Islets

Metroidvanias have a dirty secret. For every hour spent fighting bosses and unlocking double-jumps, another goes to trudging back through rooms already cleared, hunting for the one door a new ability finally opens. The good ones disguise the tedium. Islets, the debut solo project from developer Kyle Thompson, published by Armor Games Studios and released August 24, 2022, does something bolder: it makes the map itself the puzzle.

You play Iko, a mouse warrior with more anxiety than muscle, piloting a held-together-with-hope airship across a world that has literally fallen apart. The islands float in isolation, each cut off from the others, each guarded by sky pirates and monsters. Iko’s job is to reignite each island’s magnetic core—and once he does, he can physically drag those landmasses together like puzzle pieces, snapping a broken world back into one continuous map. It’s a Metroidvania where you don’t just discover shortcuts. You build them.

That single mechanic reframes everything around it. This is a game in a genre crowded with Hollow Knight imitators and Ori wannabes, and it earns its shelf space not by out-brooding them but by out-thinking them. Where most of its peers reach for gothic melancholy, Islets reaches for warmth—hand-painted vistas that owe an obvious debt to Studio Ghibli, dialogue that’s genuinely funny rather than merely quirky, and a difficulty curve calibrated to welcome newcomers instead of hazing them.

Available on Steam and Nintendo Switch for $7.99, it’s positioned squarely as the genre’s friendly front door: forgiving enough for someone who bounced off Blasphemous, textured enough to hold a veteran’s attention. That’s a hard needle to thread. Thompson threads it. The result is a game that feels less like a solo dev’s proof-of-concept and more like the confident work of a studio three titles deep.

• Magnetic Island-Fusion: Reignite an island’s core, then drag disconnected landmasses together to forge new paths, shortcuts, and secrets. Exploration and map construction are the same act.
• Genre-Shifting Boss Fights: Encounters swing between grounded melee duels and full-blown airship bullet-hell sequences in the open sky. Two combat languages, one fight.
• Ghibli-Grade Hand-Painted Art: Every island is a distinct, storybook-painted biome. This isn’t asset reuse dressed up with a color filter—each region reads as its own place.
• Accessible-by-Design Difficulty: Forgiving checkpointing and a gentle onboarding ramp make this a legitimate first Metroidvania, without gutting the challenge from its late-game bosses.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is easy to grasp: land on an island, fight your way to its core, reignite it, then step back and reshape the world. But the fusion mechanic does something to the pacing that most Metroidvanias never manage. It gives backtracking a payoff you can see.

In a traditional entry, revisiting old ground is a bet: you hope your new grappling hook opens something back in the eastern caverns. In Islets, when you slot two islands together, the map visibly rewrites itself. A dead-end that frustrated two hours ago suddenly kisses up against a fresh corridor. A shortcut you desperately wanted materializes because you put it there. The dopamine isn’t in stumbling onto a door. It’s in engineering one.

That’s the design masterstroke, and it’s worth sitting with, because it solves a structural problem the genre has quietly tolerated for decades. Backtracking stops being friction and becomes authorship. You’re not retracing steps. You’re editing the world and then walking through your own edit.

The moment-to-moment platforming is built to hold up its end. Iko’s controls are designed for precision—jumps land where you aim them, the dash carries real weight, and the hit-stop on a connecting sword swing gives combat a satisfying crunch. There’s no mushiness in the input design, which matters enormously in a game that eventually asks you to thread bullet-hell needles. Ability upgrades arrive at a steady clip and expand both traversal and combat vocabulary, so Iko’s growth feels earned rather than doled out on a schedule.

Combat and the Bullet-Hell Pivot

The decision to split combat into two modes is the game’s biggest swing, and it mostly connects. Ground fights are readable and fair—telegraphed attacks, generous dodge windows, bosses that teach you their patterns before they punish you for missing them. Then the game shoves you into the sky, hands you the airship, and turns into a bullet-hell shooter.

It’s a genuine tonal and mechanical jolt, and your mileage will vary. For players who came for cozy platforming, the sudden density of projectiles is the sharpest spike on the whole curve. It’s the one place where the game’s otherwise gentle onboarding briefly forgets itself. But the sequences are tuned so that persistence—not reflexes alone—carries you through, and the variety keeps the back half from settling into rhythm-fatigue.

Onboarding and Accessibility

This is where Islets quietly excels. The early game teaches without lecturing. Systems layer in one at a time. The map is legible. Checkpoints are humane. For a genre that too often treats obscurity as depth, Islets understands that a low barrier to entry and a high skill ceiling are not enemies. A newcomer can finish it. A veteran won’t be bored getting there. That balance is rarer than it sounds, and it’s the game’s second-best trick after the fusion hook.

The Ghibli comparison is unavoidable, and for once it’s earned rather than lazily invoked. The hand-painted islands have a soft, luminous quality—warm light, painterly clouds, backdrops that look illustrated rather than shaded-to-look-illustrated. Crucially, each biome is visually distinct. You always know which island you’re standing on, which does real navigational work in a game about assembling a fractured map.

The UI stays out of the way. Menus are clean, the map screen is readable at a glance, and the fusion interface communicates a novel spatial idea without drowning you in tutorial text. That’s harder than it looks.

As a 2D game with modest technical demands, Islets is light on hardware, and Thompson has spent that headroom on polish rather than spectacle. The bullet-hell segments are the one place where a dropped frame would actually cost you, and the game’s low overhead is well suited to keeping those screens readable.

On Steam, the game is a natural fit for a controller—and you should use one. Keyboard-and-mouse works, but a Metroidvania this movement-forward wants analog control and face-button combat; the airship sequences in particular reward a stick over WASD. Desktop hardware should have no trouble with a 2D game of this scope.

On Nintendo Switch, Islets arguably finds its ideal home. This is a pick-up-and-put-down game—island-sized chunks of progress that map perfectly to handheld sessions on a couch or a commute. The cozy tone and the Switch’s portability are a matched pair. The trade-off is the expected one for a Switch port: a softer image in handheld mode and some visual concessions docked. Neither should dent the experience. If you’re choosing, buy it where you’ll actually play it—and for most people, that’s the Switch.

Islets shows that innovation in a mature genre doesn’t require reinvention—just one idea, executed with conviction. The magnetic fusion mechanic isn’t a gimmick bolted onto a familiar frame; it’s a genuine rethink of what exploration means when the map is something you assemble rather than merely reveal. That it arrives wrapped in some of the warmest art and sharpest writing the genre has seen in years is almost unfair.

It isn’t flawless. The bullet-hell detours will frustrate the very cozy-seeking players the rest of the game courts so carefully, and its gentleness means the hardcore crowd may finish it wishing it had pushed back harder. But these are the complaints of a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and nearly nails it. For a solo debut, that clarity of vision is impressive. Kyle Thompson didn’t just make a good Metroidvania. He found something new to say in a genre that had gone quiet. We recommend it to the right audience.