I don't think Islands of Insight has a market. The casual puzzlers are on phones and tablets. Unless I'm forgetting something, all PC puzzle games that sold well this century can run on integrated Intel chipsets. If you're reaching, as heavily implied, outside the bubble to social gamers, whether on CoD, WoW or Satisfactory, their games offer at least one of
- monumental tasks to achieve, or
- emergence/chaos to keep things fresh and requiring assistance.
Puzzle Pirates, which seems to be the closest value proposition out there, mostly rides on vs and shipbuilding as I understand from the outside. It's very unclear what you're to do with your friend once you rope them in. I do have to acknowledge Internet comments are much more enthusiastic, and the accounts I checked seemed genuine, so I may end up looking very stupid about this.
Wrt to puzzles themselves, the 2D, gridded ones seem like a labour of love. They're elegant designs with ideas to convey, and are presented pretty well. The 3D ones feel incredibly repetitive. Each genre is very similar to each other, and every puzzle in the style is near indistinguishable to each other. There is potential in some variations, but I don't see either forward nor carceral lateral development of the ideas themselves. There's no sign of any greater mysteries to uncover either; of the various attempts at multiplayer puzzlers over the years, the ones that failed less - like Uru or Perplexity - had something to work as a community on, and that maintained engagement for the part of the audience that cares enough to make a wiki for a game.
You could prebake 85% of each level into a single object, and no interactivity would be lost. You can work for an hour, turn back, and nothing would look different. You haven't so much as opened a door, not even cleared your view from puzzle detritus. I find it incredibly disheartening. It doesn't help that the world is incidental, lolrandom. There's a couple of movement tutorial areas, some puzzles put the geometry there is to use, and it's hard to get stuck, but that's the limit of sense. The puzzles are extrinsic, you can't put your understanding of humans, physics, geography, history or architecture to work, and neither can you apply your understanding of symbols, language and art. You spend your time in asset flip noise.
Finally, movement lives in a dead man's land. That matters because it's most of your play time. For players of Cyan games or the Witness, the speed, complexity and occasional need of precision are deal breakers, as are the menu systems, infinite notifications and the occasional need to change cameras. For the average computer gamer, the movement looks and feels janky, and it's not novel, expressive or amenable to much mastery. I don't think the middle ground the game is on right now is very populated.
I wish the developers the best of luck. Somebody has to take a chance on something that's not a variant Sokoban or Portal but dull, and uncharted waters might just hide hungry dragons. This is written in the spirit of not being eaten.
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