Where Winds Meet Was The Nicest Surprise Of 2025

I’m going to start this post out by saying that I know Where Winds Meet isn’t perfect. For one thing, the localization and character voices can use some real improvement. It’s not unusual to hear lines being repeated, and on occasion, I’ve even had my character’s voice swap genders randomly. Literally, one line will be male, the next female, and then back to male. It can really throw you off. And then there are all the menus. Sometimes I’ll just spend time flipping back and forth between them, trying to figure out where that one thing is with a red mark that I just can’t locate.

I’ve run into other issues as well, such as the graphics loading slowly. But that might be attributed to the fact that I chose to install the game on an external drive, rather than an issue with the game itself. I haven’t bothered to check with other players on that one.

All this is to say, the game definitely needs work in certain areas. And yet, despite that, it may be my favorite new game of 2025. There’s so much good about it that it outweighs the problems I have with the game.

Prior to receiving a press invite to test the game, I wasn’t all that aware of it. This meant I went into it with very few pre-conceived notions aside from the fact that it’s an open-world Wuxia game with some gacha elements. As someone who plays games with a focus on narrative, open-world games can be a bit of a curse for me. This is actually somewhat true for any game that has side quests and other content. But it’s a bit different if I’m playing a game where all the side content is clearly marked, I can try to arrange my gameplay so that interacting with them makes sense narratively.

With open-world games, things are a bit more complicated in that you will just stumble across things while you’re out and about. You don’t choose when these things happen – although I suppose you can ignore them and come back later. If you can find them again, that is. Of course, Where Winds Meet is like that. In fact, some side things you’ll stumble across will end up in your quest log with a timer dictating how long you have to accept and complete it.

In many games, this would frustrate me when I’m trying to work my way through the main story. But in Where Winds Meet, it was different. In fact, as I played through the test, I found myself spending hours in the game enjoying all the things it does right. For one thing, the side stories are actually interesting. One minute you’ll be in the wild looking for something, and the next you’re part of a phantom parade. The characters, faction, and history are intriguing, too.

Speaking of factions… Yes, you can join a faction, abide by their rules, and learn their skills from them. But you don’t have to. The game provides plenty of options for obtaining those skills in other ways, like literally stealing them when you see them being used in the world. And some of those abilities… They really do make you feel like a proper Wuxia hero when you’re using them.

At this point, the game has been out for a while, and I’ve been playing on a live account. And despite having done a good bit in the test, I’ve still been having fun. Repeating what I’ve already done didn’t seem like some sort of chore I had to get past. Although, I did take more time moving the main story along in favor of doing side things. That alone says a lot for the game’s site content.

Admittedly, some of it can be a bit frustrating at times. I’ve had to walk away from boss fights for a day and come back to them later to complete them. But what’s a game without some challenges? The same is true for some puzzles. But in the end, they’ve still been fun enough for me to want to come back and complete them.

That’s what makes this game so surprising for me. While I’m pretty forgiving about some things in games, I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be so fun that it would outweigh any issues I have to the point that this is my favorite new game of the year. Yes, there are other games I enjoy, like Duet Night Abyss, which has a story I’d like to see more of. But I’m not really having as much fun with the other aspects of those games.

With Where Winds Meet, I’m having a great time with the game’s different features – as are friends of mine. Interestingly, for all of us, it seems to partially be because the game seems to fill holes left by other games. Some of my friends have pointed out how it has some Secret World-level puzzle-solving going on. Okay, it’s not quite that level; we’re not googling for historical information about a painting. But it’s probably the closest thing we have at the moment. Some of the puzzles I’ve stumbled across have taken real effort to figure out and are done in such a way that it feels rewarding to put in that effort.

I suppose that when we break it down, that’s very often what makes a game truly fun – when you actually feel good about completing something rather than it just feeling like a chore or something you’re doing for internet points. Where Winds Meet achieves that pretty well, which is probably why it consistently has more than 100k concurrent players in-game whenever I look at Steam DB, as well as very positive reviews. (Although, yes. There are chore aspects. We’ll never get away from that.) As long as NetEase keeps a solid update schedule, I see myself continuing to play this for a while.