Of all the games I saw at Summer Game Fest’s Play Days, I have the most mixed feelings about Islands of Insight. Revealed at the PC Gaming Show, Islands of Insight is a puzzle adventure game from Lunarch Studios and published by Dead By Daylight’s Behaviour Interactive that takes place in a semi-open shared world. It is an MMO puzzle game, which is a thing I never thought I wanted, and I’m still not sure that I do.
My short introduction to the titular Islands of Insight was an intriguing one. Each floating landmass is covered in puzzles to solve, and you have total freedom to explore at your own pace and solve whatever catches your eye. Most of the puzzles fall into a few archetypes that show up again and again across the world, so you can choose to focus on solving all the puzzles of one type, or just wander around and tackle them in whatever order you want. There’s an element of The Witness in the way Islands of Insight’s puzzles echo and build on each other as you progress through the game.
The developers showed a few different puzzle archetypes during the demo to give me a feel for what kind of challenges to expect. While I didn’t see all the different kinds of puzzles and I don’t know how many there are, I couldn’t help but notice they all had similar mechanics. More than half of the puzzles I saw were perspective-based, tasking you with standing in a certain position and looking at an object from the right angle to find the solution. The first one involved locating a pair of matching symbols and then finding a location in the world where you could see both of them at once. One involved looking at a series of obelisks that projected beams of light towards you, then standing in the perfect spot where all of the beams could reach you unobstructed. There was one that looked like a tangle of wires floating in the sky, but if you looked at it from just the right angle the two lines would separate. It even had the classic puzzle where an image is painted across several disconnected surfaces, and you have to look at it from the right angle and distance to make lines match up and form the image.
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Among the other puzzles that weren’t perspective-based, several of them were 2D logic puzzles, similar to the ones you’d find in The Witness. These are found floating around the world or attached to walls, and when you interact with them you’ll be able to work through a series of challenges with escalating difficulty and complexity that all use the same mechanic. There’s your standard sliding block puzzles, a match three-style puzzle where you have to clear a board by combining the blocks of the same color, and one where you have to manipulate an ink blot image until it mirrors a provided example - which is kind of like a 2D version of a perspective puzzle.
Islands of Insight looks like it has a beautiful world to explore and plenty of puzzles to keep you busy - even if many of them are pretty similar - but it’s also meant to be a social experience. I didn’t get to see this in the demo, and the developers couldn’t say much about how multiplayer works, but they did tell me that Islands of Insight will be an always online, server-based experience, meaning that any time you’re playing, you will encounter other players exploring, solving puzzles, and I assume, trolling you.
I’m primarily a player of online games, and in general I find that social features add a lot to the experience. I love that Diablo 4 feels like a lively world and I can work together with other players to take down world bosses and complete public events. At the same time, I’m not exactly sure how playing alongside other people is going to affect Islands of Insight, other than giving them the opportunity to spoil puzzles for me.
If I’m struggling with a solution, it might be cool to ask a passerby for help or try to solve it with another player instead of resorting to a guide. That keeps me in the game and has the potential to create a memorable moment, so I can sort of see what Lunarch is going for. But if I’m being realistic, a more likely scenario is that I’m trying to solve a puzzle and someone runs up and tells me the answer, or stands in front of me so I can’t see the solution, or gives the answer away by emoting to signal where I’m supposed to look, or follows me around while I’m trying to be alone, or DMs me a slur. We all know how people act online, and I’m not sure giving a bunch of people the freedom of virtual anonymity and the tools to harass each other is going to lead to the kind of chill serene vibes the devs kept telling me they were going for.
If nothing else, it’s a bold concept for a puzzle game. As someone who has played The Talos Principle and The Witness multiple times, Islands of Insight has the exact right style. I’d like to see more variety in the puzzles, and I’m terrified to see how other people are going to act in the game, but it’s doing enough things right that I’m willing to give it a chance. No release date has been announced, but you canwishlist Islands of Insight on Steamright now.
