Islands of Insight on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Seek out and solve 10,000+ puzzles at your own pace across this sublime puzzle game.
Islands of Insight is a puzzle-platformer, nonlinear and puzzle game
developed by Lunarch Studios
and published by Behaviour Interactive Inc..
Released on February 13th 2024 is available only on Windows
in 11 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Latin America and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 2,950 reviews of which 2,113 were positive and 837 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.0 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 29.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Islands of Insight into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Islands of Insight through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i5-7400 or AMD Ryzen 5 1400
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVidia GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon R9 380. 4GB VRAM
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 35 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD recommended
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Such a shame this game never reached its full potential, and really unfortunate how it ended for anyone who didn't download their save, but at least it is still playable offline. I've never played a puzzle game like this where you can rapid fire through puzzle after puzzle while also slowing down to complete some more challenging ones. Overall, the game has a great flow and it feels great to play. Even in the state it's left in, I still recommend at least giving the demo a try and pick it up at a discount if you like it. I really hope another developer is able to recreate the unique gameplay experience this game offers while following through on the co-op puzzle experience this game initially promised.
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Enjoying the game a lot and can see myself sinking a LOT more time into it. But... I just don't understand why it has to be an online game. Literally every person you see in the game is doing it on their own - there's never groups running around. And while its nice to see other people puzzling and occasionally emoting at you, there's also the risk of someone spoiling a solution to a puzzle. Still going to rate it positively as I do legitimately like the game, but if they added an offline mode it'd be a much firmer recommendation tbh Edit: They added offline mode and as I said - that makes this an easy recommendation to anyone that likes these sorts of puzzle games. Very good addition to the game IMO.
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Do you like puzzles? Do you like the idea of having a whole bunch of different types of them in one game? Does the idea of a seemingly inexhaustable supply of the loopy things get you excited? How about the prospect of finding hidden puzzles under that rock you just tripped over? Maybe add a bit of platforming and flight? If you said yes to these questions, then oh boy have I got the good time fun game for you. This game, I gotta say, is one wild experience. At it's core it's rather similar to The Witness in that a huge part of it is exploring different areas, finding and solving puzzles as you go. Though it lacks the rather pretentious elements that game has... it's not trying to get you to have a super deep philosophy meditation or something. There's lore to find here, but it's not super complicated or anything... not too hard to piece together what's going on, and it never gets in the way of anything. No, the puzzles and exploration are the focus here. This is an absolutely ENORMOUS world, with every square foot of it just full of puzzles. So freaking many of them. There are many types, too, of varying complexity. There's the "tile" ones, where you're dropping black & white tiles into a grid to fill it while following certain rules, there's the ... er... tower thing, where you stand on this big square with all these towers and you gotta find just the spot where you can connect with all of them, there's funky match-3 puzzles, and so on. But also, there's more than just those sorts. The game's idea of what a puzzle is can be all over the place, in a good way, really. For instance sometimes you might find these weird pointy spire things, poke it and it'll put out this huge field, and somewhere in there, is 5 hidden whatsits to find. Or there's the green/red box things that are all about getting the right vantage point, once you manage to find both of them. Or nearly invisible archways to find. Floaty jumbled rings where you're trying to get a perfect line through them, weird ball things that want you to run after them and parkour your way to victory (read: jump wrong and fall off a cliff). Or maybe those truly devious glass labyrinths, where you cant find the exit despite that you're staring directly at it because the walls are made of glass and then you fall in that accursed pit AGAIN because you forgot it was there just like the last 500 times you fell in it, and then you found a tile puzzle IN the labyrinth and solved it but got distracted and fell in that pit again afterwards- *ahem* I think you get the idea. Lots of puzzles. Lots of things to find. Lots of stuff to DO. The difficulty of all these things varies wildly, too. Any given puzzle can range from "so easy I can do it in seconds", to "why would you do this to me". This is really good, because it ensures that there's something for everyone here, and stuff to do within each puzzle type even if you have trouble with that type. Like, for me, I just cant grasp the pattern things. I can do only the lowest difficulty of those. But hey, that's okay. There's still plenty of them that I can do because there's SO MANY (just like everything else), but there's also going to be just as many to challenge experts, too. And if you find you're getting stuck on something? No reason to get frustrated or anything. Just back out of it, and go find a different thing to do. The game very rarely forces you to do specific puzzles. Though, this changes a bit in the "enclaves", which are basically the game's dungeons where you unlock new puzzle types or whatever. These can be much harder, and fully completing one is absolutely not easy. But you dont have to 100% any of them, and in fact the game warns you that trying to do so could be a bit too much, particularly considering just how darned sneaky the devs can be in hiding some of the puzzles. Be prepared to get lost and confused from time to time (while tripping over puzzles). Honestly what truly amazes me about this game is that none of this ever becomes tiresome. However much I do, I always want to do more, and there always IS more. These dont stop being fun, even when I fall into the glass holes of stupid. Not that it's perfect, mind you. In particular, the fractal puzzles are likely to frustrate you, due to the weirdness of the controls. As someone who is very enthusiastic about fractals, this part was disappointing to me. I love that fractals are in the game, but the way that puzzle type is controlled makes me want to stab a clown. Then there's the other problem, the elephant in the room: This game is always online. The devs seem to have gone for an odd MMO-ish approach, for... some reason. I cannot grasp why. There's cosmetics to earn (with in-game currency only) and daily quests and so on, and you'll see other players running around doing things. From a gameplay perspective, this doesnt at all impact what you are doing... other players cannot interfere with you, and if they walk up to some tile puzzle or whatever and do it, that puzzle wont be done on your end (and you can walk up and do it too at the same time, but in a separate instance. You'll never have something solved FOR you). The issue isnt in the gameplay, it's in the "online only" part. You'll get some rubberbanding and server boots every now and then. Not enough to ruin it, mind you. Not even close. It's been pretty rare for me. But it's there, and... I dont know WHY. It makes little sense to me. Fortunately, there IS an offline mode coming, so that's good. Still, rather baffling. I have little else to complain about, though. For such an utterly enormous game to have so few things for me to whine about... that's rare. That's very rare. Really everything is so darned GOOD here. Seriously, I just adore this one. I love everything about it, even if the controls on the fractals are made of crazy. What an absolute gem this is. It deserves so many more sales than it's getting, so be a dear and do pick it up, eh?
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I like it. Would I recommend it? Yeah, I would. But it's lacking in its core features. Namely, the multiplayer is a lost opportunity. For being online all the time, I would like to see more from the progression and community aspect. I would also like to see more a cohesive narrative. Whenever I run into a bit of dialogue in the game, I forget that there's even a story and how it all relates to what I'm doing. As far as the puzzles go, they're diverse enough in type and difficulty that I don't see myself getting bored any time soon. If you like puzzle games, this is one that you can sink hours into given that there are an endless amount of unique puzzles to solve in an open-world setting. And if you get tired of solving specific types of puzzles, you can just move onto something else. Though, even the hardest difficulty is not really all that difficult. All in all, it's a cool concept that needs work, but it's worth playing if you like hours of brain teasers. EDIT: Welp, I put about 100 hours into this before finding a game breaking bug. My game crashed during one of the quest puzzles and the servers never recorded it even though the game state says I have completed the area. So I can't progress the campaign. I could restart the game and hope it doesn't happen again, but boy that's a lot of puzzles to work through...
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I wish my recommendation here could be stronger, as the potential behind this game is massive, but it's failing to live up to it at the moment in very many ways. But ultimately, the number of high-quality puzzles in the game is so large that for anyone who really likes solving logic puzzles, it's practically a must-have. As a massively multiplayer game, this world *could* become a hub of the puzzle solving and creating community and have a guaranteed solid player base, if it just had any way for players to communicate meaningfully, and maybe some excuses for them to do so. But there are no multiplayer puzzles of any kind, not really any in-game way for players to work together on anything, no way to make and share puzzles with other players, and most baffling of all, no chat. To not have any way for players to talk to one another in-game is the most insanely self-undermining decision I've ever seen a game billing itself as an MMO make. I can only imagine what an infuriating meeting with the publisher that must have been for the developers. It's frustrating as a player to be surrounded by people with likely similar interests (we all love puzzles!) who would probably be really cool to meet, but have no way to communicate, and have the multiplayer aspect of the game reduced to something that might as well have been supplanted by bots flying around in an offline game. (Nevermind that if it were an offline game, I wouldn't have to put up with lag and server disconnections.) But while I agree with some other negative reviews that the game is sadly not quite living up to its promise there, I strongly disagree with some recent reviews complaining about puzzle quality when it comes to the grid puzzles. The grid puzzles are generally fantastic examples of construction. I've seen some complaints about the need to bifurcate in harder puzzles, but while bifurcation is a powerful strategy that will always work, and often the best if you're speed solving, that's generally *not* how they're meant to be done. For example, the last puzzle I solved, still fresh in my memory, was a 3 star (i.e. 8/10 difficulty) puzzle which had a 7x7 grid with viewpoint numbers (i.e. "cave" clues that tell you how many cells are visible in cardinal directions from that spot inside the region of the same colour containing that cell), and where all white cells needed to be connected. At first, I was tempted to bifurcate, because almost no deductions seemed immediately available. But then I realized that in each corner, there was a viewpoint number with a 5 in it, and that fact forced there to be a single black cell along each edge of the puzzle, and more importantly, made the outer border of the puzzle rotationally symmetric. This symmetry meant that putting a black cell along the border would place 3 others, and often cut the white groups off, and that was the key to solving everything. The puzzle was still a good bit of work, but entirely doable picturing things in my head from that point. Very often the hard puzzles in the game are hiding some deeper insight like that, and while the puzzle might be doable without it using bifurcation, is likely much less enjoyable that way. In general, it seems the people who made these puzzles *really* know how to make puzzles, and if it ever seems like something isn't doable without tedious trial and error, just leaving and coming back to it later with a fresh perspective might be preferable. My positive review is mainly due to the grid puzzles, but there's enough grid puzzles that you can keep doing grid puzzles for hours every day and not run out for a long time, and even the easy ones are often quite satisfying and have something to communicate. Even if you don't end up liking anything else, you can definitely get your money's worth just on that aspect of the game alone. There are also some extremely good puzzles of the sliding-blocks variety, and the majority of the match 3 puzzles are decent (somewhat surprisingly). Some puzzles of those types, especially a lot of the simpler sliding-block puzzles I would say are "filler" and a bit disappointing in that they fail to really communicate a coherent idea and many would probably solve themselves if you could shake the box randomly for a bit. The more complex ones are typically quite good however. Beyond that, there's a lot of filler "puzzles" you find as you wander the environment, and I sort of wish that all of these had been given at least a little bit of the kind of care that the grid puzzles, match threes, and the better sliding block puzzles had been given. While it's kind of fun to see if you can snipe armillary rings while flying, the randomly generated armillary rings puzzles are for the most part not very interesting. There is an enclave (dungeon) with what are obviously handcrafted armillary rings puzzles, and those were really good and required a bit of thinking about the structure of the rings and where you could position yourself in the environment. Everywhere else in the game though, they're kind of bland and mostly unsatisfying. It's rare for a randomly generated one to require any real thought. Similarly for the skydrops. Once you've done 3 or 4 skydrops, you've experienced 99.9% of all skydrops, and only very rarely will you see something that was not a randomly generated bunch of locations that from one perspective makes a circle. (Every once in a blue moon, you'll see a triangle or trefoil knot.) Essentially all of them end up having an obvious location to stand, because some of the drops will generally end up clustered together near the ground, which is usually easily spotted from a distance. The "light motifs", anamorphic graffiti that is plastered randomly around the environment and the goal is to find the place where it lines up, is similar in that it would be much better if they were a good bit more subtle and with more variation to the designs. Putting some thought into the placement, making some more patterns for them and choosing them carefully to suit the situation could result in something much more fun to discover. Matchboxes (red and green boxes with symbols that need to be matched) are similarly all over the place, and while some of them are indeed in fun or interesting locations, most of them are a bit garbage and often feel randomly generated even if I'm not sure they even are. If every time I saw one of these, I could be assured that looking for its partner would produce at least a bit of satisfaction on finding it, I might not just ignore them 99% of the time. But yeah, this game isn't really about any of that. It's about the grid puzzles, and those are amazing. If you like puzzles, despite all the caveats, and despite the fact that its future appears to be in some peril, I'd say it's *still* totally worth the entry fee. There are literally thousands of non-filler, high quality grid puzzles and most of them have an actual point to make about interesting interactions of the many possible rule variations. As a last point, I'm playing on Linux using Proton, and there's a memory leak that causes the game to crash maybe 50% of the time if I tab out and back in (and the probability goes up dramatically each time I do it). The performance is also very poor despite my hardware being overkill. A native Linux build (even just an unsupported beta, if it could be made to run at all) would be very much appreciated.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 07 April 2025 00:20 |
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| SteamSpy data | 12 April 2025 09:52 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:49 |
| Steam reviews | 15 April 2025 00:07 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Islands of Insight, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Islands of Insight
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Islands of Insight concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Islands of Insight compatibility
Online players
58
Developer
Lunarch Studios
Publisher
Behaviour Interactive Inc.
Release
13 Feb 2024
Platforms