Islands of Insight

Islands of Insight is a huge first-person, open-world puzzle game with thousands of puzzles of different types. You explore multiple floating islands, each with different puzzle activities scattered throughout, most of them involving some kind of perception trick, and some involving logic. The freshness of many of the puzzle types, the vast quantity of overall puzzles, and the superb graphical quality of the environments make this a one-of-a-kind thinky game. No wonder it got three nominations at the 2024 Thinky Awards!

As you roam around the islands, you encounter various shining objects such as rotating cubes, spires and gates. A few simply open a logic grid puzzle, but most of them require some sort of interaction, or even just a certain way of looking at them from your first-person perspective. The most common logic grids require you to determine which cells are white and which are black, following a set of rules varying from grid to grid. They’re similar to Nurikabe puzzles, and never require blind guessing.

One type of visual puzzle involves finding the one spot from which you can see a bunch of floating spheres align to form a circle. Another involves a group of entangled rings and finding the one spot from which you can shoot an imaginary arrow going through all the white rings but none of the purple ones. Elsewhere, spires trigger a simple hidden object hunt in a small radius around them, and lone bubbles contain pictures which have you searching for their exact location… And there’s still more to discover.

Navigating the islands isn’t always easy, you need a bit of precision platforming skills, level memory and spatial visualization, and digital parkour proficiency. And sometimes even solving puzzles is challenging in non-thinky ways, when you have to quickly click at the perfect moment mid-flight while being catapulted between two islands, or time a jump and a click in the right spot while one of those bicolor rings puzzle keeps spinning.

If you’re a completionist, the biggest challenge may be having the patience to go through the many thousands of puzzles. But you can also browse through the puzzles leisurely and tackle whichever puzzle type you prefer. Although the vast majority are easy, there are also deeper layers in this game, some five-star puzzles that will take a lot longer to solve, bigger puzzles at the end of each island, and some mysteries to unravel. And given that as you progress you unlock new abilities and discover new types of puzzles, there’s a little bit of metroidvania as well.

Initially, there was a multiplayer aspect to Islands of Insight, not as a co-op experience, but as a shared virtual environment with players seeing each other solving puzzles. However, the game failed to meet its commercial expectations, so the multiplayer servers were shut down in late 2024, and now the game is strictly single-player.

This description was written by Sergiu Dumitriu.