Islands of Insight
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 2,811 reviews of which 2,040 were positive and 771 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.1 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 14.99€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.
The Steam community has classified Islands of Insight into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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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
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I usually wait until I finish a game before writing a review. However, Islands of Insight is a game I am not likely to finish. It is a game that I will play, take a break, and then play again. There is so much to see and do that I can't imagine growing tired of it or running out of things to accomplish. I love exploring beautiful environments and solving puzzles. Games like Witness, The Talos Principle (I and II), The Trials, Sensorium, and Syllogism make me happy. I enjoy the freedom of wandering and taking things in at my own pace. Give me a variety of puzzles and I will enter a time warp, playing until the wee hours of the morning with no sense of how long I've been sitting. Islands of Insight is huge with a staggering amount of things to pique my curiosity. You can walk, run, fly, jump, or fast-travel around a gorgeous landscape that expands as you move ahead. If you are so inclined, you can let the objectives lead you from area to area. Within each area you can meet a basic set of goals or go for bonus points. I am leveling up and adding skills as my puzzle solving proceeds. At this point, I can jump higher and glide further now that I've built up some experience. The game is multi-player in that you see others in the game world. You can communicate with some basic symbols and poses, but not chat. This is similar to the multi-player feature in Journey, where you can travel together and chirp but never talk. Somehow the world feels more friendly seeing that there are others out there enjoying the same adventure. There have been complaints that you cannot play off-line. For me, this is not a deal breaker, as I play on a PC that I don't move around. There have also been complaints about lag and stuttering. I experienced some minor lag one time. Other than that, the game has run flawlessly. I should say that I am running a newer PC with a lot of RAM and video RAM so I am way above recommended system requirements. The puzzles are diverse. I am quite good at some (music grids) and totally suck at others (sky drops). But, I can usually avoid the puzzles I don't like. If some are required, I can do the minimum and move on to something else. The game only supports keyboard and mouse (no controllers) which is easy for me because that is what I am most familiar with. Navigation is flawless and I rarely miss jumps (which means the implementation is more forgiving than most). Gliding from high places and taking in the scenery is absolutely awesome. There is a detailed map with fast travel points, a catalog of lore discovered, a list of puzzle types with insights/hints, and a screen to customize your character. The game saves on exit and I've never lost progress or had a crash. If you do fall off the edge of the world, the game usually returns you very close to the place where you fell. In some cases, you are returned to the entry point of the area but all progress is saved. Finally, there are those who won't support a game without Steam Achievements. As an achievement junkie, I am finding the lack of achievements in Islands of Insight to be a plus. No pressure, no trying to figure out how to get 100%. I can just have fun and take pride in the incremental progress I am making within the game. So, to reiterate. I love this game. At the current price, it is a good value because Islands of Insight will provide a huge number of hours of entertainment. At about 25 hours, I've barely dented the possibilities. And, since puzzles re-spawn and challenges change, I am not apt to get bored any time soon. I highly recommend this to anyone who loves thoughtful puzzling and exploration. An Added Note - Islands of Insight went off-line in October. Since I had not taken advantage of coop features, this was not an issue for me and has actually resulted in better game performance (no server lag). I did not pay attention and thus missed the window for saving my progress locally. I started the game over and am enjoying it as much (if not more) the second time through. I still highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys taking respite in a beautiful landscape and working puzzles at their leisure.
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This game has had a strange, rocky, and unfortunately short life. People reading this after October 2024 might never know what the game was like in its brief prime. An extremely important thing to understand about this game is that the elevator pitch was basically "what if you had an MMO that was centered around puzzles instead of combat?" So the entire point was to have many players running around a shared space and solving puzzles. The puzzles are varied and enjoyable, but unfortunately they're all necessarily single-player. While I personally like the puzzle MMO concept, there simply weren't any features that justified the always-online multiplayer framework. So it went from being an always-online game (with an anti-cheat which was eventually removed) to having an optional offline mode for people with connection issues, and finally as of Oct 2024 it became offline-only. IOI is an open world absolutely littered with bite-sized puzzles which periodically refresh. The activities and interactables vary in type ("puzzle" is a catchall for all types): hidden objects, ring-races, etc., and a lot of binary logic tile puzzles. A warning for people who are used to pure puzzle games: your control of the character within the environment is an important part of the game. Not only do you navigate the world-space to access the various puzzles, but there is some precise jumping, running, and gliding, some of which is used in time/precision trials (you get effectively unlimited tries in those challenges). You can choose to play in first- or third-person, but first-person is strongly recommended for several perspective-based puzzle types. Note that there is one puzzle type that is 100% dependent on your ability to hear audio (this can be brute-forced with rechargeable hints), and there's also a type of hidden interactable that is difficult to find (but not impossible) without audio cues. Most of the puzzles that are scattered around the open world are randomized from a vast pool and get cycled out periodically, so you're free to just wander around and do whatever grabs your attention. The game also contains a number of islands with a curated set of puzzles that don't refresh with new solutions. These islands ("enclaves") are used for progression. They'll be used to gradually introduce new puzzle types (which will subsequently become available in the open world) and to guide you toward new regions with more complex puzzle constraints. Enclaves are typically packed with puzzles themselves, but the quota to move on is a pretty low percentage (You'll be shown a minimum quota of solutions, followed by a bonus goal, and then eventually a 100% goal if you choose to go for a full-clear). Binary logic tile grids are the meat of this game (they're the only puzzle type that explicitly declares a difficulty rating on each puzzle), and they're very good. Some great setters contributed to the puzzle count, and even if you were to ignore other puzzle types, the logic grids would provide plenty of entertainment. I actively play all the puzzle types in the game, but the progress tracker shows that logic grids are far and away my highest XP level. As you solve puzzles, you'll earn a small amount of currency, as well as mastery (xp) toward a level-up. Level rewards vary between currency, cosmetics, and lore entries. Currency can be spent on cosmetics or used to unlock a variety of upgrades (including things like double-jump, increasing the number of hints you can use, or increasing the currency payout for quick or errorless solves). Character customization is a bit underwhelming, but it's not a character-driven game and there's not much occasion to really consider characters' appearance. If you play in first-person (as I do), you really only see your character in a brief camera cut that occurs when you receive a rare reward. With the removal of multiplayer, there's even less cause to care about your character's appearance. Ultimately it's a shame that this game didn't get the support it needed, but the offline-only mode should be close enough to the classic experience that puzzle lovers can still get what they're looking for from it. Matchbox / 10
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What if you made a great puzzle game, but also wasted a ton of development time making it multiplayer for no reason and adding a ton of 'games as a service' bloat garbage? You'd still have a great puzzle game. And for that, I will recommend it.
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A Superb Puzzler That Bit off a Little More Than It Could Chew Islands of Insight is an awkward game to review. Looking at it solely as a puzzler, its incredible quality, variety, range of difficulty, and ridiculous quantity make for an undeniable genre-heavyweight delivering a near-limitless stream of some of the most satisfying and well-put-together brain-teasers I've ever had the pleasure of solving. Truly, I'd love to spend the rest of this review singing nothing but praises; however, IoI's DNA is comprised of more than just puzzles, and, unfortunately, just about everything else developer Lunarch Studios tries is more than a little disappointing: its story and social features are all but non-existent, its bizarre progression systems are restrictive, underwhelming and feel very out of place, and its open world, however good-looking, often lacks a sense of discovery and exploration. Yet, it's those periphery features that make this whole package so awkward to review: at best, they just kind of exist, and at worst, they're needlessly forced. There's nothing I can speak favourably of, but there's nothing that particularly hampers the overall experience either; after all, I doubt you'll find a single person excited for or even expecting a blockbuster narrative, and the open world frankly never needed to be anything more than a glorified puzzle menu to find success. If you're here just for the puzzles, IoI is an incredibly safe bet; however, for those particularly drawn in by its potential co-op capabilities, its MMO-esque structure, or any of its other more divergent offerings, I'd give this one a bit more thought before committing to a purchase. Puzzles The sheer variety and quantity of puzzles and activities is immediately apparent: from classic match-three and Sokoban-style block problems to riddles, mazes, hidden object, memory, and even platforming challenges, IoI truly dabbles in a little bit of everything, all without spreading itself too thin, either. Every puzzle type feels fully realised, deeply scrutinised and pushed to its creative limits: just as you begin to feel a certain style has nothing left to offer, the next problem will almost always have a new lesson to teach, a fresh, unique application of the same, familiar rules, and a gratifying, novel solution that solves unlike any that came before. The Logic Grids are the crown jewel in this superb collection of brain-teasers and, fortunately, the most common one you'll find throughout the islands. They present you with a mostly empty grid of varying shape and size, solved after filling in each tile either black or white, strictly following a large range of potential stipulations. They're a real treat to unravel: as the name suggests, and with a few pre-filled and locked-in tiles to start you off, there's always a logical, definitive move that can be deduced with the information at your disposal; there's never any need to guess, resulting in thoroughly rewarding solutions that, provided you're giving your full attention, never feel cheap or overwhelmingly unsolvable, however imposing they may initially appear. Not only that, but each solved square in the grid opens up new opportunities and interactions with the rules, creating this wonderful falling domino effect as all the tricky tiles and uncertainties rapidly begin slotting into place; this satisfying rhythm to each solution particularly benefits the more trivial, introductory Logic Grids, keeping those simpler puzzles a pleasure to solve for even the most advanced players. Speaking of difficulty, IoI offers a fantastic range for all levels of experience and skill. The optional hint system is particularly refreshing, refraining from outright telling you what your next move is, opting instead to simply point where next to look or informing you of your earliest error if you've made one. The result is assistance that's more understated guidance than direct help and, more importantly, doesn't feel like a concession to use every now and then. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3165786289 Online Features, Progression, and the Open World Despite what you may have heard, read, or been led to believe by the "Online Co-op" tag removed only a few days ago, Islands of Insight is almost entirely a single-player experience that so happens to be set in a shared world. Outside of a useless ping system that I've literally not seen used a single time, you have no in-built way to communicate with any other players out in the world, and with no inherent collaborative features for any of the puzzle types, you have no way to cooperate with them either; the best you can do is have you and a friend work on a problem simultaneously, and then just have the one who finished first tell the other how it's done. It's all functionally no different than having that friend sit behind you in real life or sharing your screen over your comms app of choice, and although it's somewhat nice seeing other players waddling around with you, it doesn't remotely justify the steep always-online requirement. The progression systems are equally vexing. The alluring "Go where you want. Solve what you want" on the store page just isn't true: almost half the entire puzzle roster is locked behind a mandatory main quest, requiring you to visit and complete Enclaves—small detached islands designed to teach new mechanics and puzzles, before subsequently unlocking them out in the main world. The catch is that you're limited in the order you can take them on, having to work through five distinct territories sequentially, essentially locking you out of the late-game puzzles until you've worked through the rest of the game to get there. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3165722524 It could be much worse: despite how unnecessary this forced order of progression is for the sake of a 'quest', Enclaves are generally excellent introductions to both the basic and advanced strategies of whatever it is they focus on, and they don't take too much time either if the new puzzles they establish aren't quite your cup of tea. However, the whole process just feels so arbitrary: the later puzzle types aren't any more complex or difficult than those that came before and, in conjunction with bizarre daily quests and a skill tree that, among other equally useless boons, literally and unironically offers 'additional map markers' as some kind of impactful reward, this needless push towards a more traditional MMO-like experience really feels like trying to draw blood from a stone. The open world is more of a mixed bag. It's unquestionably stunning, and the soothing nature sounds coupled with the soft, sweeping score imbue it with this lovely, stress-free atmosphere; however, the puzzles, ironically, somewhat detract from it. Despite the five fairly unique locations, so much time is spent zipping between activities that I never found myself paying the surroundings any mind, and nor did I ever feel compelled to; it's shockingly rare to be drawn anywhere by anything other than puzzles, and that noticeably limits any real sense of discovery or exploration. Even the puzzles specifically designed for you to engage with the environment have you focused more on the geometry of the space than the place itself. Ultimately, it's neither here nor there: my experience wasn't impacted by the open world, but there are certainly more compelling ones out there. Final Thoughts That sentiment really seems to be the common thread. There's a lot here that went wrong and even more room for improvement; however, Islands of Insight strikes true where it counts, delivering a vast array of cracking brain-teasers and an experience I can comfortably recommend to any fan of a good puzzle. Follow our Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/]Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.
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This game is really fantastic. The pros: + the game looks fantastic + exploration is very fun and there are many secrets to discover + 24 different puzzles and they vary in difficulty + very relaxing experience and the puzzles are not to difficult + extra skill options to unlock + different areas that gives something else every time Cons: - Always need to be online - Don't expect a real co-op experience if you look for that I would skip that - Shop tags can be misleading So if you are searching for a co-op experience and you think you can get that from here that's a big NO. Then don't buy this. If you like to walk in a big world of puzzles and not want to feel alone in a game world. This one is for you <3. The game is really well designed and works flawless. I really love that there is anything behind every corner. This game has great potential to expand, but the tags in the shop are misleading and because of that the game gets negative reviews and also the fact that you always need to be online is a big turn-off for some people.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 18 November 2024 02:06 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 20 December 2024 03:57 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:50 |
| Steam reviews | 21 December 2024 12:05 |
Online players
73
Developer
Lunarch Studios
Publisher
Behaviour Interactive Inc.
Release
13 Feb 2024
Platforms