Isles of Sea and Sky Steam Charts & Stats

If you enjoy Sokoban, box pushing style games you'll find more than enough bang for your buck here. It's not my favorite puzzle type but that doesn't mean it isn't a fantastic game, because it definitely is. Worth a purchase for sure.

I'm not great at writing reviews and do this rarely but this one deserves a praise. It's got puzzles, secrets, exploration and a good amount of difficulty. Wholeheartedly recommend. If you're wondering if it's for you because mainly it's a sokoban mechanic, let me tell you that it's nothing like the other games of this type. For example A Monsters Expedition got me really bored by the end but this one keeps me hooked all the way.

Before playing this game and checking out the end-game content after collecting all the stars, I've seen the gameplay 2-3 years ago from a YouTuber, that also promised to make more videos of the new updates after the stars. Those videos never came out and I genuinely understand now. This review will be in two parts: the first part - from the start to the late game exciting and amazing puzzles, whiles the second part - the frustrating and confusing end-game content. It'll have minor spoilers but major on the second part and conclusion. [b] [1/2] [/b] The game is a rather simple sokoban puzzle-adventure that becomes more and more interesting the more you explore the world, unlock new tools and "companions". Of course, these type of implementations of tools & "companions" make the sokoban puzzles from simple and boring to really intriguing and unique. Moreover, the art design, music and the world are fantastic, that they amplify the puzzles and exploration between the islands. These islands have their own aesthetic and unique puzzle mechanics that are reintroduced to previous islands, making them never forgotten or abandoned. This and the exciting discoveries you can find throughout the game are it's strongest aspect with it's wonderful puzzle design. However, some puzzles aren't that immaculate and usually are really confusing or boring, but positives from before usually outweigh the negatives and still make it an amazing experience of a game. 9/10. [b] [2/2] [/b] From this point onward, I have nothing positive to say about this game. The end-game content - [spoiler] pyramidions [/spoiler] - I was not a big fan of. Going from understandable and difficult puzzle design to confusing glyphs and cipher puzzles was uncalled for. Personally, I've never delved into ciphers or complex puzzles like these, so I might sound really stupid but this shift from puzzle design really upset me that I had to look up most of the 30 [spoiler] pyramidions [/spoiler] to get the 100% completion. But that's not all, because this game likely will be updated with new achievements and puzzles of [spoiler] meteorites [/spoiler]. These I didn't do because there was no purpose only to have one additional cutscene in the ending but looking over them they were like the [spoiler] pyramidions [/spoiler] but raised to a power of 5. Thank god I didn't delve into them because they seemed literally impossible. 5/10. [b] [Conclusion] [/b] Honestly, this sucked. The game went from a nearly flawless sokoban experience to a frustrating and annoying experience of ciphers for the 100% completion. I REALLY hope that the [spoiler] meteorite [/spoiler] puzzles will change, because continuing forward, if there will be more achievements containing post-[spoiler] pyramidion [/spoiler] puzzles, then I'll likely not do them and quit. Sadly, this game is a 7/10.

Great puzzle game without handholding but 100% is really hard so I didnt bother. Updates improved some of the obscure puzzles but I dont know if the game has any BS meta puzzles like Animal Well.

This is one of the best $4 I have ever spent on a game. The puzzles are challenging but so far I have eeked through. I'm at about half way from achievements. I am only stuck in a couple of places. You can just go someplace else if you are stuck. Sometimes you need powerups from other places to get unstuck. It has kind of an exploration component to it. Basically you are picking up keys and crystals and powerups on small but interconnected puzzle maps. It is Sokoban with a ton of embellishment. The graphics are pretty low res.

cinema puzzler, Tyler has good taste also love how completionist-friendly it is with its audiovisual secret cues (the eye holyyy), reward reveals, the metric ton of flags I can cover the map with, etc also the chill ost and great pixelart lowkey underrated ngl

This game manages to make me feel like a lost child in a world full of discovery like i did back when i played the old gameboy zeldas and it has been a truly wonderful experience for me thank you

The only issue is not knowing when you can't complete and area because you have not unlocked something, that aside it is a great puzzle game and the harder puzzles after the end are being a real challenge.

Fantastic puzzler. Beautiful art direction and fantastic soundtrack and sound design. Absolutely worth playing if you like Sokoban/Slide-y block style games. My only criticism would be its not entirely clear or easy to figure out if you have explored too far and need to back track because you don’t have the correct tools or unlocked equipment to complete puzzles in certain areas which can lead to lots of wasted time and, at times, aimless island hopping just to stumble across where you actually needed to be the whole time. Which may very well be the whole point of the game and a deliberate choice from the developer. Otherwise a very cozy puzzler game I enjoyed playing on my ROG Ally X w/ SteamOS

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