I've played the Windrose demo for 7 hours — the crew's shanties keep me coming back

The pandemic left me tired of sea shanties, but after deleting TikTok I’m pro-shanty again. The Next Fest demo for pirate survival game Windrose is on Steam, and it’s a lot of fun: you can repair a ship, set sail, and listen as your NPC crewmates belt out rowdy shanties.

The demo opens with your ship wrecked by Blackbeard, stranded on a tiny island. You gather rocks and branches, craft basic tools, and grind for resources—familiar survival beats, but playing a tattooed pirate makes chopping trees and smashing boulders feel like part of an adventure.

The early goal is simple: build a boat to reach the other islands on the horizon. I fought surprisingly fierce Dodos, dug up buried treasure, and battled Drowned (zombie pirates), then repaired a shipwreck after more tree-chopping and copper mining. After several confrontations with enemy pirates using a saber and an occasional flintlock shot, I freed seven crewmates, added cannons to my boat, and found a new tricorn hat—only to have my ship sunk in a clash with Blackbeard’s fleet.

windrose, next fest, steam, sea shanties, pirate survival, blackbeard, crewmates, shipwreck, dodos, drowned