Even if I was mostly being left to my own devices during this run of Lost Skies, I still managed to have adventures. Or perhaps more appropriately, misadventures. But at the same time, I’ve also made a significant step forward as well, as that headline and header image can attest.
Yes, the Goldiyacht now officially has a pair of engines strapped to her. And I managed to get the unlock after retracing my steps. But before I had to do any of that, I had to complete the task that was assigned to me by the polls. I had to retrieve my sky whale stuff.
Do you all recall last week when I expressed concern that the bag with those shiny rocks was going to be below the death plane? Well, as it turns out, that wasn’t the case. Yes, they were at a really low altitude, but it was also an altitude where I wasn’t really diving too low. Heck, it even was above the cloud layer that generally coats everything when you’re falling to your eventual doom.
It took some careful steering and navigating changing altitudes and distances, but eventually I got close to my bag. I tried to steer as close as I could from my third-person camera vantage point, but I was still just out of interaction reach. But that’s OK because I’ve got a grappling hook! I’ll just latch on to it and draw it toward me!
Nope, that didn’t work. In fact, the bag started to fall lower. And in a fit of what I can only say was temporary insanity (or constant stupidity), I leaped off of my ship and tried to grab the bag and open it while glide-falling.
I got close a couple of times, but it obviously didn’t work. So now I had two death bags to retrieve.
Once again it was a bit of a struggle lining up my two goodie bags with my ship since it seemed as if they were changing positions and elevations almost constantly. Either that or the compass pinpointing doesn’t really work in wide open air. Worse yet, both of my bags were within the cloud layer, so I had to squint at the white text on white clouds in order to find the compass icons, line up the nose of my ship, slowly walk out, and retrieve my stuff.
It took a long, stressful time, but I did it. I retrieved my whale treats and the mass of materials that were in my pockets. Relieved, I set the Goldiyacht to climb altitude and immediately deposited the whale shards. I don’t know what I’ll use them for or when, but I have them now, safe and sound.
After a break to calm my nerves and immediately save my game (which can be done only by save-quitting or saving to main menu, by the way), I decided to aim my nose at the nearest island to my home base. And it just so happened that I had directed myself to Tutorial Island! I didn’t mind the decision, honestly. Maybe there were some things I left behind, I reasoned.
After parking my ship on the old docking bay that I had built at the very start of playing this game, I decided to try to run around the landing island, ensuring I hadn’t left some scannable things behind. Things were clear, but there were a lot of glowbugs that I could harvest atlas dust from, which is a highly valuable resource for most of the mid to upper tier crafts, so that’s what happened.
By the time I elected to swing over to the next island, it was dark, and I noticed that the under portion of one island was glowing green. Was this somewhere I had forgotten to visit? Did I just blithely run away from a shielded region that very likely held treasure? There was only one way to find out: Spider-Man my way on over.
It was at this point when I suddenly got bad at grapple hook use, as I completely missed an aimed-for rock as I was sailing through the air. And there was no place to grapple otherwise. I started to fall to my death again. Terrified of the consequences, I hit save and main menu in a panic, hoping against hope that I would respawn somewhere with solid ground in order to avoid sailing back to retrieve another dropped bag in the middle of thin air.
It worked. I spawned attached to a tree branch. My stuff was safe.
After that, I extremely carefully started to swing my way back to the glowing green thing. It was here that the game decided to scare me even more by making my grappling hook suddenly not work on a certain surface and my character’s usual absolutely sticky grip to not work on rocks, causing me to nearly plummet to my doom a few times over. I was beginning to believe that none of this was worth it, but my stubbornness won out over my good sense, and eventually I clambered my way on to solid ground to try a different approach.
Here is where I found an entrance into this shielded room. How fortuitous! Sure, the entrance was here all along and I should have found it sooner, but I found it now! Yay! But as it turned out, this was one of the tutorial rooms; specifically the one where you first learn how to use the grappling hook. No treasure. No goodies. No nothing.
Dejected, I continued to move along this island, now having gotten my bearings and able to differentiate what was visited and what was not. This ended up being a boon because there were a couple of locations with data disks to gather. At long last, I unlocked how to craft airship engines. It was time for Goldiyacht to get upgraded.
I cannot even begin to tell you how liberating engine power is over wind power. Suddenly the world felt like it was opened up to me all over again. Sure, the Goldiyacht’s ponderous size now makes steering her at speed a bit of a challenge, but throttle control and some careful lateral turning has made it where I could maneuver all right. I did have to disassemble a couple of crafting stations, but it’s fine. I can unlock a power core upgrade later and rebuild them. I’ve got the materials.
Speaking of materials, I had completely forgotten that I had a storage box on Tutorial Island with literally hundreds of iron ingots. Just sitting there. Unused. Sad. Lonesome. This was the galvanizing moment when I started to finally build and arrange my storage better. It was past time.
As my recounting hopefully indicated to you, Lost Skies manages to make some of the more mundane portions of survivalbox gameplay into grand little weird adventures. I’ll admit that some of this was ineptitude on my part, but much more feels like it’s just part of how this game operates. Running around for materials becomes more of a journey when you’re not sure what weird crap an island is going to throw at you. Steering an airship around to places of interest both opens up things, especially in terms of effectively having a flying home base. And, of course, there’s the general traversal; whether it’s grappling hook or airship flight, it all feels pretty good. Lost Skies has some great bones.
But to extend that analogy, it also needs more muscle mass and more skin. It feels pretty put together in some ways but incomplete and slapdash in others. It’s obvious that Bossa Studios’ use of an entire first video game to make a second one has helped in the foundational mechanics, but now it needs to refine a lot of things. It needs a map or a way to chart course. It needs a bit of a smoother progression curve, in my view. And by goodness does it feel like it needs to encourage multiplayer more; I’m still astonished at the sensation that everyone is playing in their own instances with their own individual unlocks, meaning parity among others isn’t really likely. I suppose you could argue that’s a problem with all multiplayer survivalboxes.
There’s also the problem of this game just not seeming to get a lot of support from Bossa. We went nearly a month between hotfixes after early access, as the newest one just came out this morning. I know there’s a roadmap with quite a bit of expansion planned, but the current situation is making me nervous, especially since Lost Skies could benefit from a bit more attention.
But if it does get that bit more attention as promised – and that little more extra in terms of features and content – it could be a real standout in a sub-genre that is a bit too same-y. I don’t know that I would call this worth the money, but I also don’t mind that I bought it either. I don’t know, it’s weird. Also I’m a bit of a sucker for a lot of early access games, so there’s that damage to consider.
Either way, it’s time for the Goldiyacht to sail off into the sunset and our next month’s adventure to begin – which means we’ve got a game to decide on.
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Polling wraps at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, June 6th. For now, I think I’m going to spread my engine-powered wings and maybe try to see what else is out there. This world always felt a bit like my oyster, and now I think I can start to dig in and enjoy.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
