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