Island Maze

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Puzzle Games Bundle (5 in 1) along with Archaica: The Path of Light, Mushroom Quest, Tactical Mind, and Tactical Mind 2)

Island Maze is a Puzzle game released on PC in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game has players moving a cube around various islands trying to line up the sides of the cube to pick up various gems and align them with like-colored tiles so they can reach an exit.

This game’s presentation is pretty good, featuring 3D visuals in a colorful, stylized low-poly look, complete with an undulating low-poly ocean surrounding each of the islands. It’s nothing to get excited about, but it’s visually-interesting all the same. These visuals are backed by a nice, relaxing soundtrack that works well for this sort of thoughtful, slow-paced game.

As for the gameplay, maybe it’s just that it’s hard to wrap my head around how to manipulate these cubes to get the sides to go where I want them, but I found the gameplay here to be frustrating. There were numerous times I kept rolling around a cube in vain, trying to get its sides to the positions I wanted them in. I knew where they needed to go, I just couldn’t get them to actually go there.

The result is a game that has a nice presentation and seems to have a simple enough concept, but that I found so frustrating that I quickly found myself wanting to stop playing it. Perhaps other Puzzle fans won’t have as difficult a time figuring out the proper way to manipulate this game’s cube, and then they may find this to be a decent but unspectacular Puzzle game, but for me, this is not a game I have any intention to keep playing when there are far more engaging Puzzle games on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Island Maze is a Puzzle game where players roll a cube around various islands, trying to get the sides to align properly to pass obstacles to get to an exit. The presentation here is good, but I found the act of getting the cube to move how I wanted a frustrating affair, and one not worth spending my time on when there are far better Puzzle games on the Switch.

Grade: C

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