I'm starting to think 2026 will be remembered as the year of the Minecraft successor. We started off the year with Hytale, an innovative Minecraft-inspired adventure/building game. Now we have Everwind, an innovative Minecraft-inspired adventure/building game with airships. Jokes aside, even in its early access state, Everwind is superb. Engaging exploration, great combat, cool gear and enemies. I mean, the list goes on. I have a few gripes, but as a whole I'm absolutely loving what's on offer so far.
Everwind is being developed by Enjoy Studios S.A., a Polish outfit relatively new to game dev with only one prior game under their belt. Published by Bohemia Interactive, Everwind hit Steam early access on March 17, 2026. The game was teased at multiple conventions, award shows, and showcases prior to its early access launch, where it garnered attention for combining the exploration and combat of first-person RPGs like Fallout and Oblivion with the base-building mechanics and voxel art style of something like Minecraft.
After around 20 hours with the game, I can safely say there's something special about Everwind. When you first spawn into the world, you'll immediately notice that you're surrounded by islands, both in the sea and floating in the sky. Obviously, you're going to want to explore these islands, so how will you get around? Everwind's answer is simple: airships. Within the first hour of starting a new world, armed with rudimentary tools you create after exploring your first 1-3 ocean islands, you'll come across a ruined airship that you can bring back to life and call your own. This vehicle serves as your transportation, home base, storage hub, spawn point, and everything in-between. Your airship is your ticket to exploration, progression, and adventure.
Everwind's main loop is as follows. First, you take your airship to a nearby island and prepare to disembark by bringing food, weapons, etc. Then, you hop down to the island, fight monsters, conquer dungeons, collect resources, hunt animals, loot structures, and trade with villagers. Then you bring everything you found back to your airship and upgrade it to either move faster, be bigger, or ascend higher. Finally, you rinse and repeat by moving on to the next island. The more you explore, the more you can upgrade your ship to reach higher block heights. There's a natural progression here, led purely by your sense of adventure and curiosity as a sky-pirate, that has kept me playing for hours on end. Once I conquer an island, I can't wait to get to the next one to see what challenges, rewards, biomes, and creatures await me.
Everwind breaks the traditional mold associated with survival-crafting games set in blocky worlds. Unlike Minecraft, Everwind is much, much more focused exploration and progression, specifically geared towards your airship's capabilities. The more capable your airship is, by extension, the more capable you'll become in dungeon-crawling and combat. It's quite satisfying to bring your newly upgraded flying machine to a new island, rampage across it, come back, and get back to crafting, upgrading, and engineering. Piloting the airship is also a breeze; there's no danger of crashing and controls are simple, making it easy to hop on and off to explore new terrain. There are conveniences built in to cut down on unnecessary traversal time as well, like the compass' teleportation feature that lets you instantly teleport back to your airship with no restrictions.
All of the exploring, upgrading, and navigating serves one purpose: to get you to the next dungeon. I love Everwind's dungeons and the heavy emphasis on grinding them out. Since they're all procedurally generated, there's plenty of unique encounters and loot to collect, always providing you with a reason to explore every one you come across. However, same-biome dungeons can start to feel a bit same-y after a half dozen or so. Every dungeon and structure is a blast to conquer and they're usually littered with plenty of enemies to fight.
Since the dungeons are fun, by extension, the combat is fun. It reminds a lot of Oblivion and Skyrim—lots of swinging your sword, or staff, like a madman, taking down droves of enemies in the process. Pretty early on, your arsenal will grow to include bows, longswords, single-handed war hammers, battle axes, magic staffs, spellbooks and more, making each combat encounter unique and ripe for experimentation. Enemies are everywhere, and the variety in adversary types is great. From lowly dregs to powerful bosses, they provide plenty of challenge and incentive to regularly upgrade your gear. Enemy AI can be slightly hit-or-miss and is easily exploited by the sandbox nature of the game; but if you ask me, that's part of the fun.
One thing I don't love about Everwind's loop is the lack of a good building system. Don't get me wrong, building out your airship is a ton of fun. Want to make it look like a starship? Or a house? Or a floating rock? Go right ahead. But there is no reason to build on the islands themselves. Once you've explored an island, it's on to the next; you'll likely never visit the same island twice. The game showers you in dozens of unique building blocks but never gives you a real reason to use them. After choosing a block palette for your airship, every collected block that doesn't match your chosen theme becomes useless. Building is usually what keeps me coming back to sandbox adventure games, making the lack of attention to it here a bit disappointing.
As positive as these impressions have been, there are a few things that need to be ironed out before a 1.0 release. First off, whenever loading in new terrain or venturing into enemy-dense dungeons, FPS takes a serious hit. The game freezes for a solid five seconds before stuttering back to normal. There are a few other miscellaneous audio and visual bugs but they're relatively minor in comparison. Additionally, in terms of music, there are only two songs: one for idle exploring and flying, and one for combat. Though they're both pleasant to listen to, the fact that they're the only two in the game started to drive me a little crazy after hour five or so. I'm sure these are on the developer's radar, but for the time being, they definitely put a damper on an otherwise great experience.
If you've played games like Minecraft or Hytale and thought they could benefit from deep and immersive combat, extensive dungeon-crawling, and airships, then you need to try Everwind. Devout builders may be let down by the lack of incentive to build creatively, but for every other sandbox fan, Everwind is by and large a great time.
Everwind is available on Steam in early access now.
