Windbound from Brissy-based 5 Lives Studios has all the hallmarks of making a massive impact: excellent visuals and art-direction, a sandbox playspace and a promise of survival and discovery, with that "Zelda" tag equally in play. But does it live up to all of those promises?

We answer that and more in our review. We're also aware a lot of those cats float back to QGL days as well as AusGamers, so there's a lot of love from us towards the studio. Here's a snippet from our review:

There’s a gorgeous game here, and 5 Lives isn’t a stranger to critical success. Satellite Reign is still amazing and might just be the best game ever made in this country, but with Windbound it’s clear the studio’s vision outweighed their gust behind it. This isn’t a non-functional experience, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in it, but it fails to marry too many ideas and an aesthetic that may be too ambitious for what it needed to be, to work. I’d love to see this survive as a franchise -- all the elements are there, it just suffers identity crisis throughout and needs a bigger hook than “alone among a series of islands trying to find answers".

Click here for our full Windbound review.