The sky is a beautiful place, easy to believe it goes on forever no matter how much we know it thins out a couple miles up. It’s hard not to imagine living in the clouds even knowing the air pressure drops and the temperature is below freezing, with “facts” and “science” not standing a chance at holding back pure wishful thinking. Once you’re comfortably living in the sky, it seems like there should be something better to do than fight, getting caught up in a battle and losing track of the scenery, so Islands of Insight drops all danger or conflict in favor of an endless supply of puzzles scattered generously through its collection of floating islands.
There was an open play test of Islands of Insight back in September that ran for a limited time, and now it’s back as a proper demo that’s available for the foreseeable future. It’s a surprisingly meaty chunk of game, albeit opening with a disclaimer that the story and other events are compressed to fit within the area that’s available. Starting off with a character creator, you build an avatar that’s got a small handful of face and clothing options and a million ways to make their skin glow in a rainbow of colors. With character created and a short tutorial sky-island completed, an entire large sector of the map is made available to explore and de-puzzle to your heart’s content.
Islands of Insight is a mostly first-person open-world puzzle game, designed to be relaxing rather than stressful and always have something different to do if the current puzzle is a little much. Puzzles come in many forms, from tile-based grids to mobility challenges, plus perspective games, fractal pattern duplication, hide and seek, and a few more that are mentioned on one of the stat-tracker screens but not anywhere in the demo. Particular attention is paid to your character’s mobility, allowing them to double- and power-jump to higher areas and glide through the skies on light-strand wings. The reward for exploration, of course, is more puzzles, with the variety and frequency creating a gameplay loop that can be surprisingly hard to break out of. Set down black and white tiles with specific rules dictating where each color goes, chase after a ball of light as it zips from one check point to the next, soar through a series of rings, find the right spot so a series of orbs in the sky creates a circle, match three same-colored tiles to clear the board, and more all lead from one challenge to the next, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re scattered around an incredibly scenic setting that combines a lush wooded landscape with Egyptian ruins.
As you explore the available world, the random puzzles are joined by smaller areas that have specific challenges, with a main goal and sub-goals that reward you with a pulsing cube on completion. The cubes are used to unlock new areas, and in the demo at least if you’re at all thorough there won’t be any shortage of them barring progress. One of the main temple areas also has daily challenges, all of which are the “Solve X number of this/these type/s of puzzle,” some of them designed to be taken on alone and others with the random people roaming the map. Islands of Insight is a single-player online game, meaning you solve everything by yourself, but still have people wandering the map that you can interact with or ignore, with nothing requiring you to be social if you don’t want to. Whether that’s always-and-only-online or not isn’t entirely clear yet, but for a free demo, at least it’s nice to see others flitting about the landscape.
The reward for the daily challenges, as well as general puzzle progression, is in-game currency for spending on the skill tree as well as cosmetics, and here’s where Islands of Insight shows there’s still systems-tweaking to go before it’s ready. In its current state, with only the one area available, you may either solve every puzzle as you run across it or chase after the daily challenges to earn enough currency for a new outfit, but not both. Some of the quests are shared progress among all players while others are single-player only, and if there’s a way to differentiate the two, I’ve got no idea what it could be. When you get a “Complete X amount of (rare challenge) and you’ve already cleared most of them, it can be a day or so before enough new ones spawn to complete what had initially looked like a straightforward task. Other bits are more obviously just a matter of not being ready yet, like earning cosmetic upgrades that aren’t in the game, or one of the main quests in the demo area simply not being available and leaving you with a “9 of 10 completed” notification on the map screen. Even with the loose ends I put in almost 20 hours running and flying around, and while there’s work to be done to fine-tune the details, the core gameplay loop is incredibly engaging.
While there’s no release date for Islands of Insight yet, the demo is available now and not to be missed by puzzle fans. The beautiful, peaceful environment is a fantastic place to explore, and puzzles are everywhere ranging in difficulty from a fun diversion to needing a PhD in block-sliding to complete. The density means you can focus on the ones you like while mostly ignoring those you don’t care about, but none of them are actually annoying aside from a single instance of a timed match-3 speed run. The one explorable demo area promises a huge amount of puzzling in the four blocked-off zones to come, filled with new puzzle types to go with the change of scenery in lands that don’t need any more reason to explore their mysteries than that they exist.
