The ocean in Windrose stays calm right up until a galleon puts a hole in the hull.

Sprinting, mining, blocking, and swinging all pull from the same bar in Windrose, and hitting zero mid-fight leaves a character standing there with no options.

The game spends the first few hours teaching you how to punch boars, and then it locks you in a cave with a heavily armored pirate captain who can kill you in two swings.

A chest full of gold is completely useless if you try to hand it to the wrong vendor.

You are going to collect a massive amount of weird currency before you ever see a cash register.

Four separate pirate factions run these waters, and every one of them will happily arm you to the teeth in exchange for proof you're worth the investment.

Eating a raw coconut keeps your hunger meter happy in Windrose. It does nothing for the fact that a single pirate can still turn you into chum.

A weapon that doesn't match your stats hits like wet cardboard in Windrose. Here's the scaling, armor sets, and builds that actually work.

Health regenerates in exactly two passive ways in Windrose, and only one of them works while something's still trying to kill you.

Windrose will let you build your dream fortress crooked and facing the wrong way, and then refuse to let you nudge it two inches to the left.

Rowing a dinghy back to base for the fifth time to grab supplies you forgot is where the pirate fantasy quietly dies.

Your pistol is just a very ugly paperweight until you figure out gunpowder, and Windrose doesn't explain any of this clearly.

Clay doesn't look like much, but it's the one material standing between you and an actual metal weapon.

The dinghy Windrose hands you at the start folds under a strong current, let alone a fight.

Windrose hands you a pocket-sized inventory and then expects you to loot entire pirate camps, which is the game's idea of a joke.

Copper's the wall between "hitting rocks with a rock" and actually having a base worth defending.

Windrose doesn't kill you with one big mistake, it kills you with five small ones stacked on top of each other.

That quiet little building buried in the sand near the beach is guarding the entire back half of your adventure.

Wood and stone carry you through the early game just fine, and then they don't.

Rebuilding an entire island by hand gets old fast, so it's worth putting the local wildlife to work instead.