Gust of Wind Preview

I got a chance to check out Gust of Wind before its release, a story-driven stealth game developed and published by Wrenchpunk Games.

You play as part of a crew of giant mutant seagulls in a post-apocalyptic landscape, where a faction called the Redscarves are slowly but surely taking over what little land is left. Your hometown is one of the last bastions. As the resident stealth expert, your job is to infiltrate enemy locations, complete your objective, and get out alive, in order to gather enough firepower to fend them off. Your first objective in the demo is to check out the situation on another ship to see what has happened to it, which is where I will start my tale.

After rowing my boat over to the ship, it was obvious that almost everyone onboard was not friendly. The tutorial for this section tasked me to keep crouched down and use the rigging to avoid patrols. Climbing was fairly interesting, allowing you to leap between specific ropes fairly easily and climb up or slide down anything that can be grabbed onto. I really liked it and had no problems using it.

Once I got to the other side of the ship, I snuck into the deck below, where several bad guys were sleeping. Combat is discouraged here, as one slight screw-up easily ended in my untimely death, and not for the lack of trying. Fighting boils down to picking up the nearest weapons and to start swinging. You’re unlikely to survive an encounter with more than one enemy, so stealth and pragmatism is the best option in most cases, using shadows and any equipment you manage to stumble upon like grenades. Gust of Wind doesn’t feature modern stealth mechanics like alertness indicators, so you have to be very aware of your surroundings. You can switch between third-person and first-person views, which is useful for when you’re in open areas or in enclosed spaces, but I found it wasn’t as polished as it should be for the demo.

I have to be honest here, I didn’t finish the demo. It’s around 3-4 hours long, but my playtime ended up much shorter than that. I wish I could’ve played more, but unfortunately, it didn’t run all that well on my PC. It averaged around 10-30 FPS even on Low. I’ve seen other videos that run the game much better so hopefully this is only a problem for me. Overall though, I did come out with a positive outlook. It’s a great effort for a game made in the developer’s spare time, taking in feedback from the community, and features some really interesting mechanics. I want to see where Gust of Wind takes us with the full release.

Gust of Wind will release on the 31st of July 2023, and will be available on PC via Steam.