Islands of Insight

Some games fail because they aim too low. Islands of Insight failed—commercially, at least—because it aimed absurdly high and then shot itself in the foot on the way to the target.

Released February 13, 2024 by Montreal’s Lunarch Studios and published by the far larger Behaviour Interactive (the studio behind Dead by Daylight), this is a first-person puzzle-adventure that wants to be the Louvre of logic games. You play a Seeker, a mostly wordless avatar dropped into a mystical archipelago of floating islands stretched across five distinct biomes—verdant forests, arid canyons, misty highlands. The pitch is staggering in scope: a vast library of hand-crafted puzzles spanning a wide range of types, all solvable in any order, at whatever pace suits you. There is no ticking clock. There is no fail state that punishes. There is only a serene world, and an ocean of things to figure out.

If that sounds like The Witness scaled up by two orders of magnitude, you’re not wrong—and Lunarch clearly studied Jonathan Blow’s masterpiece closely. But where The Witness was a tightly curated meditation on epiphany, Islands of Insight is a sprawling theme park. It trades precision for abundance.

Here’s where the story turns tragic. The game launched as an always-online, shared-world experience, meaning other Seekers would wander the islands as puzzles were solved. It was a puzzle game with an MMO’s server dependency—and almost none of an MMO’s justification for it. The reception was hostile, sales underwhelmed, and by late 2024 Behaviour pulled the multiplayer servers entirely, leaving the game as what it should have been from day one: a fully single-player title. Steam reception has since settled at Mostly Positive—a number that tells a story of squandered potential. This is a great game trapped inside a bad business decision.

• A Genuinely Massive Puzzle Library: Thousands of hand-crafted puzzles across a wide range of types—logic grids, mazes, hidden-object hunts, pattern matching, spatial reasoning, and environmental brain-teasers baked into the landscape itself. The variety is real, not padding.
• Open-Ended, Non-Linear Progression: No critical path, no gates demanding one zone be finished before another. Wander, climb, solve whatever catches the eye. Curiosity is the only engine.
• A Meditative, Vertical World: Five richly detailed biomes built for climbing and traversal, scored with atmospheric ambient music. The tone is calm, unhurried, and deliberately anti-stressful.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is simple: explore, spot a puzzle, solve it, feel a little smarter, repeat. What makes it work is how puzzles are woven into the environment. A cluster of glowing symbols on a cliff face. A hidden pattern only visible from a specific vantage. A logic grid embedded in a shrine reached only after a long climb. The world isn’t a menu of levels; it’s a physical space to interrogate. That’s the good stuff, and when it clicks, Islands of Insight delivers the same dopamine hit that made The Witness and Myst legendary.

The freedom is the headline feature and the genuine achievement. Stuck on a fiendish logic grid? Walk away. Climb a mountain. Solve a pile of maze puzzles instead. Come back when the brain has quietly chewed on the problem in the background. This frictionless non-linearity respects intelligence and time, and it’s the single best design decision Lunarch made. Onboarding is gentle—new puzzle types introduce themselves with easy examples before ramping difficulty—so the game rarely leaves anyone lost about how to play, only about how to solve, which is exactly where a puzzle game should keep you.

The Repetition Problem

Now the hard truth. A puzzle count in the tens of thousands is not a feature. It’s a statistic. And it exposes the game’s central tension.

A few dozen puzzle types cannot sustain that many instances without heavy repetition. Past the early hours, the templates repeat. The logic grids start to blur. The hidden-object challenges become rote pattern-recognition rather than genuine insight. What begins as epiphany curdles into grind. The game confuses volume with depth, and a completionist chasing the full puzzle count will feel the difference between “solved something clever” and “filled in another grid” long before the credits.

The best puzzle games are ruthless editors. The Witness was small and cut relentlessly, so nearly every puzzle taught something new. Islands of Insight kept everything. The result is a buffet where the first few plates are extraordinary and the twentieth is just... food. The main story is well-paced, but the “far more content for completionists” is where diminishing returns set in hard.

The Shared-World Mistake

No honest analysis can skip the original always-online architecture, because it defined the launch and torpedoed the reception. A single-player-feeling meditative puzzle game that required servers to function was a category error. It meant no offline play, latency where none was needed, and an existential dependency: when the servers died, so could the game. Behaviour’s decision to retire multiplayer and let it run standalone was the right call, but it arrived as a rescue mission after the commercial damage was done. The lesson here is bigger than one title: don’t bolt live-service plumbing onto an experience that fundamentally wants to be solitary.

Interface & Onboarding

The UI is clean and stays out of the way—puzzle interactions are intuitive, and the game trusts players to experiment rather than drowning them in tutorials. Menu navigation for tracking progress across thousands of puzzles is serviceable but strains under the sheer volume; finding a specific unsolved puzzle in this haystack can be its own frustrating meta-puzzle.

Aesthetically, Islands of Insight is a quiet stunner. The floating-island fantasy is rendered with real artistry—the five biomes each have a distinct palette and mood, light filters through the atmosphere beautifully, and the verticality gives the world genuine grandeur. The ambient soundtrack does exactly what it should: it disappears into concentration and gently holds the calm. This is a world built for lingering, which matters enormously when lingering is the whole point.

Performance is the asterisk. A 3D open world of this scope, with sweeping vistas and dense vertical geometry, is demanding on mid-range hardware—and for a title whose entire emotional pitch is serenity, any hitch in the frame rate isn’t a minor technical footnote; it’s a direct assault on the core experience. Anyone on modest hardware should temper expectations before buying.

On Steam, this is a mouse-and-keyboard game first, and it’s better for it. Puzzle interaction—drawing paths, filling grids, selecting patterns—demands crisp, precise, low-latency input, which a mouse provides by design. Controller support exists and suits traversal and climbing, but for the fiddlier grid puzzles, the cursor is king.

The Steam context also frames the value proposition sharply. With servers now retired, there is no online friction left—the game is built to run fully offline, permanently. That’s the version this game always deserved. Steam’s frequent discounting also means patient buyers can get an enormous quantity of content for very little, which materially shifts the value math in the game’s favor.

Islands of Insight is a lesson in the gap between ambition and execution. Lunarch Studios built something beautiful, generous, and relaxing—a puzzle world of rare scale and real craft. Then Behaviour wrapped it in an always-online straitjacket that alienated the exact audience it was made for, and the design’s fatal love of quantity over curation blunted its sharpest edges.

Stripped of its servers and sold at a discount, the game finally makes sense. What remains is a flawed, sprawling, frequently delightful monument to the simple pleasure of figuring things out. It’s not the masterpiece it clearly wanted to be, and we can’t recommend it to most players. But for the right devotee, on a rainy weekend, with the ambient music low and a hard grid waiting to crack—it’s a niche pleasure worth a look, especially at a discount.