Ahead of fantasy puzzle game Islands Of Insight launching next month, NME caught up with game director Elyot Grant to learn about the title’s unusual approach to its genre.
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Islands Of Insight will task players with completing puzzle-based quests and learning what happened to the game’s universe – which looks more like the setting of a role-playing adventure than a traditional puzzle game.
“To us, puzzles can be beautiful, even awe-inspiring, and we feel that the otherworldly fantasy theme aligns with that much better than cartoonish graphics or simpler environments,” explained Elyot Grant, game director and CEO at developer Lunarch Studios.
“We aspired to create something a lot more impactful, where the beauty of the environment would add a sense of richness and wonder to the gameplay,” they added. “We also saw a huge number of fantasy-themed games – action-adventures, RPGs – that featured puzzles, but typically as a side dish rather than the main course. We felt that by focusing on the puzzles first and foremost within that style, we could create something beloved and somewhat familiar, yet also advance the state of the art.”
Likewise, Islands Of Insight‘s story is “far from conventional,” and will involve gathering memory fragments of the Known Realm’s inhabitants. To work out what happened in the world, players will need to piece these memories together – meaning that even the plot is a puzzle in itself.
According to Grant, the world’s lore has been inspired by “mathematics, neuroscience, the philosophies of beauty and sublimeness, poetry and proverbs from around the world, classic literature [and] cosmology,” along with “many other things”.
As for the puzzles themselves, Lunarch Studios designed each challenge around “eureka moments” for players to discover.
“We choose puzzle mechanics that support a deep and wide collection of those eureka moments, while also trying to maximize variety and balance the pacing and difficulty to keep one part of your brain from getting too tired,” shared Grant. “Our puzzle designers use the puzzles themselves as a canvas for expressing their creativity, as you’ll discover many secret themes, patterns, or bits of cleverness that you can unravel as you work your way down the solution path.”
Islands Of Insight is being published by Behaviour Interactive, which is best known for its multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight.
2024 is set to be a busy year for the studio, as it will also be releasing its “immersive nightmare” The Casting Of Frank Stone with Supermassive Games.
As for Dead By Daylight, the horror game finally got its long-awaited Alien crossover back in 2023.