Islands of Insight review: open-world puzzler has infinite potential

13.02.2024 - 22:07 / digitaltrends.com / Giovanni Colantonio

Islands of Insight Score Details Pros

• Tons of fun puzzles
• Near infinite challenges
• Smart progression hooks
• Great co-op integration

• Some dud formats
• Repetitive grid puzzles
• Meandering lore

When I was a kid, my most prized possession was my subscription to World of Puzzles magazine. Every month, I’d get a physical issue filled to the brim with puzzles that would keep me occupied until my next delivery. I’d become obsessed with certain puzzle formats, like its unique spin on cryptograms and crosswords. Others were total duds that I’d skip over every time, but that was fine. All that mattered was that I had a consistent way to exercise my brain.

Islands of Insight captures that exact feeling in a way few games ever have. The unique project fromDead by Daylight publisher Behaviour Interactive takes the concept of a newspaper puzzle page and spreads it across an open world filled with thousands of puzzles. As soon as I jumped in, I found myself in a familiar flow. Some puzzle had me exploring every end of a massive sky island to find more problems to solve, just like I’d flip through every new World of Puzzles issue to find the few formats I liked. And a few others had me groaning every time I came across them.

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That mixed experience might be off-putting to those who feel compelled to solve every problem they see, but Islands of Insight offers an enormous open-world puzzle book that’ll keep your brain sharp for a very long time.

Open-world deconstruction

Islands of Insight is best described as an open-world genre deconstruction. Imagine a game like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but with all its story and combat removed. Instead, picture what it would look like if you were simply left with its massive explorable map filled with little world activities to solve. That’s exactly whatIslands of Insight delivers, and it almost plays like a modern version of Myst.

Taking clear cues from The Witness,Islands of Insight tosses players into an atmospheric open world densely dotted with puzzles. Though rather than riffing on one single puzzle type, it delivers a wide range of formats that are often bite-sized in nature. Some of those are very traditional, like grid problems that have players correctly filling in black and white boxes using varying rule sets. Others are small observational challenges that are naturally integrated into the world. In the first area alone, I’d hunt down five objects in a domed-off area, find and connect two symbols within view of one another, and walk through an invisible archway.

What works so well here is just how quick and