This retro Game Boy throwback is the modern day Link’s Awakening

If you’ve every played The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on Game Boy, you know how special it is. While it initially looks like your average top-down Zelda game, it quickly gets delightfully weird. Shopkeepers will blast you with lightning if you try to shoplift, Goombas from Mario wander around, and the entire story revolves around a giant fish sleeping on a mountain. It’s a fish-out-of-water story for Link, one that makes for the most mysterious but inviting Zelda game ever made.

Now, a new indie game is recapturing that magic. Isles of Sea and Sky just launched this week on Steam and it’s a pixel-perfect homage toLink’s Awakening. The adventure puzzle game captures the oddball spirit of that adventure, while doing its own thing entirely. And it does all that while playing with the limitations of a Game Boy art style. It’s one retro game you don’t want to miss this year.

The Zelda inspiration inIsles of Sea and Sky is clear from its first moment. It begins with a character washing ashore on an island, a scene that’s framed almost identically to the classic intro ofLink’s Awakening. From there, players are set loose in a sunny, pixel-art island full of odd structures that they’ll learn about over time. There’s a main quest that involves unlocking a big door, but it’s an open-ended adventure.

But while it looks like a top-down Zelda game, that’s not actually how it plays. Isles of Sea and Sky is actually a minimalist open-world puzzle game (not unlike this year’s solid Islands of Insight). More specifically, it’s a “Sokoban” game. That’s a specific strain of puzzle game where players need to solve elaborate box-pushing puzzles. There are no enemies or combat. Instead, players gradually solve puzzles across a series of islands to open them up, collect stars to unlock new areas, and get a few power-ups along the way.