Been playing Windbound the last couple of days, I finally crafted a glider and it is straight up BOTW
The rest of the game surprisingly isn't though. It's very much a survival game, complete with very slow start and frustrating inventory management. Resource gathering and crafting is the core of the gameplay. I'm not a fan of the boringly long timers for cooking food and other fire activities (like making leather). The combat is also pretty shoddy - but it's getting better as the game goes at least.
Building a boat and sailing is definitely my favourite part. The ocean has real depth to it with the swell of waves letting you pass over rocks below or bringing you smashing down into hidden dangers. The boat gets properly rocked about, carried on waves and generally just doesn't stay on course without constant correction, and combined with the micromanagement of sail direction to match the wind it remains engaging. There are these more cinematic bridging sections between the survival stages that have you sailing through a rocky course in a big storm and those are very cool.
The story presentation in those between stages is
very Abzu, and comes across a bit expectedly vague in an attempt to be artistic. I'm not really here for the story. The game crashed on me at the end of the second section too, which was annoying as reloading put me back to the start of that section so I basically repeated an hour of gameplay.
Overall I'm enjoying it, but it's hard to recommend unless you're a survival game enthusiast who wants a sailing spin on it. Anyone looking for a BOTW-like will be disappointed.