Cicada Games’ open world Zelda-style puzzle game Isles of Sea and Sky is a real standout amongst the sea of block-pushing titles that dominate the genre. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, especially considering how overbearing the first few hours of the game were, but as I continued my journey and conquered more islands, I felt myself obtain a greater sense of freedom within this beautifully crafted spectacle filled with puzzles of unwavering quality.
Instantly Beholden
Isles of Sea and Sky starts off strong, immediately throwing you into the shores of its first island, where a few things are already evident as you try to get back on your feet. For one, this game is gorgeous, with stunning pixel work and illustrations somehow achieving both a convincing retro feel and a clean new look, coupled with Craig Collver’s work on the game’s background tracks that sound straight out of tropical islands in the middle of Southern Asia. Through these elements, the game manages to portray an entrancing panorama, luring the player within an instant — no cutscenes needed.
Another fact about Isles of Sea and Sky which is also made clear at first glance is that this game does not hold your hand. There is no tutorial, and you are indeed thrown into the game’s bottomless pits without much context or aide, for it expects you to learn its mechanisms as you go along. This has always been my preferred way of learning puzzle games as it challenges the player to think critically about everything they encounter, and it respects their intelligence without seeming too handhold-y. The implementation of that concept here complements the open world design quite well. Feeling stuck on a puzzle? The game actively encourages you to seek not only other avenues to cross, but also new knowledge entirely that may give you a fresh perspective. Each individual puzzle acts as both a key for progression and a playground that enables one to familiarize themselves with the game’s vast amounts of mechanics and how they intertwine, which is amazing! This does come with the drawback, which I personally felt with this game coming into it, which is the potential for the player to feel overwhelmed with the many options presented to them.
An Overwhelming Feeling
At any given point in Isles of Sea and Sky, there are always three to six puzzles that are available to solve. Of course, this naturally comes with the game’s open world, “pick your path” nature, and it’s not entirely unique to IOSAS either, with many open world titles having to face this very same issue. This, I feel, is only ever exacerbated by Isles of Sea and Sky‘s puzzle design, in that the puzzles do not always inherently tell you if they’re solvable; that, too, is something you must figure out. This may be seen in the game’s island-specific elementals, which offer unique mechanics that can only be unlocked after collecting six of the pertinent island’s gems. These mechanics are sometimes necessary in completing puzzles later on in the game, but whether or not one is faced with such a puzzle isn’t always entirely clear to the player.
Being faced with plenty screens-worth of puzzles sometimes without having clear knowledge of whether those screens can even be completed in the first place is overwhelming, and, without a doubt, that’s how I felt for my first hour or so in the game. For a while, I found myself walking around this admittedly beautiful world not having a goddamned clue about whichever way I should go, and perhaps the game revels in making player feel like such. Perhaps Isles of Sea and Sky is designed to make the player overwhelmed at first, and only after staying patient might they find the valuable lesson of self-pace.
The Beauty of Self-Pace
All this talk about Isles of Sea and Sky feeling “overwhelming” is not really as much a criticism as it is buildup into one of the more fundamental lessons that I learned from playing IOSAS: self-pacing is a must, especially with its problems being so open-ended. Often, when I’m presented with a puzzle of many choices, I crumble under the weight of my own indecision, and only through playing am I able to gauge my skill in puzzle-solving and adjust my pace accordingly. In my playthrough of IOSAS, there would be times where I would open the game, stand completely still as I watch Akurra sleep supinely, observing my deep think from his dreams. I would sit still, looking ten to twenty steps ahead for plausible solutions to a puzzle. Eventually, I became more willing to go through entire hour-long play sessions solving only three or four puzzles, as long as it had meant that I was making progress. Even better was the fact that I was able to freely choose which puzzles or which areas to tackle and in what order, allowing me to essentially formulate my own difficulty curve. If I didn’t like the difficulty of an area, I’d simply come back to it later, making the game a far more enjoyable experience for me. I strongly believe that, for one to enjoy this game and many similar experiences to the fullest, they must be able to control their own pace in the way most fulfilling to them.
Impressive Consistency
If there’s one thing I can’t praise this game for enough, it is its impressively consistent puzzle quality even in the face of its multilayered design. Isles of Sea and Sky has a hundred or so puzzles jam-packed within a ~12-hour long game, and I could count on my left hand how many of those I didn’t like. Seriously, this thing slaps front to back. So many eurekas, so many moments of “Aha!”. This is thanks in no small part to the game’s simple and traditional block-pushing puzzle style. The trend nowadays for Sokoban-style games is to be “meta” and “mind-bending” to grab the attention of hungry puzzle solvers, with Arvi Teikari’s Baba is You or Patrick Traynor’s Patrick’s Parabox being a few great examples, but Isles of Sea and Sky takes the classic block-pushing approach and simply executes it well. Lots of unique and polished ideas, but in its very core, it still about pushing blocks into certain locations, and this simplicity certainly helped in producing such a large quantity of thought out mechanics throughout the game’s duration, whether that be lining up obsidian blocks to blow up a stack of plates on the surface of a dormant volcano or fenagling tornadoes to blow a log over a sea of ice.
Perhaps one of my favorite parts about the game is its aforementioned multilayered design, where each puzzle is not simply one obfuscated key and one door, but rather a homogeneous mixture of mechanisms that all combine to solve one particular problem. You don’t simply try to find a way to push a log into a hole to get to the star, you must also try to free that log from magma which may burn it, perhaps by blowing it across using a tornado, but not before that same tornado brings a rolling rock dude into a button that will open the path forward. Very often in these puzzles do elements serve more than one purpose, which makes them all the more satisfying to solve. I especially loved when several mechanics from the four islands came together near the end as though the islands themselves were the layers to the grandiose puzzle that is this game.
A Trace of Incompleteness
Of course, no game can be perfect, and Isles of Sea and Sky even more so, as it is quite evident from the state of the game at launch. For full disclosure, I played the game while it was in Version 1.0C, and I could tell quite easily that the game was not released in a fully polished state as I encountered plenty of bugs, some which crashed or softlocked my game. For instance, holding left and right or up and down at the same time while controlling a tornado crashes the game… that easily.
There were also plenty of areas in the game that feel like they were supposed to have something, and while the inclusions of these could be chalked off as allusions to a potential DLC or update, their abundance makes me think that they were supposed to contain something more to begin with.
And while I did discuss the game’s consistent quality in puzzle design, the game is not as consistent when it comes to puzzle mechanics. To be frank, most of the game’s mechanics are still splendid, like the various elementals, but if one had removed the evil mirror puzzles on Serpent Stacks, or the albatrosses from Frozen Spire, or the fast travel crows, this game really wouldn’t be that hurt from their exclusion. This is not even mentioning the plethora of secrets in the game which merely rely on scanning the grid for a few faint odd pixels, which personally made hunting for said secrets feel like a chore more than anything. To me, these oddities and inconsistencies felt like burnt edges on an otherwise scrumptious piece of toast, stopping me from completely eating it.
Masterful Work Nonetheless
Still, Isles of Sea and Sky is a masterful craft, and quite easily one of the best puzzle games I’ve played this year. It’s gorgeous and well-produced with a fantastic sense of exploration and a natural, self-paced learning curve that complements well with the game’s consistent puzzles. As updates continue to roll out, I hope that future players may see this game in a more complete state. Honestly, it’s hard to think of a summarizing statement for Isles of Sea and Sky, apart from the fact that it’s just so cool.
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