Islands of Insight is a really interesting idea, what if you played a big puzzle game, with a ton of different puzzle types, challenges, exploration and progression, but it also was massively multiplayer, somehow? Moving a character around the environments, looking for puzzles to complete, discovering new puzzle types, acquiring skills and cosmetics and solving more complex and difficult versions of puzzles you’re used to. It’s really interesting, and it kinda works! Not a hundred percent, but I had a really good time with this one.
I immediately got hooked in with the concept; being told that there are a certain number of puzzles to solve in a region, exploring islands and attempting to solve them all got me almost as soon as I started playing. The puzzles start very simple; grid puzzles where you must connect all cells of the same color, point-of-view ring puzzles where you have to click on the spot where you get all rings on a single ray, positionning puzzles where you have to place yourself on a spot with a direct line of sight to all the pillars, plain hide-and-seek puzzles to find two identical boxes and link them together, these were all neat. That being said, I didn’t manage to find ALL the puzzles on the tutorial islands and I lost some time trying to figure it out. This became a bit of a problem as the game went on, because while there were only a few puzzles in the starting area, the sheer volume quickly overwhelmed me.
By completing puzzles, you gain “Mirabilis” which are like Stars or Jiggies, you need them to proceed to later areas and unlock side zones. You also gain experience, which is used to unlock skills on a tree - with various levels of usability, which is not that surprising since this is a puzzle game, although some traversal abilities are locked in there, most of them are kinda boring ‘if you solve X type of puzzles by making Y mistakes or less, gain +5% reward’. You gain Mastery on specific types of puzzles, which more or less translates to a title you can equip and you gain cosmetics to change your character’s appearance. There are also “daily challenges” that you can select to gain more experience, and while they’re neat, I felt like they were too specific to be easily completed.
The massively multiplayer part of the game made the less sense for me. I never interacted with any other characters, nor solved puzzles cooperatively, and the game never encouraged me or gave me a reason to do so. Would it have been better if there were some puzzles that could ONLY be solved with more than one person? How would that have worked if nobody was around? It was funny to see everyone on the world map moving along and see players solve the same puzzles as I did, but I really don’t know if the game needed that.
Ultimately, I played a good twenty hours of Islands of Insight, the new puzzle types you got as you progressed through the main and side areas were fun, mazes, match-3 type puzzles, more complex grid puzzles, finding-all-the-orbs-in-an-area puzzles, flight rings (like in superman 64) puzzles when you get the ability to fly, they really got creative and threw a bunch of ideas in there, and most of them work. Some of them didn’t, like some kaleidoscope-type matching puzzle that I couldn’t figure out, or more egregiously, a sound-based puzzle that I just couldn’t do, because I played without sound. Bit surprised they didn’t have a fallback for that! The higher level puzzles sometimes felt like trial-and-error, but most were satisfying to solve.
Islands of Insight is really neat. If you enjoy puzzle games, it’s pretty chill and there’s a lot of content in there. Having infinite time, maybe I would’ve tried to do it all (but I’m not sure I could’ve, due to the number and types of puzzles), but I’m glad I played it!
