Your hot air balloon cannot steer. Hold to burn and climb, release to sink, and ride whichever wind layer is blowing toward the next landing pad. Sink onto it to refuel; a bullseye grows your combo and gold pads pay triple. Touch the grass anywhere else and you lose fuel.
👆 Hold to burn · release to sink ← All gamesAloft hands you the controls of a hot air balloon drifting over an endless field at sunset, and then takes the steering away. A real balloon has no rudder: the pilot only chooses how high to fly, and the wind at that height does the rest. That is the whole game. The sky is split into three layers, LOW, MID and HIGH, and each one blows its own way. Tall poles along the field fly a coloured streamer at every layer, and the altimeter on the left repeats what they say.
Hold anywhere to fire the burner and climb; let go and the envelope cools and sinks. Landing pads slide across the field toward you. Climb into the layer whose wind carries you toward the next pad, then let go at the right moment so the drift on the way down puts the basket on the white bullseye just as the pad passes beneath. The thin line on the grass shows where you would touch down if you dropped straight now, and your shadow turns green when a pad is under you. A bullseye grows the combo up to five times; an edge landing still pays and refuels but resets it. Small gold pads pay triple, but they slide further and often sit upwind. Touch the grass away from a pad and you bounce, losing fuel and the combo. The burner drinks fuel fast, so every climb is a cost, and an empty tank ends the flight.
In the first act each layer keeps its wind, so you can learn that, say, HIGH blows right. After about twenty seconds the layers start to swap. The streamers flash white for a moment before every swap, and the far poles already fly the new pattern, so a sharp pilot rides the wind a layer is about to have. Chill mode gives wider pads and calmer air; Hard mode makes them small and the winds fierce.