Indie Game of the Week 373: Islets

You know what I haven't written about in a while? Explormers. Those games where there's a big map to check out and a bunch of upgrades to help you get around. Whatever happened to those games? Feels like you barely hear a thing about them these days. When I'm not gaslighting my audience like a fiend I tend to partake of these things whenever and however I can and this week felt like another time to whet my backtracking whistle once more. So yeah, it's another Indie Explormer of the Week, specifically Kyle Thompson's Islets from 2022. Islets sees an aerial world fractured by a past calamity, spitting a floating island nation into five disparate parts after all their ancient, artificial magnetic cores are disabled. Looking to reunite the islets once more, restoring an ailing ecosystem in the process, adventurers from all over the world work together to reach and restart the cores by defeating the beasts guarding them. Iko, a courageous but less-than-fortunate would-be hero overshadowed by his braggart associate Snoot, finds himself unexpectedly becoming the islets' best hope of salvation.

The ingenious twist of Islets, one that arrives early enough that I feel comfortable spoiling it (and because it'd be difficult to talk around) is that instead of one map initially you have five for each of the separated islets: each map has its own selection of traversal abilities to find, as well as a selection of other collectibles like engine parts for the airship sections of the game (the airship being a necessity to pass between islets) and upgrades which randomly provide a selection of three passive boosts to choose between that's somewhat similar to a run-based game like Dead Cells, and a network of save points and teleporters. However, by activating at least two of the magnetic cores those islets will combine into one structure: this merges their maps, allowing teleporters to cross over from one to the other, but also creates bridges which more often than not provides access to previously inaccessible parts of both islets. As you upgrade both Iko and his airship, the player is able to reach new islands and new cores, allowing them to continue contributing to the newly conglomerated core island in a loop that lasts until the fifth and final island, protected by "the three great beasts", can be infiltrated. It's a novel mechanical twist to the genre that constantly creates new pathways for you to investigate.

Gameplay-wise, the game functions well but for a few odd quirks that I never really acclimated to. You'll quickly get the usual genre fare like the double-jump and a wall-climb but other power-ups are linked to Iko's bow, which also operates as a seamless way to keep attacking enemies out of reach: the bow will fire a finite number of arrows before it runs out, but these arrows restock as you do damage with melee weapons, encouraging you to mix and match to work around specific enemy encounters or boss patterns. If you know the boss is going to rise in the air to drop mobs on you, you can save your arrows for when that happens, defeat the mobs to restock, and keep doing damage during what would normally be one of those annoying stretches where you have no choice but to go on the defensive. The two traversal ability upgrades for the arrows make a significant impact to how you get around—one maybe more so than the other—and so the arrows remain an ever-useful tool in your arsenal.

The quirks I mentioned include heightened momentum if you start running in one direction for a while, which more often serves to let me dash right into enemies than it helps with, say, longer jumps (which the double-jump is usually fine with handling) while the other quirk involves the way that Iko launches himself forward a little bit whenever he takes a swing at an enemy with his melee weapon, which also can serve to you get hurt more often than not. You quickly learn to adjust to both these elements of Iko's motion but they still zero purpose other than to trip you up occasionally and make the combat and traversal that little bit more awkward. Outside of those, the combat tends to be fair but still relatively challenging due to Iko's low amount of health (which can be upgraded, albeit either through random upgrades or by spending money at the store which can be better put towards powering up weapon damage or adding more utilities to the map) with both close- and long-range options and enemy patterns which can often involve a lot of danmaku-style projectile-evasion which a dodge roll (available from the outset) makes easier to handle. Traversal in general feels great, especially when the double-jump and wall-climb show up, and besides the aforementioned idiosyncrasies there's nothing objectionable about either side of the gameplay divide.

Visually, Islets goes for a simplified look with various animal-people and enemies with big, silly, expressive faces that can make it feel a bit cartoonish, and the game's script kinda follows suit with plenty of running goofs and moments of absurd comedy. Definitely feels written towards a Nicktoons or Cartoon Network audience, which I certainly don't mean as a pejorative. It can even be deceptive with its cuteness at times: there's a few disturbing enemies here and there, like a floating meatball wearing an eyeless bird mask that ended up being a little more perturbing than I expected (especially the way its beak quivers slightly), and the final gauntlet with the three beasts renders the final islet of Cinder as an almost post-apocalyptic graveyard. It doesn't go quite as hard as something like The Binding of Isaac with its cute-disturbing dichotomy but treads a similar path, I'll say. Musically, the game has what I started calling (due to many typically British summer showers this week) "rainy day EDM": the type that YouTube likes to make enormous "play while studying" playlists for that provide a calming effect as you're exploring (though the boss music sounded suspiciously like Smash Bros. at times). Much like the gameplay, the presentation strikes a confident air in what it's doing and though a significant chunk of Islets is business as usual for the explormer genre the new or uncommon twists like the islet-merging and airships and multi-range combat help set it apart and elevate it to the higher tiers of a very busy market. It may have escaped everyone's notice but I play a lot of games from this genre (don't all drop your monocles in shock at once) and it's rare to find one this competently done, some minor bugbears aside.

Rating: 5 out of 5.