Aloft’s Clever, Cozy Survival Mechanics Impress in Latest Demo

ign.com:

With a focus on ecological restoration and a cool approach to exploration and crafting, Aloft shows a lot of promise as a feel-good survival-crafting game. This cozy take on the genre encourages players to glide between floating islands in the sky and fight corruption to restore their ecosystems while discovering the ruins of an ancient civilization. Notably, its first-person town-building and crafting systems seemed exceptionally deep based on my hands-off demo of the game.

In just half an hour, one of Aloft’s developers walked me through the beginning of the game and showed me in-depth tutorials for its myriad systems; so many that I’m glad I went hands-off to watch an expert at work. Nearly everything I saw seemed clever and engaging at the very least and was always framed around Aloft’s core conceit of creating a survival game with a positive, restorative message and vibe.

Off the bat, Aloft’s setup is immediately cool: you start out on a floating island in the sky with nothing. As you work your way through the starting area, you'll eventually get a glider (think somewhere between Avatar: The Last Airbender and Breath of the Wild), and take flight to another island. Zooming from island to island looked really freeing, and developer Astrolabe Interactive made a point to incorporate systems to keep it engaging and interesting rather than just a hollow jump from one floating rock to another.

Aloft’s momentum systems fuel a lot of its moving parts. It's crucial for successfully navigating the sky, and certain environmental bits like updrafts can help you gain some extra momentum—and height—as you make your way to the next island. Once you build enough momentum and land on another island, you might find yourself in a corrupted ecosystem.

Overrun with mushrooms and a dense, gray-brown fog, it's immediately clear that something's not right here. You can't even harvest or mine anything from these out-of-whack biomes until you stave off the fungal corruption. Based on what