Survival games are great at making small achievements feel like big ones; building your first hunting shelter, surviving the first night, toppling an assailant with your first semi-decent caveman weapon, it’s all very satisfying, but there's rarely that feeling of exhilaration that you get with a good single-player adventure.

Enter Aloft, a breezy co-op survival sandbox game (with a multiplayer demo available right now on Steam) set among blankets of cosy clouds and scenic islands floating in the sky. Any of these islands can become your home-slash-skyship, which you can commandeer to cut through the clouds as you explore aerial realms in search of resources, knowledge, and unravelling the mystery of why the world is floating in the first place, and why it’s beset by a deadly fungus that threatens to destroy it all.

This deadly fungus is a fine reflection of the game's unique art style, which opts for pastelly palettes and vibrant colours that make it pop from the serious survival crowd. Fungus-corrupted islands are awash with the radiant reds, purples, and oranges of the alien matter, among which you'll fight shroomy monsters to reclaim the land. The combat itself is a little more in-depth than your typically stripped-back survival game too, giving you dash-attacks, aerial combos, and other flashy moves to take down your fungal foes with.

As you settle into your skybound homestead, filling it with allotments, vibrant farmlife, and crop fields, you'll get to expand it into some truly unique designs thanks to the robust building tools at your disposal. The home-building system allows for spectacular variety, and we've already seen players creating their own aerial galleons, moss-roofed pagodas, and towering flying mansions that would give Howl's Moving Castle a run for its money. Once your dream home is built, harness the winds with elaborate turbine machines to fill your sails and slowly (then, eventually, swiftly) soar across the skies.

Aloft is a game that inspires exploration. When, standing at the helm of your ship, you get your eyeglass out and look out over the lofty firmament, you'll see player-built fortresses, lush wooded islands hiding ancient ruins, gigantic tortoises swimming through the skies with villages on their backs, and maybe a mysterious hurricane that looms menacingly over this stratospheric world. 

It's all there for you to fly to—whether with your ship or the leathery wings that you can build for your avatar—and you can do so solo or with up to eight friends. It's a survival game, sure, but its bright, inviting world and sense of adventure has shades of Nintendo's best work—maybe one in which we might expect to see a certain voiceless tunic-wearing wanderer venturing across a beautiful landscape…

Aloft is entering Early Access this Fall, but it's already soared to the top of the Steam Next Fest charts thanks to the multiplayer demo that you can play right now. So head over to Steam, wishlist the game, play the demo, and get a feel for a survival adventure that breaks free of those sloggy shackles and shoots for the skies.