Cicada Games’ sun-baked archipelago seems to come from a parallel timeline where Link’s Awakening was conceived as a Sokoban-style puzzler. Here is a block-pusher that manages to be more than the sum of its already thoughtfully assembled parts. Yes, it introduces a series of compact, intricately designed conundrums, but the process of solving them, and in turn steadily charting these mysterious isles, feels like a bona fide adventure. It’s helped by a characterfully chunky visual style that calls back to the Game Boy Color era, and a soundtrack that freely evokes feelings of intrigue and mystery. Descend below the surface, into its network of caves and corridors that weave their way back up, around and down once more, and you’ll feel like an intrepid archaeologist, a pixellated Indiana Jones closing in on some ancient treasure.
Or treasures plural, since there is a constant sense of discovery. Each screen usually hosts more than one challenge, some of which might well require you to have made progress elsewhere. These comprise, for the most part, familiar ingredients – blocks, pits, rocks, portals, pressure plates and switches – but arranged so artfully as to feel fresh. You’ll ring bronze bells to get to silver chimes and then golden gongs, push arrows to remove blockades, collect keys to open locks, and pocket precious metals, orbs and, most importantly, stars (the main currency to unlock new areas and islets). Clifftops and ladders add verticality to familiar tasks, as you climb to push blocks down so you can cross pits. There are surfaces that crumble once crossed, requiring crates if you want to return, and crystalline obstructions that only yield to stone blocks (growing back when you’re past them). And there are new ideas: find enough of the right kind of ore and the first island god will turn boulders into golems. These, too, can be shoved – in one ins
