Lost Skies is a survival adventure game where you soar the skies in a beautiful post-apocalyptic world. Read our review of its early-access build to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.

Everything We Know About Lost Skies

Lost Skies Story Plot

In a time long past, the world was once full of diverse civilizations living in harmony, teeming with culture, technology, and innovation. Humanity fully commanded the land, the sea, and the sky with their technical prowess—it was certainly the golden age for humankind. That is, until a fateful calamity struck the world, tearing it apart and leaving only destruction in its wake. Most of the world perished in the catastrophe, shattering the land into tiny floating islands. Humanity…was gone.

…Or so it seems. Players will take on the role of an unassuming survivor, who has now awakened after centuries of stasis into a technologically-advanced ship called the Ark. Stirred awake by the Ark’s resident artificial intelligence, PRISM, they are now set to embark on a journey to uncover the truth behind the grand downfall of humanity.

Lost Skies Gameplay

In this open-world survival game, players will be able to fly through the skies to visit tons of floating islands with their own resources and types of wildlife—as well as remnants of the past. As these islands were part of a glowing civilization from hundreds of years ago, ancient technology is scattered across the fragmented world, waiting to be discovered and harnessed by humankind once again. Discover ancient ruins, battle the hostilities within, and acquire new knowledge and loot to further enhance your budding journey.

Decide whether to trek on foot, scaling the hefty stone cliffs, use the handy-dandy grappling hook to zip and zap through the air like Spider-Man, or build your own custom ship to explore even further than what the eye can see. The shipbuilding mechanic allows players to fully customize every single facet of their skyship, making it just the way they want it to be.

However, going on a journey isn’t easy. Gather materials such as building materials and food to survive, then craft them into usable furniture, tools, or dishes. There’s plenty of utility items and decorations to create.

And what fun is an adventure like this alone? Invite up to three other friends to discover more of this stunning world—the sky is literally the limit!

Lost Skies Release Date

Released on April 18, 2025, Lost Skies is now available to be purchased in Early Access on Steam for $24.99. According to the developers, the game will be in Early Access for the next three to four months with an aim to fully release by Q3 2025, however, this timeline is still subject to change.

Digital Storefronts
Steam
$24.99

Lost Skies Review [Early Access]

More Like Lost Ships

With a subtitle like that, I’d like to preface the review by saying that I actually very much enjoyed the game and it carries a whole lot of potential, but the "disappearing ships" game-breaking bug really soured the experience for me—more on that later.

Nevertheless, Lost Skies is a survival-adventure title with its fair share of the good and the bad. Survival adventure games are nothing new to me and I share quite an enthusiasm for it, playing titles like the classic Minecraft, to Valheim, Palworld, and The Forest and others. I love getting to craft things and see how they’re upgraded, as well as amassing tons of resources (I like hoarding every single interactable item if I can see it). Lost Skies seemed right up my alley, and I was very much excited.

Visually Stunning

Let’s start off with the graphics—after all, it’s the first thing you see the moment you boot up the game. While the graphics are not as intricately detailed as it is in other more graphically-enhanced games, it’s still stunning in its own right. It’s clean and simple, with not too many assets cluttering the environment—after all, you’re in a post-apocalyptic world situated in the sky. Usually, when you think of a world that has been met by a terrible calamity, you’d think that it would be barren, dry, and overall dreadful. Lost Skies, however, takes it to the other end of the spectrum.

From the swaying grass to the leaves and to the visible wisps of wind curling about against the bright blue sky, it’s serene and peaceful. I found myself just walking along to and fro islands sometimes just to take it all in. It’s bare, but beautiful. The wildlife like the flying Blue Mantas and the Atlas Shrimp (yes, Shrimp) are lovely to look at, especially the Shrimp—they glow a faint teal light because of the Atlas Dust in their bodies, and if you squint a little, they kind of look cute. Even the inside of the various ruins you will encounter are charming in their own right, whether they’re the "nice" green-lighted ones or the hostile Seraph ruins with attacking Drones.

Live Out Your Spider-Man Dreams

Granted, grappling hooks aren’t anything new in video but we’ve gotta talk about the grappling hook and its mechanics in Lost Skies. These handy tools are usually reserved for just pulling players from one end to the other and…that’s it. Sometimes, you can only even use them in certain situations, even if technically you can just use a grappling hook everywhere. Well, Lost Skies got you covered.

It’s easily one of my favorite things about the game, where I can swiftly move from island to island by blazing through the air like Spider-Man. You can hook onto virtually any single stable object or land, which grants some pretty cool travelling techniques. If you’re too lazy to trek the proper way up a slope to the upper levels of an island, you can just aim your grappling hook to the top of the cliff or an overhanging rock, and pull yourself up like an elevator. Easy peasy.

Or…take it to the next level and unleash your inner Spider-Man or Tarzan. Some islands have these mixes of small and giant rocks just floating nearby, and some of them are arranged in a formation that stretches as far as the nearby island. In other games, those formations are just a beautiful backdrop. In Lost Skies, that is an adrenaline-pumping grappling hook bridge right there. No need for a ship to get to an adjacent island if a rock bridge is there! There’s just something superbly cool about zipping and zapping through the sky like it’s no one’s business. The animation and motion is fluid, the controls for this portion of the game are smooth—it’s an amazing experience all around.

A Puzzle-Lover’s Dream

I like myself a good puzzle, and Lost Skies has that department covered too. There are several puzzles scattered all around the world, deep within the ruins of ancient civilization. From simple switch-flipping puzzles to coiling your grappling hook on generators to power up pillars (and more that I haven’t unlocked yet, according to the Compendium), there’s a puzzle in almost every nook and cranny that’s just waiting to be solved. They’re not terribly hard to decipher, but some may require you to be more observant, which adds a little challenge in itself. It also breaks up the monotony of gathering resources every time you step on a new island, which makes for more varied gameplay.

Interesting Bite-Sized Pieces of Lore

I found it cool that just from the character customization screen, you’re already given quite a bit of lore from the get go. Players can choose between 11 different Ancestries, each with their own little spiel around three to four paragraphs long dictating that tribe’s history. Each tribe also has their own unique face paint which can be slightly changed according to the tribe’s signature colors. And thus, I decided on hailing from the Verduba island people, who worshipped a god that was supposedly the personification of ice. Super…cool. (Pun intended.) The world was supposedly full of advanced technology and whatnot, but they were still very much guided by culture and elements—it’s a nice little detail.

As you go through the islands one by one and unearth the ruins within, you also encounter little Datapads from the people that seemed like they were getting ready for the calamity, discovering more about what actually went through all those years ago. It’s an interesting part of the game that really makes for better worldbuilding, reminding players that while you see all the beauty around you now, the world before was much different.

Clunky Controls

While I admit I praised the grappling hook controls, controls in other aspects are…not as good—most notably in combat and in maneuvering the ship. The usual WASD keys and all other crafting controls are pretty standard and I found little to no problem with them, but combat leaves quite a bit to be desired. The dodge takes a little longer to process, which isn’t good in a combat environment—when in battle, you want your controls to be snappy and intuitive lest you get hit. Now, I know it’s no Soulslike or anything, but having a janky dodge mechanic isn’t that great.

For maneuvering the ship, this may be attributed to the game’s physics engine, which is quite outstanding in a way. It takes in the weight of the ship as well as how the design is in traversing the hunk of wood and metal through the air, which challenges players to actually think on it. However, it felt clunky because I couldn’t steer it the way I wanted it to, and since you’re literally on floating islands in the sky, the wind can be pretty unforgiving, steering you slightly off course and whatnot.

The game was also not clear on some of the controls on screen—holding the Shift key closes your ship’s sails so that you can "brake" the ship, but it doesn’t say how to open it again. I tried pressing all the buttons on my keyboard but to no avail. Frustrated, I had to head out of driving mode, jump to the top of my ship myself, and undo the sails. There may have been a certain key to press, but why was it not part of the initial commands on the screen? Perhaps it’s a little oversight on their part, but it made ship exploring more difficult than advertised. I’ll stick to swinging like Tarzan when I can, thanks.

Bugs, Glitches, and Disappearing Ships

The game randomly freezes at times, despite the game not having too many assets present on screen. It was literally just my character, and two tiny insect critters trying to beat me to a pulp. However, since it’s an open-world game, perhaps the sheer volume of assets for that entire area was slowing it down a little bit. But with that, there could have been more optimization; my PC’s specs are comfortable enough to play several resource-hogging games, but I was getting freeze frames not on those titles—but on Lost Skies, which has minimum and recommended system requirements that most of the general public can run.

Another minor bug that was rather annoying was when interacting with objects from NPCs (for example, when you acquire your first firearm), a red warning pops up and says that "Someone else is using this." This warning will continue to appear every time you examine the NPC’s items. It ruins the experience quite a bit, especially that it obscures half of the text that you’re just trying to read. Instead of reading the world’s lore easily by simply picking it up and going through the text, you’d need to wait a few seconds before even getting to read most of what the Datapad has to say. I was very sure I was playing a singleplayer game—there’s no "someone else" to use that same Datapad.

However, the worst bug I encountered has got to be this one. My entire ship just disappeared—the entire ship, just gone for no apparent reason. I flew my newly-made ship to an all-new island that was not connected to all the other islands I explored, and explored. All I did was go into a ruin and defeated all the drones there, as well as looted some pretty valuable items for crafting. When I stepped out of the ruins, my victorious moment quickly turned to annoyance as my ship was nowhere to be found, leaving me stuck on the island. The handy compass on top of the screen did show that my ship was somewhere in the sky (I landed it on the island, but okay) and it was…almost 4500 meters away. Huh. While resources are not terribly hard to come by, it’s frustrating to build everything again from gathering the iron, wood, and Atlas Dust (which is, at that point in time, ONLY dropped by Atlas Shrimp and they only have like 5 of those per island) to building a shipyard, and crafting everything else…oh boy. With that, I quit the game (for now) to rest my tired self, gearing myself up for tomorrow’s resource gathering. Not today, Lost Skies.

I scoured through the game’s Steam reviews to see if anyone was having the same annoying bug as I did and lo and behold, some people even got it worse—their ENTIRE worlds were being deleted by random crashes. Imagine losing all your work to a crash…it’s incredibly frustrating. I just lost a raggedy old ship on singleplayer but other players reported losing everything, including entire structures, on multiplayer servers as well. Double whammy.

However, even with all these bugs and glitches needing a whole lot of fixing, Bossa Studios seems to be continuously working on the game, launching the first hotfix patch three days after its Early Access release and assuring players that they are constantly reading the feedback and the reviews to make it even better.

Very Rough On The Edges, But With Potential

Lost Skies is conceptually an interesting and enjoyable game to play alone or with friends, with tons of things to craft, a creative shipbuilding mechanic, an awesome grappling hook feature, and several unique islands to explore, coupled with clean and charming graphics. However, at its current state, its greatness is marred by literal game-breaking bugs and janky controls that otherwise make for a frustrating experience.

Nevertheless, the game’s in Early Access—I’m wholly excited to see what Lost Skies still has in store for its players. For $25, it has a lot of content to go through already, so if you’re willing to risk the bugs and glitches, it’s a pretty good deal. Otherwise, wait for the game to be updated before diving head first into its stunning world.

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Lost Skies Product Information

Title	Lost Skies
Release Date	April 18, 2025 (Early Access)
Developer	Bossa Studios
Publisher	Bossa Studios
Supported Platforms	PC
Genre	Action, Adventure, Survival
Number of Players	1-4
ESRB Rating	RP
Official Website	Lost Skies Official Website

Charlene Sarmiento

An RPG enthusiast with a love for cozy games. Might also be addicted to gacha games too, but it's a sensitive topic for her wallet.