Aloft is the latest in-progress title from Astrolabe Interactive, their previous project was Sacrifice Your Friends, which was a top-down multiplayer fighting/shooter where you fight each other in small contained areas. Aloft seems to be something that is completely new and so far it looks amazing.
The Amazing Visuals
Even though the footage that is on their steam page is from an early access build, it already looks vibrant and colorful. The environments will consist of mountainous greenery, lush forests, ruins, islands and ships that float in the sky. They showcased gliding areas where we can travel from one to another almost like in the recent Zelda games.
The survival aspects of it already seem fleshed out with us harvesting wood, rocks, certain plants etc, gathering to use to build our home base. We will also be able to plant our own gardens, go on hunting various kinds of wildlife like giant living mushrooms, human-sized fungi and various kinds of combinations that are sure to be a surprise.
It seems since we’ll mostly be on floating islands, the main theme or feature would be to use the winds to power the complex systems we build. Kind of like using the redstone from Minecraft to build out entire self-sustaining systems.
Lots Of Exploration
It can’t be a survival title without a lot of exploration. After we establish an island as our base, we have to start gathering resources from the floating islands surrounding ours. Thus we’ll have to craft melee weapons and bows to go on hunts on the neighboring islands and purify them by finding the corrupt seed that is present on them.
Finding and disposing of these seeds gets rid of the dark enemies that plague the islands and restores them to their natural state which then allows us to harvest it for resources such as wood, food and other necessities.
We can even collect animals from these islands to bring back to our place when we are ready to create a farm. The pictures and video show that we can even pet the adorable sheep, chickens and goats that were shown.
A Focus On Co-op And Community
While the game may be fully playable alone for those that enjoy it that way, Astrolabe made sure that groups of friends can play together to build the base of their dreams. Each lobby can hold up to a maxim of 7 players. With the proper organization and teamwork, groups of players will be able to efficiently build, gather resources, craft and finally take on the corruption really easily.
We can also use an in-game build editor that lets us customize whatever we wanna build and share it with the community. Thus helping anyone else populate their worlds with the builds that we created.
For games like these, fostering a strong community is the way to expand the life of the game. Games like Stardew Valley, Graveyard Keeper and other niche indie titles have been running for so long due to how dedicated the community of those games are.
Conclusion
While we are a long way from an official version 1 release, the game is set to release in early access on January 15th. The game has already received a ‘Most Anticipated Award’ due to how unique their concept is in the cozy-survival genre. Aloft has a very interesting concept and it is sure to amaze the wider public if they manage to execute or fully complete the features that they’ve showcased.
However, caution needs to be taken on games releasing in early access as lots of mechanics and visuals may change in the future as the developers keep working on it, but this is where a fostering community will shine as they can then communicate the mechanics they like and don’t like, what subsystems need more work etc.
All in all we only have to wait a few days to experience what Aloft is showing and hopefully the developers will be able to complete their work on the game and reach a version 1 this year to earn this game its place among the greats in the cozy-survival genre.