I don’t know what it is about the state of the world in 2026, but this is the second game in as many days that starts off with me, the character, either in a criminal work program or so deep in corporate debt that my first goal is to get to paying it off. I get that we need “a reason” to be doing what we’re doing, but yeesh. How about a little light fantasy, even?

In ATMOSFAR (all caps), I took on the role of a criminal who is assigned to a scrap yard. My job is to refine the junk I find around me and stick it into the recycler. Happy days. The futuristic prison I inhabit is guarded by hovering robots with attitude problems, and everyone, bot and NPC alike, sound like they’re chatting through Half-Life 2’s walkie-talkies.

It’s not long before the requisite escape sequence kicks in, and I’m commandeering a small flying vehicle — another constant that seems to be popping up in these games more and more often as we’ll see later. This is not a high-performance shuttle; it’s basically an anvil with propellers that I guessed had to be flown through a series of floating rings as a means to teach me how to control the thing, towards a marker that suddenly appeared on my HUD.

Now I am on a floating island, with a series of chores to handle, but I’m not entirely sure what, exactly, I have to do to complete them.

I still have my salvage gun, and there are tons of items I can use it on it get some bespoke mineral as well as plastics, fabric and more from the garbage. But I also found a ready-made camp which provided me with a crafting bench, but little instruction on how to use it or what I should be making. Since I didn’t know what to do at that point, I kept on following the marker.

At this point, I found a welding gun, and managed to repair some of my air-taxi which I had crashed into the island because it ran out of fuel. Sadly, I now need to actually craft certain parts to complete the repairs, but the crafting bench is now on the other side of the island.

ATMOSFAR is the next in a long line of survivalbox “floating island” games. In this case, our survival elements are fuel and power. The blue tube on the backpack is the power, and the glowing yellow tube is jetpack fuel. The air taxi also requires fuel which currently makes it of limited use, as I haven’t found a new source of gas since I left the prison. Food replenishes the green meter at the bottom of the screen, and that’s pretty much it. Everything else so far has been about looking around, collecting materials (into a painfully small inventory that forces hoarding choices), and…I’m not entirely sure what. I have to find a mysterious faction that is sending me coded messages through data pads I pick up here and there, but I’m not sure what my overall goal is.

Truth be told, this seems to be a good game, but it’s also re-treading a lot of recent tropes in video games. There’s the back-foot starting conceit, the flying-as-a-feature…feature, weird unexplained floating islands, collecting items into limited space, crafting, probably base-building somewhere in here…I don’t know what exactly this game brings new to the table, and if I have to play another 10 hours to find out, I might as well play a similar game that hits the ground running. It’s not a bad take in the genre, though, so don’t get me wrong. It’s got a bit of an Astroneer vibe, using the backpack to indicate power and fuel levels, and Aloft vibes with the flying and island-hopping. It seems like it will be a perfectly good game, although not necessarily a great game, so keep an eye on it if it seems like your cup of tea.