Islands: Non-Places

When did you last really look at an airport baggage carousel? Not glance at it while checking a phone, but watch it and wonder what it is doing there. ISLANDS: Non-Places is built on that question, and it answers it with a confidence few games manage.

The developer is Carl Burton, an artist and animator best known for the moody animated illustrations he made for season two of the Serial podcast. Released on November 17, 2016 for $0.99 on iOS and Steam, Islands applies the same sensibility to an interactive format. The title comes from the anthropological idea of “non-places”: transit spaces designed so you pass through them without registering them. Think parking lots, hotel lobbies, office atriums, airport terminals and empty streets at 2 a.m.

The structure is simple. There are ten short scenes, each a small diorama of one of these anonymous spaces. You click or tap on objects, and the scene responds. A building folds open like a pop-up book. A machine wakes and starts some private ritual. Something rises out of a swimming pool for no stated reason. Nothing is explained, and that is the point.

This is not a game in the sense most buyers expect. There are no puzzles, no text, no fail states and no score. It belongs to the art-game category, alongside interactive toys and digital installations, and it should be judged on those terms. Critics did: PC Gamer called it “an odd, wonderful thing,” The Verge said it “makes mundane places magical,” and it was nominated for the IGF 2017 Nuovo Award, the Independent Games Festival’s prize for unconventional, boundary-pushing work. The iOS App Store is less generous at 3.7 out of 5 from 70 ratings, and nearly all the friction there comes down to one complaint: length.

Calling Islands an experience you “complete” is a little misleading. You pass through it, much like the spaces it depicts. The difference is that this time you notice.

• Ten surreal vignettes: Self-contained scenes set in parking lots, lobbies, offices, terminals and streets. Each one starts out mundane and turns uncanny as you interact with it.
• Zero-friction interaction: Click or tap on whatever catches your eye. There is no tutorial or user interface, and nothing to read.
• Burton’s signature art direction: Solid single-colour palettes, deep shadows and soft volumetric fog. It looks like a moving illustration rather than a rendered 3D world.
• A soundscape that matters: The ambient audio carries half the mood. The developer recommends headphones, and that advice is correct.
• Revisitable scenes: A first run takes a single short sitting. You can go back into scenes afterwards to find interactions and details you missed.

The Loop: Curiosity as the Only Mechanic

Strip Islands down and its core loop is three steps: notice, touch, watch. You scan a scene and click on something that seems suspicious, like a lamp post, a vending machine or a lit window. Then you watch what happens. Usually something sets off a chain of events that changes the space, and the scene moves on once enough of it has happened.

On paper that sounds thin, and in a strict sense it is. In practice it works because Burton understands payoff timing better than many designers who make far more complicated games. Every interaction is a small reveal, and the gap between a mundane setup and a surreal result is wide enough to stay surprising. A parking lot hides a transformation of its own. It is something waiting to happen. The game teaches you this within the first minute without a single word of instruction, which is a clean piece of onboarding without onboarding.

The design also trusts you. There is no hint system and no glowing outline telling you where to click. Scenes contain few enough objects that you will never get stuck for long, so the lack of guidance never turns into frustration. That balance is hard to get right. Too much empty space and players flail around; too much hand-holding and the sense of discovery disappears. Islands lands in the narrow gap between them.

Ritual Without Explanation

What separates Islands from a pretty toy is its tone. The changes it shows aren’t whimsical in a Saturday-morning-cartoon way. They are ritualistic: mechanical processes and odd ceremonies that seem to have been running long before you arrived and will keep running after you leave. The spaces feel inhabited by systems rather than people. That is exactly the anxiety a non-place produces, and it is also, surprisingly, the source of their beauty.

The effect is dreamlike and slightly eerie without tipping into horror. Players often describe it as calming, and that tracks with the design. The pace is slow on purpose, the colours are soft and the sound design is low and enveloping. It is built for late-night headphone listening, where it plays like a guided meditation through spaces you normally hurry past.

Burton never explains any of it, and he shouldn’t. A line of narration or a lore tooltip would turn the mystery into a puzzle with a solution. The refusal to explain is the game’s most important design decision, and it holds to it from start to finish.

Where the Model Cracks

The criticism is legitimate, and the game’s structure invites it.

Length is the headline issue. A first run is over quickly, and some players reach the end feeling short-changed. That reaction is understandable even if the run time is deliberate. The returning scenes add some longevity, but finding a missed interaction isn’t the same as finding new content. Once you’ve seen the main transformations, the surprise that powers the whole thing doesn’t come back.

The absence of goals puts off a smaller group. For some players, interaction without stakes isn’t meditative, it’s inert. If your enjoyment of games depends on agency, mastery or progression, Islands gives you none of those, and no amount of atmosphere will make up for it. That isn’t a flaw in the execution. It’s a mismatch between the product and the buyer, and buyers should know about it before they pay.

One pushback on the criticism: the length is not padding avoided by accident. Ten scenes is the right number. A 20-scene Islands would turn its sense of wonder into routine, and the eleventh building unfolding would hit far softer than the first. Burton stops while the idea still has force. That is restraint, not laziness, though restraint doesn’t change the price-to-minutes ratio.

The art direction is the reason Islands exists, and it is excellent. Burton works in flat, single-colour palettes: a scene might be nothing but shades of teal or dusty rose, broken up by hard-edged shadows and soft, low-lying fog. The result sits somewhere between Edward Hopper’s empty diners and a modern motion-graphics reel. Each frame could be a print.

The fog does real work. It hides the edges of each diorama, so every scene feels like an island floating in nothing, which is where the title comes from. It also softens the geometry enough that the low-polygon, simple-shape construction reads as stylisation rather than technical limits. This is a smart aesthetic choice that also suits the hardware, and it should age far better than games that chased photorealism in 2016.

The interface is effectively nonexistent: no HUD, no menus cluttering the screen, no text. The objects in each scene are the interface.

On the technical side, there is little to criticise, mostly because the game asks so little of the machine. Its simple geometry and short, contained scenes are about as light a load as a 3D game of this scope can place on hardware.

Sound deserves equal billing with the visuals. The ambient score and the mechanical, humming effects carry much of the emotional weight. The audio is clearly designed for headphones; without them, much of its enveloping quality is lost. Wear headphones.

iOS is arguably where Islands feels most at home. Tapping directly on a building and watching it respond is tactile in a way that suits the game’s handmade, toy-like quality. A little glowing diorama in hand fits the intimate scale of the piece, and a run this short splits naturally into a commute or a quiet evening. The catch is the reception: the 3.7/5 App Store rating suggests mobile buyers, used to apps they return to every day, are harsher about a one-time experience. On iOS, the length complaint is louder.

Steam gives you the bigger canvas, and Burton’s compositions benefit from a large screen in a dark room. Clicking is a natural match for an interaction model built entirely on pointing at things, though it is a little more distant than touch. You are examining the diorama rather than handling it.

Our recommendation: iOS with headphones for the intended intimacy, Steam on a large display for the art. Neither version is a compromise.

ISLANDS: Non-Places is a singular piece of work that most people will struggle to recommend with a straight face. Burton takes the forgettable architecture of modern life and makes you look at it again, and then makes it look back. The art is gorgeous, the sound design is essential, and the interaction model is so simple it disappears. The IGF Nuovo nomination was deserved.

It is also, unambiguously, a very short experience with no goals. If you judge games by hours per dollar, Islands will lose that comparison every time, and the weak App Store reception shows how many buyers it loses on exactly that point. If you judge games by whether they change how you see something, it wins easily. Next time you’re crossing an empty parking structure at midnight, you’ll half expect it to unfold. That lasting effect is the real value here — but it is value for a narrow audience, not the mainstream.

Buy it knowing what it is, play it in one sitting with headphones on, and don’t go looking for a goal.