At time of writing, I'm about 45 hours into Aloft, in less than a week. I'm still in the Emerald Isles. In fact I restarted from scratch after 20 hours because I realised I'd missed so much at the beginning and wanted to do better. I may have found my spirit game 🧡
If I had to tagine it, I'd say "It's like Minecraft but with better graphics" because I honestly think that's the most similar game to it that I've played. I also love Minecraft, FYI.
It's a very slow and calm game. Truly cozy. I don't enjoy combat but even corrupted islands are easy, and you can turn off enemy attacks anyway. It's obviously subjective, but it's exactly what I'd been looking for, personally.
There's no quests (other than the initial 'hints' at the beginning to get you started), you just need to explore and work it out yourself. There's no relationship building (in fact you're in the world alone in single player mode, with just animals for company). There IS cooking, farming, exploring, crafting and flying. All of which you need to discover as you play, in order to progress. I spent a good few (real time) hours just flying around, picking a home island and building my wooden cottage though, without progressing at all 😂
The map is massive.
The audio is outstanding. I usually turn off in game music as soon as I start because it annoys me, but I'm happy to leave this on, and also spoiler - there are unique audio signals for knowledge stones, frescoes, atlas stones and corruption nodes, so you know you've got to look around if you can't see it immediately.
Yes, it's a bit buggy because it's in early access, but it runs absolutely fine on my Steam Deck. I've only had one freeze up (wasn't even doing anything, it was on the menu screen) and I didn't lose any data. The bugs I've found have been more visual things. But that could just be my graphics settings to be honest.
I've found the Medium preset works best on SD. High runs fine, but goes a bit mental on corrupted islands when things are a bit more fast paced.
I haven't tried multiplayer yet but I could see that being much like Minecraft as well.
I have downloaded a few islands from the Steam Workshop to try (very easy process - they show up automatically in game once subscribed to and you can pick them on the home island screen to spawn into your current world), because there are some really talented builder players out there, but ultimately I decided to stick to my own build because it's just fun 😊
I'm excited to see where the devs go with it. I'll be sticking around, for sure.

fun!!! enjoyable!!! calming!!! and for those who want to fly this is total the game for you.

GREAT GAME watch for crashes tho since its early access