This puzzling PC game needs to be on your radar this February

Islands of Insight, an open-world puzzle game by Behvaiour Interactive and Lunarch Studios, will launch on February 13. It’s coming exclusively to PC and will retail for $30. A public demo for it will be available from February 5 to February 12 on Steam.

Ahead of its release date reveal, I went hands-on with a build of the upcoming game. I’d be dropped into its sprawling sky islands and given free rein to solve puzzles around a walled-off space. Based on the 90 minutes I’ve spent with it so far, it’s looking like a creative approach to the genre with some surprising inspirations.

The best way I can describe Islands of Insight is it’s like The Talos Principle meets Myst, but with the slightest dash of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. When I begin my adventure, I’m thrown into a small tutorial island with some basic puzzles strewn about. Clicking on a floating box activates a grid puzzle where I need to fill in spaces with black and white squares while abiding by certain rules. When I tap on a pillar, I have to find five hidden relics within a circular range. As the world opens up, I discover more puzzles that have me walking through invisible archways, navigating a glass maze, and connecting boxes with matching symbols.

The early puzzles I tried were all relatively easy to understand without much guidance. Most use a simple point-and-click control scheme, while others are simple navigation puzzles. One just has me walking through six orbs as fast as I can. Not every puzzle type is a winner here (like a confusing format that has me trying to look through several interlocking rings at once), but the joy here is that every corner of the island has some sort of discovery lying in wait. It’s like an open-world “map game” with all the combat removed.