Islands of Insight Review (roncli)
I bought this game about a month or so before it was made free. It was a great puzzler that had its share of flaws, but was addicting enough that I finished all the Enclaves and solved over 95% of the random puzzles that spawn in the world. Got a good amount of enjoyment for my purchase, and got good value for my money.
So why leave a negative review? Because you will never get to share the experience that I had.
The game used to have an online mode. On November 1, 2024, online mode shuts down and goes single player only. Now, there wasn't much difference between online and offline mode, other than you could see other players and interact with them through pings and emotes, nothing more. When offline mode was promised, I was excited that the game's issues would be solved by having an offline mode, but that was not what happened. In fact, things are made worse by a flimsy game save system that can eat your save file if the game crashes at the wrong time.
There are also many, many, MANY flaws with the game itself that I put up with, but honestly just aren't acceptable for a game of this scale.
- Zones state that a certain number of puzzles spawn. This is often false, especially for crystal mazes, rolling blocks, flow orbs, and MOST especially sentinel stones. Sentinel stone puzzles, in fact, have some puzzles that literally never spawn... for instance, you will only ever find 43 in Verdant Glen, not the 52 advertised.
- Some puzzles simply will never spawn. In Verdant Glen on the west end of the island, there's a hidden ring that's supposed to spawn in the exact same location as a pillar. That ring never spawns because it's blocked by the pillar.
- There are a few places where you can clip out of bounds. Sadly, it's actually necessary for two puzzles (a matchbox on the Lucent/Autumn border and a pentad behind a rock wall next to a building in Serene)
- Glide Rings are bugged where you can't get mastery from them in future cycles if you get a perfect score on your first try.
- Flow Orbs are bugged where you can only get the mastery reward from bronze, silver, gold, and platinum once ever. The only way to get more mastery is by getting the bonus 1 mastery per 0.01 under the platinum time, which you can only get once per cycle.
There are many more bugs than what's listed here. And yet, less than a year after release, the developer has come out and said they will not be fixing these bugs. How am I supposed to trust this developer with their future games if they can't take care of one that has as much promise as this one?
Besides that, there's the horrible support you get from their publisher, Behaviour. It is very clear that their support is run by AI running large language models. Sorry, Paige, you're not real! This tells me that this publisher should also be avoided.
The decision to turn off online mode so soon after release is enough to convince me to stop playing this game. It was great entertainment while it lasted, but we live in a time when live service games just don't stick around. Imagine what this game would have been if it were offline mode from the start, and they could have focused on improving that rather than patching what they already put out. So much potential wasted.