Don't be fooled by the cutesy exterior of Isles of Sea and Sky. Behind the 16-bit aesthetic and breezy Pacific vibes lies a formidable, brain-wringing puzzler with more layers than a birthday present wrapped by your nan. Cicada Games' top-down adventure takes one of the simplest puzzling premises around - 'what if human push box onto switch?' then spins it out into a grand island-hopping journey riddled with secrets and surprises.
You play a burly Polynesian castaway lost amid a tropical archipelago, with no memory of who you are or how you arrived in this curious land. All you know is there is a big door with four symbols on it that looks like it needs opening, a lady who keeps running away from you despite seeming like she might have answers, and frankly implausible number of boxes between you and achieving your goals.
At its core, Isles of Sea and Sky is a tile-based puzzler where you push boxes around to create pathways through implied mazes. It's important to stress that you can only push the boxes, with no other kind of box manipulation available. Pulling? Ain't gonna happen. Throwing? Fuhgeddaboudit! Carrying? What does it look like, Death Stranding? Pushing's all you get, take it or leave it.
Consequently, you need to be precise in your movements. The block-pushing puzzles are all single-screen affairs, while the available play space is tightly controlled. If you shove a box against a wall, for example, you won't be able to pull it back out. If you shunt it into a hole, you better believe it's staying in that hole.
The first few puzzles are straightforward enough, but it isn't long before the game starts to complicate matters, introducing new hazards into the puzzling space like spike traps, portals, and holes covered by thin planks that you can only step on once. Meanwhile, the scope of the game rapidly begins to expand. Your first few puzzles see you collecting green keys that unlock new areas of the starting island. But then you'll start picking up blue stars, which enable you to venture to new islands via the back of an agreeable sea turtle. These islands vary in size, but the largest islands all have their own distinct themes, mechanics, and collectible items, all of which play into the central puzzling.
The second major island you visit, for example, is water-themed, with streams you can push boxes into to transport them to a new location. But there are also weird gelatinous blocks that can be shouldered around to divert the flow of these streams. You have to be precise in where and when you push them to ensure the stream flows the right way, as they will always attach themselves to the end of whatever stream they flow down.
If this is starting to sound complicated, I've only scratched the surface. Each island is home to an elemental deity, and its shores and cliffsides are scattered with colour-coded orbs you must retrieve to advance the main story. When you do this, it also twists that islands puzzle concept in unusual ways. I don't want to spoil these too much as they're quite fun. But to give one example, on the water island it spawns cute droplet-like creatures who take the form of any box they're pushed against. Which is super handy, but of course, you can't then pull them away from the box, so you must be super careful about where you do this.
On top of this, each island has a bespoke, island-wide enigma to solve, plus all manner of other secrets and challenges that'll net you extra stars and other rewards. The combination of a singular puzzle focus with a higher-level unpicking of the world is not dissimilar to The Witness, to the point where you start seeing puzzles in everything. Is that grassy spiral on the ground some hidden conundrum? Where is that dragonfly going? Is this wall a hidden door? Is that one?
This isn't to say that Isles of Sea and Sky is like The Witness. It's considerably less arch, for one. Moreover, the open-ended structure is intended to make the game easier, rather than heighten the challenge. If you struggle with a puzzle on a major island, heading off to a minor island with a similar theme might net you the collectibles you need via an alternate route, letting you push through the main story without being roadblocked by one challenge.
This is as well, because there were moments playing Isles of Sea and Sky where I thought I might go cross-eyed. The individual puzzles are exacting in their demands, and one wrong step can see your solution go up in flames. This is literally the case on one island, where floors riven with magma will set you ablaze if you stay on them too long.
Cicada Games does its best to mitigate frustration. You can reset the puzzle at any time and undo individual steps in reverse-order. But as a game about moving tiny blocks in very specific sequences, there is an inescapable level of fiddliness involved. One thing that doesn't help is that your character moves quite fast, making it easy to step on the wrong block, fall into a hazard or accidentally slip into an adjacent area – resetting the puzzle. These mistakes are easily redressed, but that doesn't stop them from being frequent occurrences. Also, as the puzzles become more elaborate, it becomes easier to make mistakes without realising it until much later. In these instances, lost progress becomes measured in minutes rather than microseconds.
Even in its most frustrating moments, however, the titular isles are always splendid spaces to spend time in. Despite its visual simplicity, the game powerfully evokes the look and feel of the South Pacific. The vanilla beaches and crystalline oceans are beautifully depicted, The soundtrack, meanwhile, is all wistful serenity and bliss, heightening the escapism. The vibes are, in short, impeccable, which makes the game wonderfully relaxing when you're breezing through the puzzles, and the frustration much easier to cope with when you're not.
Fiddliness aside, Isles of Sea and Sky is a treat. Its pursuit of a single idea to its absolute extreme is wonderful to watch unfold, while the open world the game builds it into acts as a handy pressure valve for its more obstructive moments while providing a constant sensation of discovery. If you're the kind of person who brings a Sudoku book to the beach, Isles of Sea and Sky brings both the puzzles and the beach.
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