While The Talos Principle 2 is slowly preparing its arrival, Devolver will be able to count on a little competition from the Behavior side. The Canadian studio is always looking for an original multiplayer experience, as shown by Dead by Daylight or more recently Meet Your Maker. This time around, Behavior is putting on its publisher cap and its latest investment is called Islands of Insight, developed by Lunarch Studios. To summarize the game in one sentence, we could say that it is The Witness with an artistic direction closer to The Talos Principle and, you will have understood, a multiplayer component. A rather ambitious mix that raises a lot of questions and unfortunately, if we were treated to a solid overview of what the game offers in terms of puzzles and level design, the multiplayer component was only touched on superficially because ” we’re not ready to talk about it yet “, in the words of the very nice person from Behavior who gave us this presentation.
Puzzles everywhere, walkthroughs nowhere
If the presentation started on the small island serving as a didactic area, you could see several floating islands in the background, some of which are more than generous in size, and you quickly understand that the game will offer an absolutely titanic number of puzzles. We can already imagine the huge number of puzzles that are available to us and, as in The Witness, we walk freely in the world (while having the choice between the first or third person view). A double jump, no fall damage and even wings to reach certain high places will allow us to move freely. Puzzles go everywhere and will come in many forms.
First, one can interact with specific elements to start a puzzle. On the first example presented, we find ourselves in a kind of zone which seems instantiated to invite whoever we want to participate in its resolution. The key word for the duration of this presentation was that the choice was always left to the player, so that the entire game can be done solo if desired, even if we will meet other players during our exploration . This first didactic puzzle is rather simple since it involves finding five hidden elements in this restricted area, but that’s not all. In this place, we can also find another completely optional puzzle that relies solely on logic. In our example, it was a matter of placing black and white squares respecting the rule ” no more than two black squares side by side “.
Secondly, puzzles will be found through elements in the scenery. We saw for example a tangle of rings which required finding the right angle so that our gaze passed through each of them, except one. Or two objects with the same pattern hidden in the world and which must appear at the same time in our field of vision. And finally, we can also find invisible elements arranged everywhere. Each puzzle solving will bring experience in different categories that correspond to each puzzle type, but we didn’t get to see or know what all of that was for.
Don’t make a single move. His vision is based on movement
If you’ve been paying attention so far, you must have already noticed something about the proposal for Islands of Insight. For those who have not followed, most of the puzzles that we have seen during this presentation are essentially based on the vision and movement of our character. Look for hidden elements, find pairs, place yourself in the right place… All the examples we have observed apart from the pure and hard (and optional) puzzle are based on these specificities and we necessarily wonder if things will become more dense and varied in what is proposed later.
That does not mean that what was presented to us was bad or uninteresting. The puzzles that we could see were different from each other since after the rings we were talking about above, we could see another puzzle which consisted of finding the right location to activate several poles at once, and you will guess it without surprise, that they are all in our field of vision at the same time. After all, The Witness was essentially based on the same pattern of puzzles, varying the formula and adding intricacies and complexity as it went. But faced with the gigantism presented for Islands of Insightwe also hope for more diversity.