ALOFT

About

ALOFT is a single player and multiplayer open world simulation game. It was developed by Astrolabe Interactive and was released on January 15, 2025. It received positive reviews from players.

Soar the skies in Aloft, the co-op sandbox survival game set in a world of floating islands. Build any island into a skyship, your home in the clouds. Find lost knowledge, cure the fungal corruption, and brave the hurricane to restore the ecosystem.

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86%

Audience ScoreBased on 2,120 reviews

gameplay161 positive mentions

grinding123 negative mentions

Relaxing, cozy, and wholesome atmosphere with beautiful visuals and soothing music.
Unique and satisfying mechanics like flying islands, gliding, and building customizable flying bases.
Engaging exploration and creative building system with many unlockable crafting recipes and cute animals.

Performance issues and optimization problems causing lag and crashes even on high-end hardware.
Repetitive gameplay loop with slow progression, repetitive islands and limited enemy variety.
Poor combat mechanics and lack of meaningful rewards, leaving exploration and island restoration feeling tedious.

gameplay
387 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
42%
53%
5%
The gameplay of this early access game is praised for its unique flying and island mechanics, robust and intuitive building system, and relaxing exploration-focused loop centered on ecosystem restoration and crafting. While many find the core mechanics enjoyable and the gliding and island piloting especially satisfying, critiques highlight repetitiveness, lack of deeper progression or story, and some clunky or underdeveloped combat and resource management elements. Overall, the game offers a cozy, creative experience with solid foundations but needs more content variety, clearer guidance, and system refinements to sustain long-term engagement.
- “The flight mechanics are exactly how I've always wanted them to be in other games.”
- “The core gameplay loop—explore, battle corruption, restore the ecosystem—is both satisfying and relaxing, offering a welcome change from the genre’s typical tension and scarcity.”
- “With more than 600 modular building pieces and a unique sketchbook mechanic, players can replicate structures they find in the world simply by observing them. This mechanic blends discovery with learning, encouraging curiosity and rewarding exploration with new crafting recipes and design ideas.”
- “The core mechanic of restoring each island’s ecosystem to unlock chests or recipes is not just repetitive — it’s downright exhausting.”
- “Also your inventory feels too small, the storage system needs a lot more work and the only two gameplay mechanics right now are to kill mushroom man and to heal the ecosystem of an island, which is absolutely annoying because you gotta write down the things you need to heal it of, which are sometimes animals and insects, so you need to have a couple chests around your island full of animals and insects you have to sort yourself into the correct biome and then go back with all that to the island and sometimes you bring the wrong thing, etc, go back and forth.”
- “The gameplay loop is boring and repetitive and as I mentioned my biggest gripe is the randomness of it.”
graphics
230 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
49%
1%
The game features a charming, stylized art style with vibrant, lush environments and relaxing visuals that many find beautiful and immersive, enhancing exploration and cozy gameplay. However, despite the appealing aesthetics and satisfying animations, numerous players report performance issues and lag—even on high-end hardware—alongside some awkward animations and early access graphical rough spots like shadows and lighting. Overall, the graphics are praised for their creativity and mood-setting qualities but would benefit from further optimization and polish.
- “The visuals and art style are fantastic, exploration has become more and more rewarding, crafting and building are simple and intuitive, and while still showing some early rough spots, the polish looks better all the time.”
- “Aloft has by far some of the best visual world structure I have ever seen. The art style is a simplistic cartoony style which gives the game creative freedom allowing the wingsuit and fungal infection to exist and not feel like they’re clashing. The sound design is immaculate and the music is an 8/10.”
- “The aesthetic plays a big role in this tone—lush greenery, stylized visuals, soft lighting, and a whimsical color palette make the world feel alive and welcoming.”
- “Bad graphics and poor optimization.”
- “Even my 6950xt graphics can't get 60fps on my own home island.”
- “The fisheye FOV is rough and the graphics feel a little stutter-y which probably doesn't help with the motion sickness.”
music
198 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
51%
47%
2%
The music in the game is widely praised for its relaxing, immersive, and atmospheric qualities, often described as beautiful, calming, and perfectly complementing the exploration and building gameplay. Many users highlight its hypnotic, soothing nature with melodic drones, acoustic elements, and dynamic cues that enhance different game scenarios. While some note occasional repetitiveness and prefer to play with music muted, overall, the soundtrack is regarded as a standout feature that significantly elevates the game’s chill and cozy vibe.
- “The soundtrack is just fantastic, lovely use of melodic drones with little accents of choir, chimes or bells.”
- “The gorgeous, soul-soothing soundtrack gently caresses your ears, melting away even the most stubborn tension.”
- “First thing I want to point out is the absolutely gorgeous OST in Aloft, I rarely go out of my way to highlight a soundtrack, but this one deserves a special mention; highly recommend getting the supporter pack which includes the OST among some other goodies.”
- “But I randomly crashed once [it ended up putting me back on a previous island, like a rollback], some of the building things leave a gap, and the music is a bit repetitive.”
- “That said, there's not a lot of music in the game, so it can get pretty repetitive.”
- “One last thing - that droning tone in the background with the music I really don't like.”
story
151 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
25%
70%
5%
The game's story is generally described as subtle, environmental, and fragmented, with some players enjoying the atmospheric and exploratory storytelling but many noting a lack of a strong, coherent narrative or quest structure. While the visuals and world-building are praised, the story content is often seen as minimal or incomplete, leaving players hoping for more lore, quests, and narrative depth in future updates. Overall, the story adds ambiance and a sense of purpose but currently feels underdeveloped and occasionally repetitive.
- “The joy of discovering new islands to see the story playing out in discovering run-down buildings, helping to restore the ecosystem for islands means there's plenty of reason to return to previous islands in seeking out how to fully restore them.”
- “There’s also a deeper purpose to it all, with the quest to cure the fungal corruption and restore the world, which adds a great sense of adventure beyond just survival.”
- “Love the aesthetic and the subtle environmental storytelling; it's kind of like if Myst were a survival game.”
- “There are only faint traces of story or lore, with a very vague trail to follow, and the tasks you have to complete island by island are a dreary, repetitive grind that leaves you absolutely famished for anything new, which you never get until the very end of the current content.”
- “The storyline remains vague and underdeveloped, and core gameplay mechanics haven’t evolved.”
- “Missing story elements make it feel like we have no idea what to do as there was no storyline to follow to make us want to move to the next quest or story objective.”
grinding
127 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
2%
1%
97%
Grinding in the game is a mixed experience: while farming, crafting, and building are generally enjoyable and intuitive, many players find progression slow and resource gathering repetitive or tedious, especially when dealing with certain materials, island cleansing tasks, or inventory management. The game demands patience, with some noting that grinding can become a chore over long sessions, though others appreciate the leisurely pace and cozy farming atmosphere. Overall, grinding is a notable aspect that may appeal to fans of farming and crafting sims but could deter those seeking more streamlined or varied progression.
- “The game is not too grindy.”
- “This game really has scratched the itch of survival games that are open world with a storyline but also not too grinding.”
- “But it required me to finish all the life saplings in that section, which included one island locked behind needing a 'cure'. I give up and probably won't try again due to how much grinding I had to do because I couldn't progress naturally.”
- “Skill progression is still painfully slow, requiring excessive grinding for minimal payoff.”
- “The developers claimed to have streamlined the corruption removal process, but it’s just as tedious as before—still demanding you to repeat 3–4 tasks up to 10 times each.”
optimization
126 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
13%
68%
19%
Optimization is a major concern for this game, with many users reporting poor performance, frequent stuttering, and low FPS even on high-end hardware and consoles like the Steam Deck OLED. Despite being in early access, optimization issues—especially with CPU usage, frame rate drops during exploration, and multiplayer performance—significantly hinder the experience. While some players find it passable at lower settings, widespread performance problems remain a critical drawback that hopes to improve in future updates.
- “The performance issues have been complained about for years on the forums and it appears the devs haven't solved it yet.”
- “Without further optimizations, the performance remains a major drawback to an otherwise incredible experience.”
- “Second the game seems to be quite a workout for my GPU, even with a RTX 4090 I felt the game could do with some more performance optimizations.”
- “There is no optimization so you will have 15-40 FPS in mid and endgame moments (I have 5070ti, Ryzen 7 7700).”
- “But as it stands right now it's really unoptimized. I'm running the game at the lowest settings and still just reaching 20-25 FPS. It's so laggy it started giving me a headache not even 20 mins into the game.”
- “The game is honestly a lot of fun and has potential but it severely needs some optimization, this game should not be running at 20 FPS consistently and stuttering to load every single island.”
atmosphere
50 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
52%
48%
The game's atmosphere is widely praised for its relaxing, cozy, and immersive qualities, enhanced by gorgeous visuals, calming music, and satisfying environmental design. Players enjoy the unique blend of exploration, ecological restoration, and creative building within vibrant, dynamic floating islands, which together create a soothing yet engaging experience. Overall, the atmosphere stands out as a major strength, evoking feelings of tranquility and enjoyment that keep players deeply immersed.
- “Aloft continues to be the best, most atmospheric, and simply beautiful game I've ever had the fortune to play.”
- “The atmosphere alone is worth a poem – gentle, uplifting music, whilst you sail your island exploring the world, healing it, and finding new items, recipes and ways to expand your island.”
- “The ecosystem restoration loop (clearing fungal corruption, planting seeds, releasing animals) is satisfying the first several times, and the atmosphere throughout is consistently gorgeous.”
stability
46 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
7%
93%
The game currently exhibits a range of stability issues typical of early access titles, including frequent bugs, crashes, glitches, and performance drops, particularly in multiplayer mode. However, many players find these problems manageable thanks to ongoing developer updates, built-in fixes like the "unstuck" command, and overall decent optimization on some platforms. While stability is inconsistent and frustrating at times, the game's core experience remains enjoyable for many, with improvements expected over time.
- “The game is stable, at least for me, relatively bug free with the exception of some physics issues, and fortunately they opted not to go with a static map and to allow some modding using a built-in system.”
- “Aloft is exceptionally well optimized and bug free, especially for an early access title.”
- “There are some bugs of course, but it’s early access and so you cannot expect a bug free experience.”
- “Definitely buggy and somewhat unfinished, with optimization issues; the game freezes and stutters, causing characters to fall to their death.”
- “Buggy with many crashes and poor procedural generation, featuring islands with mechanical handles and secret rooms that lead nowhere and waste your time.”
- “The game often freezes when quitting and suffers from significant lag issues that are not solved by lowering graphics settings.”
emotional
17 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Players overwhelmingly describe the game as a cozy, wholesome, and emotionally soothing experience that fosters relaxation and heartwarming moments. Its engaging gameplay and serene atmosphere evoke a strong sense of joy and comfort, making it feel like a nostalgic and emotionally regulating escape. Despite minor flaws, the emotional core and delightful ambiance leave players feeling content and connected.
- “This is the most emotionally regulating game ever.”
- “All it has been is cozy, relaxing and heartwarming to play with my partner (and not need to stress).”
- “I love the ingame music and sound design; it goes so well with the game - the resulting overall atmosphere is top notch wholesomeness in my book.”
replayability
7 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
43%
14%
43%
The game offers decent to high replayability, particularly enhanced by custom and workshop content that keeps the experience fresh. However, some players note the core gameplay loop may become repetitive after multiple playthroughs. Suggestions for a hardcore mode could further boost replay value for those seeking more challenge.
- “The ability to add custom own-made and workshop islands adds a lot of replay value, but I could see the gameplay loop getting tedious after too many playthroughs, which is common for most games.”
- “Good game with decent replayability.”
- “Infinitely replayable.”
- “The ability to add custom own-made and workshop islands adds a lot of replay value, but I could see the gameplay loop getting tedious after too many playthroughs.”
- “Difficulty: now I understand the peaceful aesthetic and I'm all for it at times, but the introduction of a hardcore mode, where you need food and water to survive, and you lose gear or level progression upon death, would increase the replay value.”
- “Replayability is minimal as the gameplay loop becomes repetitive and lacks new challenges to keep it engaging.”
humor
7 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The game's humor is highlighted by its lighthearted and amusing moments, such as chaotic island flying and quirky enemy reactions, which create a fun and relaxing atmosphere. Players enjoy the playful freedom and often find themselves laughing together while exploring and managing their floating islands.
- “We couldn't stop laughing as we found little guys and crashed into things while flying around.”
- “The chaos can be funny when you are raising your islands around.”
- “Like I only fought two things and busted a mushroom fungal corruption node thingy and the two enemies just run at you, get staggered on impact and fly off into the middle distance (kinda funny tbh) when slain if you are looking upwards.”
character development
4 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
75%
50%
The game offers diverse character options, including playing as a feminized male or transwoman, but lacks structured character development, quests, or clear progression systems. Players primarily shape their characters through equipment and discovered traits rather than traditional skill or story-driven growth. Some desire more refined character design and deeper customization options.
- “Character design allows you to play as a feminized male or a transwoman.”
- “Some sort of character development, including skills and traits, would be welcome. I could see the game allowing you to shape yourself via equipment and choosing discovered traits.”
- “I do wish the character design was a little nicer; it's a bit angular for my liking but it's a small detail.”
- “The game itself looks to be a lot of crafting, building, collecting, roaming, but no direction, character development, or quests.”
- “Some sort of character development, skills, traits, etc. I would welcome but I could see them just going along the lines of something like Grounded where you shape yourself via equipment and maybe choosing a few discovered traits or something.”
monetization
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The monetization is generally seen as balanced and not overly aggressive, but concerns arise due to a lack of updates and new content, leading some users to feel it may be leaning toward a cash grab.
- “The longer without proper updates and new additions, the more it feels like a rug pull cash grab.”