Finally, an online game shutting down the right way: Islands of Insight will shut down its servers next month and “permanently modify the game to be offline-only” so the promising puzzler can live on.

I liked the shared world puzzle game. Islands of knowledge quite a bit when it came out in 2023, as did some of my fellow PC gamers. Unfortunately, it couldn't find an audience and today the Islands of Insight community team announced that, like so many other online games, the servers will be shut down at the end of August. But the good news is that even without remote servers you can continue playing.

A offline mode It launched in July and keeps the game world intact, with the same biomes, respawn puzzles and daily quests, without the need for an internet connection. Social functionality is not available, of course, but that's not really a big loss because interactivity with other players was never so cool in Islands of Insight anyway, one of the notable weaknesses in an otherwise very good puzzle game.

The IoI team said at the time that offline mode would “expand our gaming experience and give more players the opportunity to join us on the islands,” but that didn't work out: as recorded by SteamDBPlayer numbers have seen a long, slow decline after a draw in late June yielded an all-time high concurrent player count of 7,755.

And so, here we are. He Islands of Insight Final Updatewhich launches on October 30, will “permanently modify the game to be offline-only,” the community team said. “This will allow Islands of Insight to live on for all Seekers to find and enjoy, while we focus our efforts on our next projects.”

Players have until October 30 to transfer their online progress to the offline version via the “Download Game Progress” option in their account settings. Once this is done, exit the game, restart it and choose “Play offline” to continue where you left off.

No further content or bug fixes are planned for Islands of Insight, leaving some players unhappy: as detailed in this Steam forum threadThe game's offline mode writes saves at an extremely high frequency, causing performance issues on some PCs and also putting significant strain on SSDs. Publisher Behavior Interactive has since edited the post to confirm that, while there are no bug fixes, “we are reducing player position save frequency in response to community feedback about SSD wear and tear.” possible file corruption”.

Many games simply go out of stock and disappear, leaving their players with nothing but memories and perhaps a dead Steam listing; It's enough of a problem that the US state of California recently enacted a law requiring sellers to warn consumers that They don't actually own the online games they buy. It sucks to lose online support and I really wish Islands of Insight had been able to deliver on its initial promise, but I give my full props to Behavior and original developer Lunarch Studios for ensuring the game remains playable after the servers go away.

As for Lunaarch, he has a new project in the works, although he's not ready to fully reveal it just yet.

“Lunarch wasn't planning on releasing anything today, but we saw many of our fans disappointed by this announcement and several of you reached out to us,” the studio wrote. “So we wanted to share a little of what we've been secretly preparing this year. Since March, Lunarch has been working on several upcoming projects. One of them is a new single-player logic puzzle game. It's unrelated to Islands. from Insight, but features new creations from the same team of world-class puzzle designers who worked on IoI.

“We learned a ton working on Islands of Insight and are incredibly proud of the puzzles and world we created. Check back soon for future announcements.”