From the Archives: Isles of Sea and Sky
Nothing impresses women more than solving block puzzles
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those, like this one, that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
Isles of Sea and Sky is an atmospheric maso-core block toucher step-puzzler.
From the same developer as Triga [a short puzzle game I know about but didn’t play], Isles of Sea and Sky has been a long time coming. It had a few demos as more and more elements were introduced in development, and I played them all. I’ve been looking forward to this game for years, since back when it had a different name and you had to download the demo off the developer’s itch.io page. It’s finally come out [well, mostly, I’ll get to that] and I bought it immediately.
Isles is fundamentally a block pusher puzzle game. You play as a little bare-chested islander guy, and your only input other than walking over tiles is pushing against them. Early on, the old standbys turn up, and you do a lot of pushing boxes onto pressure plates to hold doors open and the like. But the game picks up pretty quickly, on top of having a fairly open layout, and your options start to expand. As the title implies, there are several separate islands spread across an overworld, each with their own puzzle themes and elements to unlock, which you reach by riding a giant sea turtle. Most screens have a few separate ‘puzzles’ to solve, though they frequently weave together or lead into each other in some way. The main reward for solving puzzles is stars, which are the thing that completion % is determined by at the end, and there are also many gates both on islands and in the overworld that open at certain star thresholds. Some simpler puzzles or exploration reward you with keys, which are consumed to permanently open certain gates. Finally, each elemental island has a multi-stage progression, where you explore it to find the screen with the elemental ‘lord,’ get the key that allows you to tackle most of the island’s puzzles, use that to find at least six of the elemental stones, and then return to awaken Elementals of that type throughout the game world. At that point you’re mostly able to collect a few stars and move on, but there’s a final puzzle layer on each elemental island which rewards you with a permanent ability upgrade.
The way the game breaks up introducing puzzle elements and pushing the difficulty higher, on top of letting you poke at puzzles you aren’t yet able to do, makes the game feel a lot richer than many similar puzzle games. It genuinely feels like a big pivot when an island’s elementals come to life, and playing with them to feel out the nuances is a lot of fun. The game also does a great job of guiding you through ‘tutorials’ without a single word of instruction or forced input - usually the first screen you encounter with a new puzzle mechanic will be constructed to allow you to see what its primary function is, and then leave it up to you to experiment on other screens they show up on to piece together the details. The game has a surprising variety of puzzle elements and depth to each one, including a lot of interactions that don’t come up often but still make a decent amount of sense. There’s even one zone with pseudo ‘boss fights’ that are a surprisingly enjoyable change of pace, and don’t outstay their welcome.
Isles also has a really fantastic style and feel for a puzzle game. Each major island has its own unique chill music track that never gets grating or distracting, all the sprites and animations feel fully fleshed out and detailed, and there’s even idle animations for all the elementals to go along with your player character falling asleep. Even the sound effects and jingles are excellent. The game has unlimited undo as well as a separate full screen reset button, and deaths are handled with a bare minimum of fanfare, automatically undoing your last action after a short animation. The movement and pushing, which you’ll be doing a lot, has been given about as much speed as possible without feeling imprecise at all. I never felt like doing anything was a drag or hassle, and there were never any puzzles that required enough inputs to warrant a mid-screen checkpoint.
Once you awaken all four elemental types, a gate to the ‘final’ area opens up on the tutorial island, and after some puzzles involving the interactions between each pair of elemental type, you can complete the game. You can then restart after seeing what percentage of the stars you’ve found and continue on - there’s that third layer of each elemental island’s progression to finish, many smaller islands with some unique gimmicks scattered around the overworld, a final large island involving evil shadow clones, and a handful of other things to solve, most of which reward you just with stars. That’s pretty much it - continue as much as you want, up to 109 [at time of writing] stars, and then you’re done - I don’t think there’s a ‘true’ ending or anything like that for your trouble… yet.
That brings me to my main problem with Isles of Sea and Sky, which is that it’s not really ‘finished.’ It’s finishable - in fact, you barely have to do half the puzzles to get to the end, and all the stars and items you can catch a glimpse of are obtainable in some way already. However, there are a few glaring loose ends, islands wreathed in permanent clouds, routes through the reefs you can’t seem to get your turtle to, and screens you can’t ever visit on most islands, which are bound to trap an unsuspecting puzzler into hours worth of humping random wall tiles. After I gave up on trying to find a way to a particular island that seemed within my reach, I finally checked around and discovered that the developer has stated vague plans for ‘future content’ and that most of those things I’d been trying to get to are just placeholders. Now, I’m jazzed at the idea of getting to pick this game up in a few months or so and have even more cool islands and puzzles to explore, but it’s a little shitty the way this has been done, especially considering the game is not, like, in Early Access or a beta phase anymore. I’d have been a lot happier with at least a minimum of signposting dead-end content, even if I know why it kind of has to already be partially implemented [to keep from breaking save files when additional content is added and screens potentially altered].
There are a few other tiny issues too. There are a handful of bugs, like a couple tiles tagged as walkable when they shouldn’t be, secrets that aren’t flagged by the game’s in-game indicator, objects depicted on the map from prior versions that aren’t really there, and so on. These should probably be mostly cleaned up soon, since the developer’s been pushing relatively rapid patches in response to reports. Some of the puzzle setups can be a little frustrating to get your head around initially, and the way shortcut gates are permanently disabled can probably be confusing to new players. So far, there was only one star I’ve found that I would say has a genuinely dickish solution, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s also the only star I’ve found that isn’t obviously a star present on the screen initially. Finally, the game makes somewhat heavy use of secret paths and ‘illusory walls’ in a sense, where some spots just have invisible ladders or pathways open up when you walk in front of them or bump into them. The game does attempt to indicate these very lightly, with faint glyphs on floors indicating either where you need to go or where you CAN go if you find them, but it’s easy to miss them in a dense screen, and especially later on, some of them are actually missing their indicators, and if you don’t have all the equipment upgrades, it’s tough to tell what objectives you need to find a secret route to versus ones you just need a new ability you don’t know about yet for. On the first island they occur, specifically the underground, the start of secret paths is at least indicated very clearly like cracked walls in DROD, but later on there are definitely a few where you just have to wall-hump each tile like in Wolf3D or Doom.
The last thing I want to mention is the name. Isles of Sea and Sky might sound like a surprisingly bland and SEO-unfriendly title for a game with so much passion and creativity poured into it. Well, it is - the game used to be called Akurra, until the dev abruptly announced that it was being changed to avoid the perception of cultural appropriation. It seems kind of silly, especially since stylistically the game still leans pretty heavily on that Pacific Island Tribal vibe, but you know what they say - give the sharks a tiny bit of blood, and they’ll definitely give you good reviews. Honestly it’s not a big deal, but the last few demo releases had me confused as I repeatedly forgot the new ‘improved’ name, and I really don’t think it’s doing them any favors even if it’s not hurting things either.
I ripped through Isles of Sea and Sky in record time for me with a puzzle game, and that’s not a slam on its difficulty - it gets quite hard, I just really enjoyed it enough to push through in a few long sittings. [plus I’d already done the first hour or two multiple times via the demos] I’m getting close to 100% stars, and I’m definitely going to be back once the rest of the content gets finalized. I think if you’re not a big puzzle fiend, the full price might be a bit rich, but if you liked things like Baba is You or A Monster’s Expedition, it’s probably worth picking up whenever you feel the itch - just maybe take a peek to see if all the islands are actually completed before beating your face against the post-game.
Afterward
Post-release, the developer resolved most of the problems I had with the game, culminating in the Mysterious Update, which added a pretty significant amount of post-game content, puzzles that go several layers deeper than anything required to ‘beat’ the game, and honestly a bit more than I was prepared for. I probably won’t ever completely finish it, but it was a thoroughly pleasant replay, and it stands as one of my favorite puzzle games. I recommend this game even more strongly than I did in its release year, when it just barely made it to tenth place in my personal ranking.
Isles of Sea and Sky can be purchased on Steam and itch.io.