Choose My Adventure: Lost Skies is almost immediately enrapturing and engaging

I try to take my time when it comes to putting together these Choose My Adventure columns. I try to nibble on the content leaves, absorb the atmosphere or story, or otherwise make sure I move at a reasonable pace until I hit a point when I think it’s best to stop so the pollsters have something to choose.

I did none of those things this time around. I absolutely bum-rushed Lost Skies because I was so completely in love with almost everything I was doing, and in so doing I managed to get myself to that stopping point much sooner than I expected. And that is a problem because I really want to keep playing some more.

Naturally we’re going to start at the beginning, and part of the reason I was able to tear through this opening segment as hard as I did was that I’ve done this one before. Specifically the opening segments were what made up the demo for the game and I streamed that for OPTV some months back. That bit of foreknowledge meant that I was capable of taking Lost Skies on at a higher pace than usual thanks to control familiarity.

Still, that didn’t really dull this rerun of the tutorial beats. This game really is quite pretty; granted, floating temperate islands dotted with some random ruins isn’t what one would call a particularly challenging visual bar to clear, but Lost Skies really does have some great visuals, helped along by a graphical style that does a good job of blending realistic with stylized. There’s also this overall sense of size and potential in this world more than other survivalboxes I’ve played. Everything feels so open and breezy in both a figurative and literal sense.

This sensation of a vast expanse to wander is helped by all of the traversal tricks that the game offers, not the least of which being a vaulting and climbing system that doesn’t try to punish you for using it. There just isn’t any stamina burn that’s forcing you to reconsider whether you should clamber walls or try to expand your horizons. Even if the starting portions of the game are very, very guided, there are still points when you’re allowed to just wander around; I didn’t feel particularly rewarded for doing so, but I also wasn’t discouraged either.

And then, of course, there’s the grappling hook. I don’t know that I’ve ever used a traversal tool in any online game that felt more thrilling and terrifying to use all at once. The sense of weight and inertia conveyed as my character swung around and reeled in was impressive, to say nothing of the fact that it works on literally every surface to once again encourage freedom of movement. At the same time, it is scary to use.

There’s no extremely visible line to indicate I was attached to something, leaving me to rely on audio cues and the visual language of my character’s arm being raised to affirm that I was indeed hooked on, which lent itself to this idea that it was extremely risky. I should point out, though, that the actual UI isn’t the problem here – there is a very obvious indicator of when you’re within range of something – but it’s also a bit minimalist beyond that.

I almost prefer it this way, honestly. I’m leaning into the terror. And when I did nearly fall, I was able to rescue myself and recover before I plummeted to some endless void. I wish superhero MMOs used this kind of traversal. Grappling feels really good.

I also can’t speak highly enough about the gathering tools and gathering mechanics that opened up to me as I went through the tutorial islands. The overarching narrative is that I’m part of some civilization that’s managed to hit some impressive technological highs but has also fallen prey to some awakened evil force, and the tools for gathering in this game reflect that brilliantly, as my character wielded a giant cannon glove to break apart mineral deposits and a glove that lets her throw a saw blade to fell trees.

As for the gathering mechanics, those toe a positively brilliant line between functionality and minigame attention-grabbing. The saw from my glove can be sent out in fairly rapid succession with good timing to make cutting down trees, cutting the felled tree into segments, and then breaking those segments into wood a cinch. Meanwhile, the mining glove tool requires me to carefully break apart exterior rock, then aim at the hiding mineral bits sticking out, all while making sure I don’t strike the core, which causes the whole deposit to explode and thus destroy material. This stuff is flawless. It’s a perfect execution to make what’s otherwise a dull task in survivalboxes honestly engaging.

Now I should bring up a word about multiplayer here because obviously that’s part of what this site is all about, and I will say that there doesn’t appear to be a pretty wide community of players in this game, or at least not yet in early access. When I was starting off, I made sure to look for a public game just to get a measure of how active things are, and over and over again I found no public games online, which prompted me to make mine public.

All through most of my playthrough, I was utterly left alone right until a certain point when I was tasked with building my first airship. It was then that someone else connected to my game, placed down the airship building item I required, and even put together a small skiff. After he showed me some of the ropes in terms of how to pilot the thing, he waved goodbye and disconnected, leaving me to utilize this tiny little boat or break it down for materials. It was so surprisingly kind.

Either that or this person disconnected and never got back. I’m choosing to believe the former scenario, though.

I’m not going to claim that literally every part of my Lost Skies experience was flawless. The controls can feel a bit fiddly, particularly in the case of grappling hook movement and airship movement, and when that other player connected there was quite a bit of hitching going on as they loaded into my world.

But these are minor wrinkles that I can ignore; the world looks great, the gameplay so far has me engaged, the story is enough to motivate, and the survival mechanics aren’t getting in the way; the items on my toolbelt come with me when I die, making for some careful inventory management that doesn’t frustrate, and the hunger and thirst stuff that hamstrings most of these games isn’t present here.

I truly think this is a diamond in the rough here, but it’s still early days yet, and as I mentioned before, I’ve gotten to a stopping point that I need to sort out in order to play further. And that involves my airship.

There are a couple of paths to getting myself into the air and moving on to the next portion of the game, and those are either putting together my own airship design or following one of the pre-made blueprints. I’ve taken the liberty of already designing my first ship’s blueprint, but I also don’t really mind following the pre-built ones either if only for the sake of making sure I didn’t screw up something with my own creation. So help me out, won’t you?

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The second poll is once again about multiplayer things. On the one hand, the fact that I was the only public game available makes me wonder if I should keep doing that so others can just hop in. On the other hand, it’s entirely reasonable (to me anyway) that I should keep it private or friends only so that I can get to grips with what is going on. So let’s settle this ahead of time.

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Polls will close at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, May 9th. That said, I really do hope that the results resolve themselves sooner rather than later because I really, really want to dig into this one some more. For now, I’ll busy myself with gathering wood and smelting iron. Something tells me I’m going to need a lot of material.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.