Isles of Sea and Sky
Year: 2024
Rating: E10+
Time Played: 16.6 hours
Isles of Sea and Sky is another one of those games that Game Maker’s Tool Kit (GMTK) introduced me to. I always appreciate when a game tries to be a spiritual successor to a retro game series in a way that makes it feel like the game could have easily come out in the late ’90s. For Isles of Sea and Sky, the gameplay felt like the little dungeon puzzles in the early Game Boy Zelda titles like Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons. Ultimately, it scratched that itch and more.
One of the nice gimmicks with this game was its open-world Metroidvania style of exploration. You need to collect stars to open locked areas (akin to the locked areas in Super Mario 64) but you don’t need to collect all the stars to continue the plot. This means there are lots of little puzzles to solve, and the player can choose which ones to complete to get to the next section. The trick is that you need to unlock some abilities to get to and solve some puzzles on other islands (hence the Metroidvania comparison).
My only problem with this game is that some puzzles are so complex and complicated that I occasionally ran out of “easy” ones to solve and had to look up some solutions to progress. I loved the a-ha moments where I’d figure out a tough puzzle—especially when I unlocked a new ability that suddenly made the tough puzzles a lot easier. There was a lot of content in this game I didn’t get to because I just reached the standard ending, but it’s still worth playing even for the “easy” ending.
A great retro-inspired open-world Metroidvania puzzle game, I give Isles of Sea and Sky 4.0 stars out of 5.
