Islands of Insight Review (Misery)
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?