Isles of Sea and Sky

I do actually recommend this game to sokoban fanatics, but I'm leaving this review as Not Recommended to highlight an issue I have with its endgame puzzles. Many puzzle games suffer from this type of issue, and IoSaS is sadly not an exception. For clarity, I have reached a total of 111 stars and achieved the ending credits before finally getting stuck on the postgame puzzles (and one midgame "puzzle") for good and finally looking up guides for the first time just to start understanding them. At the beginning, this puzzle game does very well to introduce mechanics and interactions to you slowly over time. Navigating the tutorial island and the first real island felt great, and that's what initially drew me to the game: Navigating through and unlocking a Sokoban puzzle world, which is definitely the best part, too. Secret areas to push yourself into, weird tiles to step on to eventually unlock more stars, cheeky screen transitions. It was really juicy and sweet. Then, sadly, by the time I reached the endgame (and the postgame too) that was when the puzzles became less about "have you mastered these interactions between puzzle elements?" to becoming "do you want to jump through hoops just to even begin experimenting with puzzle element interactions?" Yes, once the lategame puzzles begin mixing together mechanics from the previous worlds, you eventually have to start figuring out how all the unique gimmicks start interacting with each other... all with an entire puzzle that's hindering you from actually making these gimmicks interact. Note that there are no "experimentation rooms" in this game. Easy rooms exist, sure, but no rooms where you can freely interact with multiple elements without hinderance. You MUST force interactions in the middle of pre-existing puzzles and just pray that something works out. Sliding ice that keeps you from interacting with the 4 different elementals, a combination that you may have just encountered for the first time... Cloud blocks which I am STILL unsure of how the developers intended for them to be used in their respective puzzles... Hey, did you know that the ONLY way to make a rock elemental move a single tile - without rolling at all - is by hitting him with a fire elemental's bolt? Oh, and to make it even funnier, the fire elemental's bolt will act like the player's push in almost every other instance, such as when it hits an air elemental or a box. So the "ranged push" gimmick stops being a push only when it fake-pushes an earth elemental... Yeah, you better have bet on green and spun the roulette like I did by even bothering to try that in the middle of one of the final areas you unlock in the first place, because that's one of the only 4-5 screens where this interaction is even possible at all. In fact, I actually turned away from the water and fire islands at first because I didn't understand how their gimmicks were supposed to work, and so I got stuck wandering across all the small islands for a while before coming back to the big islands. Compared to the tutorial island and rock beach island, the gimmick objects and their consequences are generally quite opaque. You aren't naturally encouraged to take actions that would trigger intended mechanics. The "tutorials" meant to introduce them are so weak that you might even think you're "not strong enough" to get through them yet. In a game where you can unlock new powers and puzzle elements, I was thinking that I had to come back later because these puzzles might have been unsolvable without new unlocks. Turns out I just had to experiment harder, effectively doing the work of a tutorial all by myself. Which does sound really stupid when I write it out like that, yes. What's the difference between a puzzle tutorial, a tutorial, and a puzzle? Is experimenting the fun part, am I being tutored, or am I puzzling out puzzles? Apparently those specific lines and boundaries can be really thin. In the end I got through the majority of the game without a guide and plowed through all 4 main islands as soon as I understood their gimmicks. But I still don't like that I failed to see those boundaries at these early moments - multiple times. In the current version of the fire island, you have to push an obsidian box across three hot tiles that aren't necessarily in your path. The only way you would know to do this is if you suspect that pushing it 3 tiles will do... SOMETHING. You aren't encouraged to actually do so by anything except sheer gamer intuition. Without solid tutorials like that, you might think that their ONLY gimmick is to make platforms on lava, which you absolutely can encounter before learning that they can detonate. (Seriously, why would obsidian boxes float endlessly in lava, but violently detonate over some hot tiles? Why would I think they'd do anything except quietly get destroyed when their heat meter fills in the same way as a wooden box?) The worst example of "the items really interact like that??? nobody told me!" frustration I can recall - the clearest instance of actual ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ staining this game, if you don't count the other instances of needing to experiment on overloaded screens - is that one small water-themed island near the fire island, which has only about five puzzle elements: Two portal entrances and their exits, a wooden box, a blue box, and a water elemental. (An elemental which you have to unlock, yet you can encounter this "puzzle" before unlocking it!! Just imagine encountering this island without knowing that you can unlock entire puzzle elements across the whole game. Insane.) The solution to this is completely asinine and arbitrary: Use the water elemental on the blue box to get an extra blue box. You drop the original blue box onto the portal exit via water streams, then shove the copied blue box into the portal entrance from the left going right. For no discernible reason at all, a teleported blue box is the ONLY way to break the original blue box that blocks you from teleporting. You can't even shove two blue boxes into each other normally to destroy either one of them! So where's the logic here?? How are you supposed to know that this blue box-blue box-portal interaction exists?? Well, I think you AREN'T. This is genuinely, actually, without a doubt, the only spot in the entire game where this interaction is necessary, maybe even possible in the first place. I can't understand this puzzle game design decision at all. The developers realized that they programmed in some dumb interaction, and then they made a "puzzle" to show off this interaction... without considering that making a "puzzle" based on "think up the most arbitrary interaction you can smash together in your head" isn't fun to work out. This may genuinely only be solvable for most people via bruteforce, and I have better standards for myself than resorting to bruteforce. Hell, I think I was locked out of the all gems ending because of this specific awful "puzzle." But I took my L, even though there were so few moves to potentially bruteforce. And rather than resort to bruteforcing, eventually I decided to look up the solution, Couldn't believe the interaction when I saw it. How pitiful that such a tiny "puzzle" felt so awful. It doesn't seem like it should be that bad for how quick the solution is, yet the more I think about it, the worse my opinion of it grows. tl;dr Lots of fun puzzles all around, but the tutorialization for gimmicks sucks after the rock beach island (first level). Many endgame puzzles rely on having to experiment with gimmicks upon gimmicks. However these gimmick combos are so rare that these dense screens are the only places in the game where you can even find these different gimmicks together, so you have to experiment in crowded spaces. The initial relaxing vibe gets muddied up as the difficulty creeps into bruteforce/moon logic territory. 8.8/10 too much water, pokemon company pls nerf irelia

I just can't. It's a really fun game and an absolutely fantastic puzzler, but staring at a puzzle for 20 minutes only to youtube it and realize you're missing some obscure item to complete it ruins the fun. Would rather them make unlocks for certain areas instead of the constant guessing of "Am I stupid" or "Oh now that I came back half the rocks are unlocked and usable to complete the puzzle."

112星，打到最后一个岛了还没打完。 表层的推箱子解谜很好，只做表层推箱子也可以打到我这个收集度。深层那些不喜欢，经典的做阅读理解，有些要靠猜，有些要考验观察力，还要截图，这种局外操作很讨厌。 提供两个不算剧透的攻略给新手玩家 [spoiler] 每个岛屿只有1-2颗星星是需要其他岛屿的能力才能收集的，最好当前岛屿都收集完再去下个岛屿[/spoiler] [spoiler] 大地图合理的探索路线是一个逆时针的蚊香路线 [/spoiler]

评分：10 / 10 【像素 类推箱】 Isles of Sea and Sky是我今年玩过最好玩的推箱游戏！！！在我心目中，这款游戏是此品类里质量上乘的绝对神作。来讲讲它为何如此吸引我。（以下稍含剧透） 1. 游戏的核心玩法：游戏内设置了各种机制新颖的箱子，玩家解谜完成收集。并且随着游戏进程和探索，主角还会获得新的能力，能控制/看到新的解谜“资源”，然后打开不同颜色的锁以解锁新的区域。这些机制非常有创意，区分度很高。游戏的谜题设计环环相扣，每种机制之间还能相互配合，可以说解谜深度非常之高。 2. 画风：游戏是复古像素画风，怀旧颗粒感十足，而且色彩层次很丰富。不仅如此，游戏的视觉语言还很高效，无意识的引导能够让玩家免受无关信息干扰，沉浸式解谜。 3. 世界观叙事：游戏讲述了一个原始世界的四元素（古希腊的水风地火）创世故事，颇有”道生一，一生二，二生三，三生万物“的感觉，故事站在”传说“亲历者的角度展开，非常经典。最重要的是游戏内的机制、故事、画风三者高度统一，彼此自洽，仿佛世界本应如此，很有代入感和氛围感。 4. 地图设计：游戏的地图设计很有类银的味道，比如走回头路、重玩一遍找隐藏等。并且游戏是吸收到了精髓的，小地图还是大地图都是线性弱引导，并且做得非常流畅（玩过之后你会赞同我）。 5. 收集：收集要素齐全、对称、且有指示。 6. 细节：游戏有很多小细节、隐藏和彩蛋。很精致，有设计感。 7. 性价比。10块钱能玩20小时。不查攻略的话，游戏时长可能会更长。 小瑕疵： 后面两个能力藏得过深，并且有了它才能展开后续四分之一的最精华最难最繁琐的解谜。游戏里很多解谜是随机设置的，查攻略能够了解机制但是照抄不了。其实这是优点啦，但是最让我挫败的地方是它让我无法轻松获取前面所说的那个能力（因为谜题位置过于刁钻，且网上没人和我一样）。 推荐！推荐给喜欢像素画风、精致的“结构感”、收集、以及强逻辑性的解谜的玩家！真的特别好玩

I enjoyed the game for the first 40 stars, but then when I got to the snowy island, the difficulty spiked, and screens took a lot longer and needed much more tricky movement than I'd like. The game wears you down with screens that can only be solved once you have a secret item, despite appearing as though you could conceivably solve them now. By 70 stars, I was very frustrated, and I dropped it after looking up hints for the A1 snow puzzle. I had misinterpreted a part of the puzzle, and that led to a very bad experience of fruitlessly staring at something I thought was part of the solution, but was actually just an assist tool. It also suffers from the classic metroidvania problem of spending more and more time just looking around for what the hell to do next.

Awesome game! The puzzles are hard but relaxing at the same time. I highly recommend this game, especially if it’s on sale!

I was very impressed with [i]Isles of Sea and Sky[/i]. I'm not particularly well-versed in block-pushing ("[i]Sokoban[/i]") puzzle games, but I have played some, and I found [i]Isles[/i] to be challenging for sure, but not fiendishly difficult like, for example, [i]Baba Is You[/i]. I did require hints for a few puzzles in my quest to 100% the game, but I think the difficulty and scaling is perfect. Simple yet inventive twists get added without requiring a text explanation, and solutions fairly rarely rely on fringe rule errata. The open-world framing of the game works well, both because exploration is fun in and of itself and because it discourages you from endlessly bashing your head against a puzzle you're having trouble solving. I enjoyed the (minimal) story and the unique Mesoamerican theme. The graphics are simple yet functional, so they work perfectly fine. It's always neat to find a game that could've been released 35 years ago yet innovates today. As far as criticism goes, I disliked the [spoiler]cape[/spoiler] item, as it felt like it unnecessarily trivialized some [spoiler]previous[/spoiler] puzzles. The style of puzzle switches in the [spoiler]postgame[/spoiler] and didn't interest me. But these are both minor gripes. Highly recommended!

This game is really great for a while, but then you kind of hit a wall. This is a block-pushing game, and it's a very good one, with clever puzzles. The problem is that it gets really finicky towards the end, at least if you want to get all of the stars (which is not necessary to simply reach the ending). Still, for the bulk of the game, it's quite delightful, and I would suggest finding guides for the harder late-game puzzles since they can be quite motivation-sapping. As you can see, I still recommend the game. Actually, I played this back in November 2024, but I didn't finish it because it got finicky, and I really never planned to do so, but recently (June 2026) I saw that one of the gaming YouTubers I watch was doing a playthrough, so I started watching it, and I realized that I wanted to play this again. I think that's saying something, right? I just finished the main game, and now I'm in the postgame. The other cool thing is that in the meantime the dev has added a bunch of content to the game. It's years after release and there's still more. The dev is really dedicated to the game being great. You should play it!

It's very "find the map secret"-y, but the vibes are so immaculate that I don't mind.

Buen juego de puzzles, pero bastante obtuso en algunos de los misterios. Ha conseguido provocarme auténticas migrañas. Cada vez que me sentía listísimo porque pensaba que había dado con la solución y justo me topaba con un obstáculo que me impedía solucionar el puzzle de esa manera en concreto, podía sentir el aliento de las carcajadas de los desarrolladores en mi nuca.