Sometimes a game can transport you back to an exact moment in time. When I think back to Islanders, I blink back to January 2020. It was a cold New York winter, and I was bundled up in my apartment for a particularly bitter weekend. I was feeling a bit of cabin fever, but I didn’t dare brave the frost. I needed a warm escape, and I found it in developer Coatsink’s minimalist city builder. I spent hours meticulously crafting the perfect islands, placing each building just right to maximize my score. The stakes were low enough to create a zen moment. I didn’t leave my desk, but it felt like I was on vacation.
Five years later, that feeling returns with Islanders: New Shores. The sequel builds on its predecessor’s bones in careful ways, adding new buildings, tweaked scoring strategies, and a visual upgrade built to show off a new photo mode. Those fresh upgrades naturally slot into a winning idea without overcomplicating its tranquil pleasure. And with it launching on all major platforms rather than just PC, it has instantly positioned itself as an early staple in my Nintendo Switch 2 library. No matter where I am, I can always have an island escape on speed dial.
Islanders: New Shores is a streamlined city builder that boils a complex genre down to its tactile joy. It’s all about placing down structures in spots that will maximize their score potential and synergize with the environment around them. In its primary high score mode, I’m given an island themed around one of six colorful biomes. It’s a blank canvas that I quickly start filling in as I’m dealt a set of buildings and structures to place down. In my first run, for instance, I start with a seaweed farm in my hand. I can place it anywhere on flat land, but it’s best placed facing as much water as possible. From there, I place down some seaweed fields from my hand near it. Each one will get a score boost if it’s within the farm’s radius, and it’ll get additional points for any other field it’s near too. The idea is to make each building placement more valuable as a run progresses through strategic land management.
Reaching certain score thresholds grants me more structures to place, but the extra twist this time is boons. These are special effects that can give me any number of buffs, from shrinking the size of the next building I place to giving me a massive, raised platform I can build on. That twist pairs with a few additional nuances that set New Shores apart from Islanders’ first go-around. For instance, I can now place buildings like lighthouses that are scored more based on how far their line of sight can extend. The end game is to get my score high enough to unlock a fresh biome and keep chaining my score up as far as I can.
While that sounds complex, Islanders’ strength is in how streamlined it keeps that concept. I can always see exactly what my score will be when placing down a building, and am encouraged to hover around the map to find the highest yield spot. It’s a good idea for me to plan ahead, leaving some space open near trees in case I draw a mill that will get the most out of the space, but I can still casually plop down buildings where they feel most aesthetically pleasing and get far in a run.
While there’s some high-level strategic depth, it’s those simple pleasures that make New Shores such a calming summer getaway. I’m less filling the high-stress role of a city engineer and more indulging that inner kid who liked to stack his blocks and sort them by some color system that only he could decode. Islanders finds a primal kind of play in the genre’s foundation, buried underneath all those twisting electrical lines and sewer pipes. What is an empty island if not a gigantic sandbox?
While the first Islanders did eventually launch on Switch and benefited from the Steam Deck’s release after that, I’m glad that I’m able to take New Shores on the go from day one. I don’t want my memories of it to be chained to a dark corner of my apartment again. That feels like a betrayal of such a breezy sequel that begs to be a travel companion. I want it to work like an air freshener, momentarily clearing the smog of the world around my Switch 2 screen. It’s a moment of peace on a crowded subway commute. A brief retreat from a stressful family gathering. An hour of gentle play while letting the aloe vera soothe a long beach day’s sunburn. I want to carry that warmth that got me through a cold weekend on hand wherever I go.
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