Finally, an online game shutting down the right way: Islands of Insight will close servers next month and 'permanently modify the game to be offline-only' so the promising puzzler can live on

I liked the shared-world puzzle game Islands of Insight quite a bit when it came out in 2023, and so did some of my PC Gamer compatriots. Alas, it wasn't able to find an audience, and today the Islands of Insight community team announced that, like so many other online games, the servers will be shut down at the end of August. But the good news is that even without remote servers, you'll be able to keep on playing.

An offline mode was released in July that keeps the game world intact, with the same biomes, respawning puzzles, and daily quests, without requiring an internet connection. Social functionality isn't available, of course, but that's not really a huge loss because interactivity with other players was never all that great in Islands of Insight anyway—one of the notable weaknesses in an otherwise very good puzzle game.

The IoI team said at the time that the offline mode would «expand our play experience and provide more players with the opportunity to join us in the islands,» but that didn't work out: As recorded by SteamDB, player counts have been in a long, slow decline after a giveaway the end of June brought in an all-time peak concurrent player count of 7,755.

And so, here we are. The final Islands of Insight update, set to roll out on October 30, «will permanently modify the game to be offline-only,» the community team said. «This will allow Islands of Insight to live on for all Seekers to find and enjoy, while we focus our efforts onto our next projects.» 

Players have until October 30 to transfer their online progress to the offline version through a «Download Gameplay Progress» option in the account settings. Once that's done, exit the game, restart, and choose «Play Offline» to continue where you left off.

No further content or bug fixes are planned for Islands of Insight, which left some players unhappy: As detailed in this Steam forum thread, the game's offline mode writes saves at an extremely high frequency, causing performance issues on some