Wayfinder

Wayfinder is a co-op action RPG from Airship Syndicate, the studio behind Ruined King and Battle Chasers: Nightwar. You play as one of the Wayfinders —heroes with distinct abilities, weapons and playstyles— to push back the Gloom devouring the world of Evenland. Play solo or in three-player co-op, and its hook is combining three things that rarely sit together so cleanly: fast action combat, real character-building depth, and dungeon runs you shape yourself.

What sets it apart most is the Echo card system: modifiers you apply to each expedition to crank up difficulty and rewards at the same time, so you decide how much to risk for how much loot. Paired with each Wayfinder's skill trees and a roster of characters with clearly distinct roles, the result is an ARPG with a satisfying progression ceiling and an eye-catching art direction —clean lines, saturated color— that's easy to recognize.

Wayfinder isn't the game it started as. It launched as an always-online free-to-play title published by Digital Extremes, but when that publishing arm shut down, Airship reclaimed the rights and reinvented it under the Echoes banner: it dropped the microtransaction store and battle pass, added an offline mode, and switched to a one-time purchase. The studio's stated philosophy is plain: all future roadmap content arrives inside the game, with no paid DLC, to avoid fragmenting an already small community.

Concretely: the base game runs about $24.99 USD on Steam, the PlayStation Store and Xbox, with frequent sales that drop it well below that. There's no subscription and no season passes; a few optional cosmetic extras survive (like the Critical Role Supporter Pack), but none of it touches progression. You buy once and get the full game, campaign and offline mode included.

The game is Live and in active development. It went through early access with founder packs in 2023, relaunched as a buy-to-play title on Steam in mid-2024 with its full 1.0 version, came to PS5 in October 2024, and reached Xbox Series X|S in early 2025. Since then Airship has kept pushing the roadmap with updates, and even opened a player-made mods beta toward the end of 2025. The official site (playwayfinder.com) is where the studio posts what's coming.

Now the uncomfortable part: the studio has been struggling. There have been several rounds of layoffs that shrank the team to around 50 people, and the population is modest —Steam concurrency peaks at roughly 1,800 players after a big update and then falls into the low hundreds. In practice that means co-op works better if you bring your own group than if you count on matchmaking to fill it, and that the roadmap moves cautiously.

Wayfinder is a solid entry point for anyone after a co-op action RPG with short, flexible sessions —without the commitment of an MMO or the endless grind of a pure looter. If you enjoy action combat with clearly-roled characters, build-crafting, and the "just one more run" loop with scaling rewards, there's plenty here —and at a one-time price, without a store nudging your hand at every turn. The offline mode also makes it a genuinely viable pick for playing solo at your own pace.

The honest close: don't buy it expecting a world full of players or a guaranteed future stream of content. The game's rocky history left marks —a small population, a downsized studio, and a roadmap that moves slowly— and those are real factors to weigh. But as a buy-once package of co-op action, with an art identity of its own and progression that keeps its hooks in you, Wayfinder delivers on what it's aiming to be today.