Sailwind

An excellent little sailing game with more depth than you might realize at first. Perfect for anyone looking for a sea merchant type of playstyle where you go on long voyages across open seas, relying on celestial navigation and primitive tools to find your way. Or you can take shorter trade routes and hop between islands visible on the horizon. There are many boats that you can work up to, each with their own advantages & disadvantages, and you can customize them quite a bit in each major port's shipyard. The game is still in early access, so it does feel lacking in polish at times but the gameplay loop is already there and I think it'll be very fun for anyone understanding enough to give it a chance.

Sailwind — massive potential, but still rough around the edges The sailing simulation itself is a masterpiece. The water and sea look and behave so realistically that the last time I had a similar impression was probably in Sea of Thieves. Sail handling, wind physics - this is what makes it worth putting up with the game's current shortcomings. I also want to highlight the survival aspect - I like the concept, but the implementation is still rough, and the hunger/thirst/sleep balance isn't tuned. I understand many players might not even want this layer at all - it would be great to get a difficulty selector or modifiers so everyone can tailor the survival elements to their liking (up to fully disabling it for those who just want pure sailing). The main problem is the broken economy. Contracts pay noticeably too little, especially in the late game once you own a bigger ship with higher upkeep. Meanwhile, regular trading lets you afford the largest ship in the game after just a couple of lucky runs — and not even ocean crossings. Short routes between neighboring islands give disproportionate margins (basically: buy a crate of silver, sell it for double on a short one-island hop, repeat that a couple of times, and you're a millionaire). Ocean crossings, on the other hand, don't offer the margin they should given the time invested - a crossing takes roughly 10x longer than a short coastal run, yet the profit is nowhere near proportionally higher. What I'd like to see: Rebalance contracts and trading overall - either raise contract payouts (especially late-game, ideally with scaling - letting you take on more missions per voyage, with a steadily increasing cap), or nerf the short speculative trade routes that currently break the economy. Make ocean crossings more worthwhile relative to time spent - either boost long-haul margins or cut crossing time by at least half. More ways to pass the time during long voyages - the developer already added tobacco, coffee, and tea, but they're purely immersive and give no actual gameplay bonus. It would be great if they had even a small effect on character stats (focus, fatigue, reaction time, etc.) instead of just being a nice animation. Overall - the game already hooks you with a genuinely unique sailing experience, but the economy and balance urgently need attention from the developer so that progression feels meaningful rather than like a silver-crate exploit.

Wonderful chill & cozy sailing game with gorgeous stylized graphics. Navigate by the stars, the sun, a watch and your compass as you crisscross archipelagos or cross the open ocean. Each archipelago has a distinct vibe, culture, currency, geography and weather patterns. The ships can be customized to an impressive degree with different rigging and different sails. The minimal to no HUD helps immerse you in the beautiful scenery. Still under active development, lots of Quality of Life updates recently. Dev listens to player feedback. For example many players complained about the removal of pushing while swimming, because the ore is too weak for the big boats. So the next update introduced a anchor kedging mechanic. Which is both more effective than the ore and more interesting as a game mechanic than pushing while swimming. Sailwind is rather niche but still highly recommended. Be warned the very early game can feel a bit hard and slow. Buying the fishing rod early helps to both have something to do while sailing and reduce the food expenditure. And staying at the inn is always worth the fee.

Fun game that does many things well even in early access. For me, the trading and transporting of physical crates and other cargo really hits the spot. Early access does mean that the game has certain bugs and limitations that can be frustrating, however I've personally not run into any issue in my 40 hours of gameplay that couldn't be mitigated by carrying extras of important items on board. Finally, it's my impression that the developer is quite attentive on the Discord server, as they fixed both bugs I reported in the following patch.

Janky but cool and one of a kind. First of all, this game is very interesting in it's design, in that it has minimal controls, and on the surface it seems like not much is going on here, but the depth lies not in UI and controls, but in items, locations, shipyard, etc. Because of that, the game feels really realistic, you have to sail somewhere to unlock a new mechanics, a lot of stuff is very "diagetic", i.e. the map is an item you hold in your hands, etc. You can also customize your ships, which is very cool, but the game severely lacks some kind of "sandbox" mode or something, it's easy to do something, but very hard to measure whether it's good or not. This game can get frustrating, some of it is just glitches, but some of it is just "fight against nature", but the experience is very interesting and laid back. Do note that this game takes a lot of time, and is "more about the journey than the desination".

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First 9 hours in have been entertaining! that's 2 euros per hour on average, I'd say that's worth the money.

Offering my review to help the game grow! This is a great game for those that are interested in more realistic sailing mechanics compared to something like say Sea of Thieves. However, the game is largely chill in that there's no combat outside of fighting the elements and hunger/thirst. There's no story/objectives, just sailing port to port, either doing missions for coin or buying low; selling high. This probably sounds boring to a number of people and if it sounds boring to you, then you may not enjoy this game, but it really is a very chill experience with moments of excitement like keeping your tiny ship afloat in the middle of the rough ocean waters in a storm. Oh yeah, that's another thing. While there are several archipelagoes with islands that are maybe a day or so sail between each other, you are able to make bigger profits by sailing between archipelagoes with cargo. These can take a week or so in game, assuming favorable winds and conditions. There's no simple world map that shows your current position, you have to use some basic celestial navigations to figure 'roughly' where you are and where you are to your destination. This has personally been my favorite part of the game as it makes you feel smrt if you manage to find your way correctly. Fortunately, there is a 'fast travel' (of sorts). Sleeping. This can backfire on you though if the wind changes or perhaps...wake up in the middle of storm and capsize (oops). You may need to make sure you have a save that is good, which is one of the weirder failings of the game. It has a somewhat obtuse save method that comes off as wanting to be hardcore with no manual saves outside of just quitting the game and maybe about 6 save slots in the normal game select, that said I understand there are ways to retrieve older saves. While this is a single dev game, it feels updates are still consistent and the game hasn't been abandoned. This is all not to mention the modding community for the game. As someone who feels unsure with modding games, it seemed relatively easy. And the mods feel like real game changers to help make the game how you want, with allowing to turn off the survival aspects if you want a more chill experience to things like adding a system to 'automate' the ship with a "crew" to help with larger ships, different celestial skies with both fake and even our world skies to navigate with and more. While some might say this is a negative, I find it nice to keep the game feeling fresh. The discord channel is handy, but you can still definitely enjoy this game without it/mods.

Ce jeu mérite d'être mis en avant. L'aspect de l'eau, la physique du navire et des voiles, tout ça sur Unity c'est plutôt bluffant ! C'est un jeu qui se base beaucoup sur l'ambiance. Au début c'est très lent, surtout si vous choisissez la première zone car la météo change peu. Mais c'est là son essence, il n'y a pas d'objectif, pas de score, juste vous et l'océan. Et des gros bateaux parce qu'on aime les gros bateaux :p En revanche je met en garde contre la notion survie du jeu, le développement a pris une direction que je n'attendais pas et visiblement une partie de la communauté non plus... Pour faire court : votre personnage aura besoin d'une alimentation variée entre fruits et poissons, avec des produits frais ou cuits, voir fumés. C'est moins la détente quand vous regardez votre barre de faim se vider, le vent de face, mais c'est aussi ça la vie de marin.

Game gets frequent updates, recommend if you want to just chill.