Airborne open world Atmosfar gets an early access release date and a trailer full of flying islands, cloud cruisers and sky taxis

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

There was a time when open worlds made of flying islands really seemed like the New Hotness. I guess The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the obvious trendsetter, but my mind always returns to Bossa's ill-fated aerial MMO Worlds Adrift. I have fond memories of a preview session in which a developer and I tried to rebuild a wildly rolling airship in a hurricane. We failed, but a good time was had plummeting and dying.

More recently, we've had Lost Skies (another Bossa joint, born of Worlds Adrift's crashlanded remains), Bohemia's Hytales-ish Everwind, and the curiously fungal Aloft, none of which appear to have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of the Steam Top 20 Most Played. Still, the zeppelin fanciers among game developers keep trying to make fetch happen. Here's a trailer for Atmosfar, which now has an early access release date - 29th October.

Atmosfar is a giddy aerial exploration game after the heart of No Man's Sky, but I'm already trying to escape it

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Oh hi there! Why yes, I am free to chat. Please excuse the wind noise, I'm currently tumbling to my doom in Atmosfar, after getting lost in a cloud bank and exhausting my fuel. This kind of thing happens to me regularly in Atmosfar - an open world survival game that plays out across clusters of floating islands, with players scooting about in adorable, propellor-powered airships.

Many of the islands are quite large, with proper landing pads and bases set up by NPC scavengers. Many of them teem with non-human life: rainforests full of nectar droplets and carnivorous plants, meadows of ponderous honking lizards, and mossy grottos where you'll find caches of batteries and possibly get eaten by mantids. It's important to make the most of these larger islands, gathering materials for crafting at your deployable campsite (which straps pleasingly to the back of your whirring fly-mobile). It's particularly important to mine hydrogen crystals you can refine into fuel.

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Airborne open world Atmosfar gets an early access release date and a trailer full of flying islands, cloud cruisers and sky taxis

Atmosfar is a giddy aerial exploration game after the heart of No Man's Sky, but I'm already trying to escape it