ISLANDERS: NEW SHORES

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I still fondly remember ISLANDERS. In fact, it was one of the very first game reviews I did some years ago, when the idea for handling a blog about indie games was still formulating in my brain. It was a perfect game for the whole concept - small, cosy, gentle puzzler with soothing aesthetics. A simple game, too, something to chew on after a hard evening of work. A little morsel of entertainment to ease the tired mind and bring a little bit of a smile to one's face.

To be frank, I had no clue what the developers could make to improve on the formula. Oh, there were possibly dozens upon dozens of feasible branching notions, but all of them - at least in my noggin! - would make the game too complex. Steal its charming simplicity. To my utmost delight, ISLANDERS: NEW SHORES is pretty much what I would call a perfect sequel. It doesn't try to reinvent the core gameplay, but builds upon it in clever, unobtrusive ways that expand the experience without ever smearing or smudging what it was always meant to be.

But let me paint you a picture if you never played the predecessor. It is, in its very core, a tight little puzzler about the optimal placement of provided elements. The dryness of that mechanic is beautifully masked by a theme - a relaxing city builder, in which you'll populate a randomly generated island with pastel structures. As expected, buildings come with their distinct categories that are well designed to have a bit of intuitive reasoning to them. For example, the city components - mansions, houses, and the like - do not enjoy proximity to structures of industry. Nobody likes a smoking chimney next to their window, I reckon! Even without reading the detailed breakdown of each building's likes and dislikes, it is quite easy to divine their purpose. Lumberjack? Wants to be around trees. Hermit? Keep'em away from the population. Lighthouse? Place as high as you can, close to the shores. And so on - it is a little spark of genius, that the vast majority of components have this intuitive ease of use.

It's a peaceful sort of joy to watch the island develop under your watchful gaze.

That is where the first ISLANDERS sort of wrap up. A neat little puzzler about organizing your semi-randomly provided set of building blocks to score high and beat the island point threshold. If you do so, you can either stay on your little bit of land to try to squeeze as many points as possible, hunt for some achievements... Or just move to a new challenge. Each progressive island tends to be a teensy bit more demanding, asking for a bigger score to let you pass, and therefore forcing a bit of a learning curve in which you must start getting more strategic about your placements. Anticipate, too! It's nice to have a giant chunk of houses making your city, but if you don't leave some neat empty spaces between them, you will miss out on a big score from that fountain that might come in just a few more drafts...

The sequel greatly expands on this aspect. When moving to a new island, you're given a choice between two - they inform you of the biome you're going to play with, grant you a special building (usually a very high scoring one, that is not easy to satisfy the needs of), and, possibly, a fun alteration to the ruleset. It's a great way to mix up the formula as these biomes and special properties mix and match, making multiple permutations of minor changes to keep things fresh. Sometimes you'd like to clump your structures and keep a high spot free to plant that big juicy Mountain Shrine, other times you'll keep small buildings to place around a Layline Node to get your boons.

Sometimes in the chase of the highest score, the desire for clean visuals slips away, and some... ungainly creations are made in the process.

Oh right. Boons! Each island can provide you with additional and powerful abilities each time you cross a certain milestone (or fulfill the modifier's needs). Those come in quite a few flavours - from letting you ignore neighboring structures' penalties, duplication of strong structures, to even a cute little wisp that empowers your scoring and jump between buildings in a chain of construction. There's a good variety here, and you never know when you're going to need them to enable yourself to cross a certain hurdle. Use them wisely!

All that is, of course, wrapped in pretty, delightful visuals. It's sharp, colorful, and soothing, with gentle tunes helping you relax, unwind. Structures providing a bit of extra sound when placed to give that tactile feel of playing with them, too. There's a pretty nifty photomode too, to make lovely screenshots or recordings of your neatly populated island, giving some creative minds a solid set of tools to curate some charming vistas. Toss in a solid selection of achievements to chase and you'll get out a game that can be played over and over again, always offering some minor, sweet goal to aim for - if you so desire.

Yup. ISLANDERS: NEW SHORES is exactly what I could ever hope the sequel to be. It makes the game just... better in every way. If anything, its only fault lies in pretty much invalidating the existence of the original ISLANDERS, because there's hardly a point in playing it now. The sequel just provides the same experience, but better - more robust, more polished, with new ideas to excite the gameplay while being the same good time with the tiny buildings.