Oh. Oh…hell yes. Now we’re talking!

What if we took the air-ship building vibe of Lost Skies and slapped some Palworld on there? We get Guardians of the Wild Sky.

I almost bounced out quickly because I didn’t really want to play “Scoliosis Simulator 2026”. What’s up with this woman’s posture?

Anywho, I started out in the hold of a ship. Talking to all of the NPCs revealed that everyone was worried about the myths of terrible creatures out in the world that we might encounter. Some people considered them legends, some people believed them to be facts. Consider this to be foreshadowing. I do.

The captain, having gotten a meal of bad oysters, needed someone to pilot the ship so… I guess that’s me for some inexplicable reason.

Low and behold…an air ship. Like ATMOSFAR, Lost Skies, Aloft, et al., I like the idea of a flying home base, but the most fundamental conceit behind such designs means that flying these things is going to be absolute dogshit of a time for me. I know, they’re not space ships or dogfighters and they move slowly and at the mercy of the wind, but I end up crashing these things far more often than I should be. Flying in these games is my least favorite aspect.

Good news, then! I was told to “head North” — with no central magnetic pole I have no idea how they determine North, but I had a compass, so I went North — and eventually ran into some kind of firey vortex which resulted in a crashed ship and, suspiciously, no other NPCs.

What I did have, were cuddly critters!

Yep, it’s a catch-em-all survivalbox game with airships and floating islands. This, however, is not the first aspect that I was told to go about doing. Instead, a small yet illuminated bird kept appearing with tutorial hints for me to follow. It told me to collect rocks and crystals which littered the area and create the…uh…”capture crystals” that I’d need to snag these little critters.

I snagged the Fluff and the Eager Driftwing as those were the only two in the area. The driftwing acts as my glider, so not only could I eventually get back onto a sky ship, but I could hang-glide between islands. First, though, I had to ride the whale.

Flying above me was a massive sky whale. Using the drifting and nearby updrafts, I managed to get on the back of this thing to collect the “Windseer’s Eye” which pushed back the fog of war in my immediate area on the map.

Next, the interdimensional tut-oriole told me to set up a base, so I collected more materials, unlocked some additional recipes using the skill points I had earned by leveling up, a la A.R.K., Conan Exiles, and other well known survivalbox games, and threw down my land ownership claim flag and a campfire.

I need to build a storage barrel but I spent all my skill points on other things and have no more to buy the storage barrel, so I have to find something to do that will earn me XP. Chopping trees, mining rocks, and collecting things all earn XP, which is good, but not a lot of XP to help me reach my goal quickly, which is not so good.

I have yet to deploy my critters beyond the hang glider, but they can be used in battle, and I was told by the instruction bird that once I set up my camp, I can put my animals to work, a la Palworld, although the bird introduced this aspect by first telling me to build them beds so they can rest and not get disgruntled. I’m interested to see how this plays out in GotWS since in Palworld, the Pals have a somewhat comical design to many of them, which kind of makes the whole “indentured servitude” take a little more light-hearted. Here, the Guardians can get pretty no-nonsense from what I’ve seen, so it might feel a little more like a chain gang if they’re constantly scowling at me even after I give them a pet bed to sleep in.

So far this is most certainly one of the games I really want to see fixed and finished. I played a lot of Palworld when it launched (until I didn’t, of course) and I like the idea of having a deep bench of sidekicks for different scenarios. Even relying on pressgang labor for automated tasks at the home base has some appeal (the automation aspect, not the…you know…slavery) as it’s not just reactors and conveyor belts. I’m not stoked about the airship aspect, as I really dislike how the industry implements those controls and reactions, but it is what it is.