Islands of Insight is like meditation. It's like a sauna followed by a steam room after a gym workout. It's like snuggling up by the fire on a cold and dark day, listening to ASMR while drinking hot chocolate and getting a foot massage. It's also infuriating. Pure brain-bursting, head-scratching, feet-stomping, temper-flaring, mood-shifting, controller-throwing exasperation. Until… hang on… I see! You stand here and look there and, e▨t voila, you've solved a puzzle and all is righ꧙t in the world again. 

Granted, I've only spent a couple of hours roaming Islands of Insight's gorgeous shared open-world puzzle playground, but I've loved every second of it. It was my favorite thing to come out of this year's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2023 (after a hands-off demonstration, no less), and now, having gone hands-on with its open playtest –🐷 running from today through Thursdꦺay, September 21 via – I'm absolutely buzzing to see more.

Riddle me this

Set on an aerial sprawl of luscious floating islands, filled with fauna and exotic-looking flowers, Islands of Insig♏ht is beautiful. Underpinned by a slow-paced orchestral soundtrack, your job is to snake your way around its multi-leveled biomes at your own pace in first or third person view, solve increasingly difficult puzzles in a variety of different styles, and progress to the next open-ended platform in turn. 

Logic Grids, for example, see you shifting around colored bricks against set criteria (all black squares must touch; certain configurations are forbidden); whereas Armillary Rings are environmental conundrums that involve positiಌoning yourself at an angle where your line of sight can see directly through a consecutive number of rings. Hidden Gates are exactly that: concealed archways that are uncovered once walked through, and Tile Puzzles see you matching different shapes and colors in X-in-a-row fashion, in a manner akin to old-school Columns 🐲and Tetris. As you meander deeper into Islands of Insight's world, you'll uncover many more – some variations on all of the above, others entirely new.

Through all of this, developer Lunarch Studios leverages a framework of systems to keep things interesting. Each completed puzzle grants you Sparks, which can be used to unlock upgrades – such as, say, Metroidvania-esque mid-air double-jumps – and cosmetics to change the appearance of your avatar. In order to progress to the next gated zone in turn,♔ you'll often be required to collect a set number of 'Mirabilis' –  magical cube-shaped to🦋tems designed to "awake new lands" and help you "gain access to secret enclaves." 

My favorite series of head-scratchers involved the aforementioned Logic Grids, when I was tasked with solving 11 consecutive set-pieces in order to gain my wings. I'll speak to the latter in a moment, but this 11-tier challenge caused me equal parts joy and pain like few other puzzle games I've ever played. In its most perplexing moments, I wanted to quit outright. But in its flashes of success, I felt like an absolute big-brained genius. The most intriguing strait of this run was when said Logic Grids introduced numbers – whereby, in something sort-of similar to Mines🧸weeper, I had to match black and white squares around number blocks, without them touching. 

It's likely easier to illustrate this in picture form. Here's one more involved puzz🐼le:

And her☂e's one I must have spen🤪t 20 minutes banging my head against, until it finally clicked into place:

All told, what makes these instances of frustration worth it are, of course, those eureka moments that you propel you onto the next. And with such a stunning, peaceful and thoughtful world tying everything together, losing yourself ﷺto Islands of Insight feels inevitable. While primarily a single-player game, the game's full release promises to let you see other players on their journeys as you go, with the aim of "offering a sense of camaraderie and belonging inside the game without being intrusive to your solo journey". 

If you fancy any of that, y💜ou should check out the Islands of Insight open playtest – where you can provide fee🌌dback to help shape the game's development from here on.

Oh yeah, wings. After successfully completing that 11-stage Logic Grid challenge I was granted my wings – meaning I could float between stages at will without relying on magic spring boards. That's when things really opened up, and introduced a new layer of wonder to what was already a pretty wonderful experience. Islands of Insight boasts a vague "coming soon" release date as it stands, but I'll certainly be keeping a close eye from now until launch whenever that may be. 

Check out its between now and September 21. 𝓡;

Break your brain with 10 of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best puzzle games causing conundrums right now