Islands of Insight (v0.1.3)

Islands of Insight. As cozy online games continue to prove that not all MMOs need to be RPGs, I’m always excited to dip into a new world. Islands of Insight is the latest, a “shared-world puzzle game” of chill challenges. After a few hours with it though, I don’t think the concept gels. Islands of Insight has constructed what already feels like a great gauntlet of puzzles, it just doesn’t seem to have needed the online open world, gorgeous though it may be. Islands of Insight boasts over 10,000 puzzles and immediately introduces me to a handful of them after I’m finished designing a character with just the right shade of glistening blue glow to my skin. In the tutorial area I find logic puzzles where I need to draw patterns of black and white squares in a grid, perspective puzzles where I maintain line of sight with several pillars all crammed onto a platform, and hidden object puzzles where I need to find and click on several golden rings within a given area. It lacks some intrinsic motivation off the bat though. I wind up floundering initially without any particular goal as I’m dropped into a world where individual puzzles seem just strewn about my path. Islands of Insight seems to think that puzzles are compelling purely on the basis that I can’t help tripping over them. I don’t need to explore or uncover anything there’s no fall damage or inaccessible areas to serve as motivation so the selection of puzzles feels as if it’s been dumped on the floor in front of me like an upended tub of unsorted Legos. The tutorial does at least present me with a checklist to complete a certain number of each initial puzzle style, so I’m not left entirely to my own devices. After that, I make a beeline for all the floating cubes that trigger the logic grid puzzles that I was introduced to in the tutorial area. The ramping difficulty in each black and white grid keeps me seeking more and more of them. Eventually they begin asking me to fill bigger, more complex grids without, say, using three of the same color in succession while working around a given set of unchangeable squares. There’s a version with a sort of Minesweeper twist where numbers on certain squares denote the number of contiguous same colors they should have that leave me scratching my head at times.