Isles of Sea and Sky

Difficulty : 3.5/5 (Hard)
Global : 4.5/5 (Great)

Isles of Sea and Sky is a sokoban adventure in which you explore a world of islands full of puzzles.

You wake up on one of the islands, you see an arrow pointing to a box… and yeah, that’s the only indication you’ll ever have in this game. It doesn’t hold your hand, you’re left to explore and figure out how to progress on your own.
The world is rather open, but this is not a true open world as lots of things are locked until you’ve solved enough puzzles.

Each major island follows the same pattern. You solve mandatory puzzles until you reach the elemental divinity in the center of the island, and there’s always an item nearby that lets you open up previously blocked paths so you can truly start exploring the island.
The goal is then to solve puzzles to gather gems for the divinity; when you have enough of them, elemental creatures awaken throughout the world. Previously impossible puzzles become possible, allowing you to gather stars that unlock other areas of the game.

There are also power-ups. Even after awakening the elemental creatures, some puzzles and secrets will still be impossible without the correct upgrade.
That means you can enter an island and try a puzzle that seems doable… but in reality you need a power up and the elementals before. There’s a first layer of thinking before even attempting a puzzle, you need to determine whether it’s currently possible or not (the opposite is also true, upgrades can also completely trivialize some puzzles later on so be careful).
I didn’t have any problem with that as I’m experienced in puzzle solving, but people that mainly come for the Zelda vibes the game gives may have trouble.
The game got me once though.

Let’s talk about the puzzles, I found them to be incredibly well designed and tons of fun. They are often pretty large with several different objectives. While some of them are pretty straightforward, a good chunk is really like a battle against the game.
To help you, the puzzles usually have several “checkpoints”, your goal is not always to straight up reach an item. You first need to find how to reach a specific part of the puzzle, permanently unlock its shortcut, reset the room and then keep going while using the same items as before, but differently.
The more you progress into the game, the more you need to get creative and ingenious. Especially for the last two major islands, there are so many things you can do with their mechanics.

The secondary objectives can be very hard, though you don’t need to get everything if you just want to reach the ending. There are no “steps” to help you anymore, just the items used previously for another part of the room that you need to cleverly re-use.
So Isles of Sea and Sky has a completely different feeling than most of sokoban games and uses interconnection really well. You often don’t even know if your solution is the intended one or not, this is what I meant by “battle against the game” and it’s an incredible feeling that is pretty rare to find in puzzle games in general.

Visuals reminescent of the old Zelda games, a beautiful soundtrack, extremely gratifying and challenging puzzles, a world satisfying to explore and full of clever secrets… Isles of Sea and Sky has litterally everything to be perfect.

And yet, it’s sad to end this review on something negative, but I have to talk about that : the game is incomplete. You can reach a “secret” (not really but whatever) room telling you that this will be for a future update, you can see glimpses of an unused island, the world map is clearly not fully revealed and there’s a “useless” room on every major island (probably cut content).
That’s really a shame, and the reason I won’t give it a 5/5. If the game is not ready to be released, then don’t release it (or better cover your mischief at least)… it just tarnishes an otherwise great masterpiece.

So yeah, despite Isles of Sea and Sky being pretty much perfect to me, I wouldn’t recommend it for now. That’s a must-play for sure, but wait for the game to be updated before playing it.

Developer: Cicada Games
Publishers: Cicada Games, Gamirror Games
Platforms: Steam – Windows/Linux/macOS, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: May 22, 2024