Passing By – a Tailwind Journey is a stunning exploration game about trying to deliver a letter by exploring floating islands with your flying balloon ship.
In this game, you have your inventory full of items, your balloon ship, and a lot of little places to explore. You’ll choose where to land, what to explore, and how to best keep yourself fed and warm. It’s an adventure survival game where you will need to pay attention to what you are doing and where you are taking Curly, a young balloonist. Your ultimate goal is to deliver a mysterious letter, but you aren’t really sure where to take it. So you just go around and explore until you find it.
Flying your balloon is simple; you can control a switch that lets your balloon go up and down, as well as another that sends it left and right. If you go down, you will see that you get warmer, whereas if you travel up, you will get colder. You might need to change your character’s clothing to match the weather so you do not overheat or get too cold.
When you see an island you want to land on, you can throw out your anchor and hope that it hits the mark, then get off and explore the island. Many of these different islands have little puzzles to solve, supplies that you can pick up, and secret areas to find. It’s fun exploring and seeing whatever you can find, as well as using items in your inventory to solve these little puzzles that are all around the area. Though I am not sure how opening the arms of swans will affect the wider world, it was so fun to do so and see the island come to life. The balance of needing to watch your needs – going near fires when cold, ensuring you have food, etc – adds more challenge to these puzzles, as you need to decide how long to spend in a place based on those needs. You can also choose to skip some places. Once you blow by an island, even if you choose to never land on it, it’s gone forever.
I only got to see a small portion of the game during my time at Gamescom this year, but am excited to see more once the game is out.
Passing By – A Tailwind Journey is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.
About The Author
