Islands of Insight

Platform	Windows
Genre	Open-World Puzzle
Release Year	2024
Rating	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Added	2026-Jul-07

Islands of Insight's a frustratingly strange duck. It's a massive collection of varied, unique, and engaging puzzles but it's wrapped in this ridiculously high fidelity, high-requirement engine that makes my GPU scream every second it's running, and an open world I have to tromp through to get to those puzzles.

It started life as a weird MMO, but the version you can get now functions in single player fully. The game at least uses the open-world-ness to an effective degree in the form of environmental and motion puzzles. My real love affair are the logic grid puzzles (pictured) though.

The puzzle variety is frankly astonishing. I think there's about 30 puzzle types ranging from kinesthetic "fire an arrow through concentric rings" things to classic match-3 to souped up nonograms to hidden object puzzles and a bunch of other stuff.

The "Plot" such as it is takes you from island to island tutorializing you on the puzzle types one by one, then requiring you to finish a certain number of puzzles anywhere in the world before going to the next island. Finishing the plot leaves you at about 30% completion and turns you loose on the entire world, and also introduces a global meta-puzzle I frankly ignored.

Insight has mostly left me wishing for a game that's just the logic grid puzzles. Something I got somewhat given to me by the dev's other game: Artisan of Glimmith.