Sometimes, turning a linear game into an open world just makes sense. Whether it’s Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild, plenty of franchises have found that their core gameplay loops map well to an open world iteration. With Elden Ring, you can disperse the intense FromSoft difficulty across a map that invites players to “git gud” at their own pace. With Breath of the Wild, the entire world is now a dungeon, every hill and valley a puzzle. Playing both, it almost feels as though each franchise and its mechanics were just waiting to be spread across a sprawling map. They just feel right.
By contrast, Isles of Sea and Sky, an open-world Sokoban game, isn’t quite as obvious a fit. But just because something isn’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean it won’t work.
Released in late May, Cicada Games’s Isles of Sea and Sky employs Game Boy Color-era Zelda aesthetics in pursuit of a genre mashup that produces harmony and dissonance in equal parts. The game makes a great first impression. It evokes that feeling of playing Link’s Awakening DX (pre-remake), to the point where you’d be forgiven for mistaking one of Isles’ beaches for Awakening’s. Moving from screen to screen is a nostalgic joy, with a Vocaloid-infused soundtrack that imbues the game with even more personality, which is good, because at its core, open world or no, this is a Sokoban-ass Sokoban game.
You will push blocks in Isles of Sea and Sky. You will push many, many standard-issue blocks into standard-issue holes, allowing you to cross over those holes in order to push more blocks. You will also push things that aren’t blocks, like little boulder dudes (definitely not Gorons) who roll as far as they can in the direction you push them, crushing any boxes they encounter. Or little water guys, who can extend riverways if you push them downstream. The puzzles start simply, easing you into the game’s increasing difficulty one screen at a time, until eventually you find yourself stumped. And, in being stumped, you will find yourself pushing up against the contradictions inherent to Isles’ mixture of freedom and linearity.
One of the pleasures of Sokoban games is the underlying conceit that, though you may feel frustrated by an individual puzzle, you always have the necessary abilities to get through the level. Each stage is then simply a matter of thinking and working through what things you have tried and not yet tried. You’re stuck, sure, but you’re not lacking anything you need to achieve the solution.
Not so in Isles of Sea and Sky. Early on, you will be presented with puzzles you are not yet able to complete until you unlock a new ability. While plenty of games include this kind of lock-and-key design, where you must first unlock an ability before you can access certain areas, this runs contrary to genre expectations for Sokoban titles. Going into Isles, the player might reasonably expect that, if they’re stuck, they just need to keep trying different solutions. Such a mentality will get you through similar games like Baba Is You or A Monster’s Expedition. The solution is there. You just need to keep at it. By contrast, in Isles, you are often meant to move on, to travel elsewhere in the game’s map and overworld. In short, you are meant to give up when you get frustrated.
At first, I found myself stymied by this dynamic. How am I meant to know when I am failing to understand a puzzle versus lacking the ability to solve it? When is my frustration an intended element of the solution and when is it futile? To its immense credit, Isles goes out of its way to reduce some of this frustration by allowing the player, at any point, to rewind their actions step-by-step, or to reset the entire puzzle, each with the press of a button. But you cannot rewind the real-life time you are putting into the game. You cannot undo the minutes spent bashing your head against the wall, stubbornly trying to solve something you are simply unable to solve. Encountering this, I found myself asking why anyone would design a game in this way, when they must know that players will get stuck like this.
That’s when it hit me. They know players will get stuck like this.
Full disclosure: I can be a bit stubborn. I like to think of myself as a creative problem-solver, but my general approach is to stick to something until it’s done. This can be a good trait (sticktoitiveness and all that), but it can also be a problem (see: my description above of bashing my head against the wall). Traditional Sokoban titles are designed with this kind of player in mind — someone like myself, who will spend hours trying out different things until finally they figure something out. The folks at Cicada Games clearly love this genre, as is evident by the sheer number and variety of puzzles they’ve crammed into Isles, but what they clearly don’t love is that feeling of being stuck without any recourse, of being unable to move on.
Not to quote a meme, but to quote a meme: Isles of Sea and Sky is here to say “Just Walk Out. You Can Leave!!!” What began for me as a frustration with the game turned into a bit of self-reflection when I stopped to consider why, exactly, I felt the need to stay frustrated, when, at any point, I could simply leave, or, to quote our generation’s preeminent philosopher dasharez0ne, “hit da bricks!!!” Sure, there are some areas you cannot access before completing at least a certain number of puzzles, but in general, you can well and truly leave behind most anything that’s too frustrating in Isles and find something you’d rather be doing. The challenge, at least in my case, was in allowing myself to do so.
As I’ve argued, Sokoban games are not an obvious fit for an open world iteration. Their inherent linearity rubs up against a style of game best known for its variety and, well, openness. The focus required of the player feels categorically different than the desirable distraction of asking, “What’s over that hill?” With Isles of Sea and Sky, specifically, there’s an immediate dissonance between how you expect to play a block-pushing puzzle game and how you’re meant to play this block-pushing puzzle game. But dissonance can resolve into consonance, to harmony and stability, and in Isles’ case, you’re pushed not only toward accepting limitation, but toward the inclination to free yourself.
For me, it was difficult, at first, to see moving on as a valid strategy, having become so accustomed to the habit of pushing through mental blocks, both in Sokoban titles and in life. But once I did, I found that mentality extending beyond the game. Is stubbornness helping or hurting here? Do I have to sit in this feeling? Why do I think of moving on as giving up?
In the end, I was happy to play a game that inspired this kind of self-reflection. Isles of Sea and Sky challenged me to take a step back, to reassess, and to move on. Maybe it’ll do the same for you.
Isles of Sea and Sky was released May 22 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed with code provided by Cicada Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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