because I didn't understand that those would be used night by night... which is a bit silly in my opinion. I refunded it and hope that with time it'll improve but for now in my opinion it needs a lot more work.

A very promising start- but very much still a start. The game is perfectly playable as is, but you will run into technical issues, and many systems are either unimplemented, or still very obviously work in progress. The comparison to Sailwind is unavoidable and not entirely invalid. Unlike Sailwind, you *start* with a ship with multiple masts, a proper hold space, and a cabin to chill in when you aren't needed on deck. There is an actual intentional setting with interesting and evocative writing- though it's still very stages for that. The ships are still relatively easy to control, but arguably more complicated than Sailwind's- though you don't get to customize them to nearly the same degree, there are at least two ships in game available in substantially different variants. In my opinion, as long as you're tolerant of some technical hiccups (and willing to reload a save every now and again), there's more than enough here to justify the purchase price right now. The developer (I believe it's just a single guy) is reasonably responsive on the community discord, and at the time of writing a fairly major content update adding a whole new type of sail to the game and a ship variant to mount it just dropped, so there's promise for the future as well.

While the free Demo had some issues, it was playable and performance was ok. Since then, the developer pushed many updates. Each update made the game worse, esp the physic-calculations. And finaly, the developer decided to move to an complete new Unity-Engine, which makes the game unplayable. The FPS went down from stable 60 to 10-15. While suffering lower FPS, the game stutters all over the place, even that onyl 6 GB of VRAM of my 16 GB are in used.(AMD 9070) So instead of trying to fix the many physic-issues, developer updated to a new Unity-Engine and make things even more complicated and unmanageable. On top of all this, the developer seems to live within its closed Discord-bubble, and never responds to any Steam-community issues/threads.

Im giving it a thumbs up. great sailing mechanics and lovely ship modeling. The only think I dont really like are the land masses and design, I find them asthetically jarring but thats just my personal taste. Maybe the developer will improve that in time. Other than that and a few bugs here and there its still a very good sailing game. If you are coming from other sailing games you will enjoy this one as well.

A terrible buggy mess. Played the demo and it was great, had no issues. This on the other hand, when the boat wasn't spining in circles every time I set the sails to the wind it was flying through the air, barrel rolling through the water throwing me out, or sinking into some bizarre trench that opened up in the water like moses split the sea. 0/10, save your money

Невозможно играть. Отвратительная производительность, статтеры, ужасный интерфейс, в общем плохо всё, кроме идеи.