Cozy survival sandbox Aloft has been on our radar since last year, and as of tomorrow, it’s officially moving from its public demo stage to a proper early access on Steam. Studio Astrolabe – backed by Funcom, a publisher MMO fans know very well – says the current version of the game offers 25-30 hours of gameplay, not counting all the time you’ll spend building, with three biomes, more than 500 handmade islands, eight-person multiplayer, 600 building pieces, farming, cooking, crafting, animal husbandry, monsters, and of course, combat, with more to come as the game marches through early access.
Astrolabe kindly granted us a key to check out Aloft ahead of the release this week, and I dipped in for a few hours last weekend – and came away pleasantly surprised.
Since I was going in basically blind during a press preview, I skipped joining a multiplayer world and created my own single-player world to test out; you can choose to toggle on creative mode and peaceful mode when you do, though I didn’t initially. You can also check custom islands to appear in the game, though since I haven’t downloaded or created any, my options were blank. I’m encouraged to see all these tweakables; Aloft is being marketed as a “feel-good, cozy survival game,” and that isn’t a fib. I don’t actually want a totally peaceful world, but I’m not into masochism either. I love that we get choices.
Character creation is darling. I personally favor this stylized, cartoony character type, simple but high-end. Notably, there’s no binary gender choice, meaning you can freely choose from a whole range of bodies, hair, and facial hair to make whatever kind of composite person you choose. Yes, you can play a chonky dude or a broad-shouldered lady with a beard. Even the hair choices are good. Extra gold star for the eye choices; I haven’t seen irises that even come close to my own or my daughter’s eye color in a game before outside of mods in The Sims franchise.
Once I made it to the game world, it played, well, like a typical survival sandbox, meaning I was immediately happily clicking to collect wood and stones, which helpfully light up so you don’t miss them, then moving on to learning to craft with the mats I was hoarding, then following all the sparkles and looting all the baskets while my brain said, “What’s this? What’s this?” on loop.
I really need to stress this more: The basic, rudimentary gameplay here is very similar to the basic, rudimentary gameplay in most of the other survival sandboxes I have played, from No Man’s Sky and Valheim to Astroneer and Ylands. You are going to spend your first few hours learning how to craft and what to craft and then building The Big Thing that will move you from the local area to the global area, whether we’re talking about pirate islands or planets. From there, you’re more or less on your own to survive, build, and explore, suffering varying degrees of hostility from the wildlife and regions you encounter.
The concept that sets Aloft apart, at least from the survival sandboxes I am most familiar with, is the conceit that you’re gliding between floating sky islands and literally piloting one of the islands as your skyship. You’re not just building a spaceship or a raft. You are transforming an island into an earthen dirigible.
Initially, the game rather vaguely tells you to go out and explore the other nearby islands, to discover specific chunks of sailing knowledge (recipes, basically), all in an effort to get your home island up and running. Exploration! As core gameplay!
To get to those local islands, you’ll be making use of gliding as the key movement style. If I’m perfectly honest, I think the gliding itself is the weakest part of the whole game. I found it awkward even after hours of practice. Turning off the default Y-axis inversion helped me a lot, but I still found steering unintuitive. It works well enough getting between islands, but getting around the larger islands with lots of tiers? I found myself crashing and flailing quite a bit, especially when trying to sail up under islands to get into hidey holes accessible only from that direction (which you will definitely need to do). I’m spoiled by Guild Wars 2 gliding, perhaps. Or maybe I just need more practice.
In any case, the first island I landed on was actually corrupted – covered in fungus and largely inaccessible until I smashed a particularly annoying myconid tree and mobs with my tools and cleansed the whole island. Once cleansed, the island provided both the sailing knowledge I was after and piles of seeds, sugar, and rope.
I did run into inventory overload issues quite a bit – I got major Valheim vibes here – but I love the Guild Wars 2-esque method for discovering smaller-scale recipes.
As I was looking for the fourth and final island for the tutorial quest, I landed on a fungal island whose inhabitants swarmed and wrecked my face. Turns out you can get only so far using pickaxe as your weapon. The game actually resurrected me that time not on the original starter island but a different island nestled alongside another mini-ship. That gave me time to figure out how to eat for buffs and craft a sword – and those bandages I found came in handy, too. Either way, there’s nothing particularly punitive here.
I didn’t dive deeply into the combat system, though it must be more elaborate than “stick ’em with the pointy end” as I noticed I was unlocking some maneuvers along the way. Thus far, I haven’t encountered anything else that my trusty sword can’t take on, however.
Once I finished the questline and tricked out a fun waterfall island with all the trappings of a skyship, I was able to access the map, plop a waypoint, and set my ship to head to a totally new biome, which took kind of a long time (10 minutes or so?) to reach. But I was rewarded with new architecture, new plants, and my first glimpse of real animals – sheep, as it happens. In fact, the animals – along with farming and cooking – are the gameplay bits I most wanted to see, as they’re usually present but underwhelming in survivalboxes.
But the new biome and island just kick off another exploration mystery, as UI prompts and my own crafted nature journal urged me to destroy diseased trees and hunt down more fungal dudes, as well as rebalance the existing flora and fauna, in order to restore the island’s ecosystem. If that sounds familiar to MMO players, it’s because upcoming MMORPG Star’s Reach has a similar ecological theme, and players will likewise (hopefully) restore the corrupted and ruined locations they discover. I spent quite a bit of time roaming around planting seeds!
I will say that exploring the first new island of the new biome took me an irritatingly long time. The next-to-last mob group was hiding in a pitch-black cave and swarmed me in a group of five or so mobs (trusty sword triumphed, don’t worry). But then I spent an hour failing to find the last spawn, which was super annoying. I actually came back on Monday to try again and spent yet another hour of touch-and-go gliding before I finally figured out I had to swoop under and then up and then backwards (ug). I have notoriously thin patience for hide-and-seek “gotcha” exploration, so maybe it’s just a me problem. But overall, I still enjoyed the experience? I can’t explain it. It was annoying and compelling at the same time.
A few other assorted topics I want to mention:
- The wind and storms in this game are incredible! The wind up in the islands is logically strong, and seeing it rustle through the trees at full gust actually makes it feel supremely realistic. That was such a smart touch on the part of the environment designers.
- The whole game feels like a nod to Breath of the Wild, especially the music. I didn’t particularly enjoy the gameplay of BOTW, but the world and ambiance are riveting.
- At times, it also reminded me of Journey, if Journey were a sandbox. Again, it’s the music, the stark lack of NPCs, and the “lost civilization” motif.
- MMO players might consider turning on the third-person camera for that MMO viewpoint feel (it’s F4).
- Prior to crafting my glider, I threw myself off a cliff to see what would happen. It’s my tradition of 15 years to test out a particularly dumb death in demos. But the game just started me back at the beginning with all my stuff. No big deal. Not punitive. I kind of love it.
- Make sure you flip through the screenshots of testers with weeks and months of playtime because they really show what can be done with the gameworld once you’ve gotten to the end and tricked out your islands. I’m looking forward to collaborating with the fam and planning a skyship intentionally instead of just slapping down my sails and rudders wherever. And I want a farm!
- There is something akin to a storyline endgame here, as you’re meant to eventually progress to cleansing the Leviathan, a giant flying creature on whose back you can ultimately build a flying city. I don’t know if it’s done on purpose, but when I first emerged into the daylight, I saw what had to be the Leviathan sailing overhead; from below, it looked like a long chain of massive stone turtles.
I originally sat down with my press key intending to give this game a cursory look so I could talk about it lightly on the next podcast because I was exhausted and I’d already written two long-form pieces the day before. But instead, four hours later, I was still in there flying my island to get to a distant archipelago. Day two and six hours later, my kids were hovering over my shoulder wanting to know if they can play and when does it launch. That’s a pretty good sign that there’s a spark here, as is my urge to buy it in spite of my notorious dislike for early access.
But even now as I’m typing the article the game deserves, I’m missing my personal Howl’s Moving Castle and wondering when I’ll have time to get back in there to loot some more baskets.
