Islands of Insight

It’s finally out! The biggest open-world puzzle game has released, and it’s just as- if not more -obnoxious for the “ooh shiny” among us.

There are now 5 big areas to explore, with a world big enough to be awe-inspiring and provide plenty of biomes and landmarks, whilst not being so big as to be difficult to hold in your mind all at once, or at least biome by biome.

All the stuff I posted in my first look review is still relevant in this one, though some systems have been expanded on.

First up, new puzzle types. Pretty much everything in the demo makes a return, but as you progress the story, you unlock more puzzle types: Visual and Audio Memory boxes give you a grid that you can either “glimpse” (for visual), or “listen” (for audio) and it’ll show you what the solution is. For the visual boxes, you just copy what you see, I’m really bad at these ones so I just keep spamming the glimpse button as there is no penalty beyond missed bonuses. The audio ones however show you a small section of a tracker where each row is a pitch or tone, and each column is a timestep, and you have to listen to the underlying audio and transcribe what you hear. I really enjoy these ones (I have the music autism lol.)

The lockpicking puzzles I mentioned in the previous review are known as Phasic Dials, and essentially asks you to rotate a set of dials to point to the center using a set of group operations that rotates a subset of the dials a number of steps, so the puzzle is to try and line everything up so that pressing a button spins everything into place at once, instead of completing one and undoing another.

There are also some new puzzle rules that could appear in logic grids, such as darts indicating the number of opposite colour cells in that line, spiral galaxies demanding rotational symetry, and letters that want sectioning into groups.

After each non-story enclave, you’ll also unlock a Mystery. Once you reach the great pearl of Lucent Waters, you can then start investigating your mysteries, and if you can figure out what to do, find where to do it, and then pull it off, you’ll complete the mystery. In the demo the great pyramid above the Verdant Glen was an enclave about crystal labrynths, but now it’s a more end game area, requiring 5 solved mysteries to access. I don’t know what’s inside it yet even, so I couldn’t spoil it even if I wanted.

As for the MMO features, unfortunately the game still only has communication via a small set of emotes and chirps, but you can now disable chirps from players outside your friends list or party, and can add people to your friends list and party. Joining a party means everyone in the party joins the same server and can see eachother in world. Lilla and I have done a lot of stuff together in various enclaves using the “Wave” and “Check it out” chirps to point eachother towards interesting puzzles or points of interest such as matchboxes or hidden cubes. It seems the “Request Help” feature was scrapped between the demo and now, but instead there is now a hint button in logic grids in the form of a “Gain Insight” button that does double duty.

• If your progress is correct, it’ll give you a tile to look at which can be deduced.
• If you’re correct except for one cell, it’ll tell you “this cell is incorrect, but all other progress is correct”, and let you correct the mistake and move on.
• If you have multiple wrong cells, it’ll tell you “multiple cells are incorrect, and this is the earilest one”, which usually means you have to undo until the wrong cell is removed. This is super handy at setting you back to a known good state, and the fact that it forces you to undo past potentially correct deductions made between the earliest mistake and now is a fair trade-off for returning to a known correct state.

Insight is on a timer, taking about a minute for each insight charge to refill, and spent insight refills in the background at the same rate between puzzles, so it’s not something that can be totally leaned on, but it can be handy to help unstuck yourself or validate your progress in large puzzles. There is no penalty for using insight, and 3 upgrades to raise your insight charges from 3 to 6.

The game is just as pretty as I remembered, and in fact between the demo and now, the graphics have been optimised to the point where I’m not using the bare minimum settings. It’s still a very demanding game to run however, and I do see very clearly that when it comes to refraction effects, having medium instead of low graphics settings does give a significant advantage in finding hidden cubes and archways, as well as a small advantage in crystal labyrnths.