As someone who played Minecraft in its early iteration a decade ago, I’ve seen a large amount of imitators, clones, and games that took inspiration from the literal groundbreaking title. Still today, games like Isle of Spirits are capitalizing on the successful formula. This is a take on the blocky survival genre which opts for an isometric view and a goal of making it off a randomly-generated island with a competent boat.

Upon my first boot of the game, I hopped in and got straight to chopping down some trees and gathering the scattered resources. The player has to account for hunger, sleep, and temperature. As I set out to go to sleep late in the game’s day cycle, I was awoken and handed my first death in pitch black darkness. On my second run, I hopped in the water and sunk immediately with zero indication this would happen.

Frustrated, I gave it a third try and got much farther. I attached a wearable torch when I went to bed, and slept through the night. Now that I could make some progress, I discovered that the resource management was actually quite robust and that building the boat would be quite the task. I felt that I could competently make progress in this task while allotting time to attend to my character’s well-being.

Unfortunately, this positive run was cut short by a random event, where the screen went white in the middle of the day and I was killed by another unseen enemy. With permadeath, a good hour of progress was gone. I get the urgency behind this mechanic, but nothing makes me want to shut a game off more than getting booted to the main menu with nothing to show for it. Permanent progression is the reason I could keep playing games like Rogue Legacy.

Mechanically, Isle of Spirits works well. There are no glitches and no exploits, but the game has no options menu which gave me no way to remedy my mouse scrolling across multiple screens. I can only assume the game defaults its resolution size to 1920×1080, so you may run into issues if you’re not running that. The framerate stayed a consistent 60fps and the game looked decent enough in “quality” mode despite its low-end aesthetic.

One highlight of the game is the music. While the sound effects are pretty stock, the score is relaxing in normal conditions and downright-harrowing in combat situations. The nighttime and white mist moments I experienced were visually unsettling as well. The effort in making these sequences stand out is appreciated. However, the day turns to night all-too-quickly, so it’s easy to dread the dark thanks to this.

This does appear to be Silver Bullet Games’ first foray onto Steam, so I can say there’s plenty of potential, but I have to wonder: is there even any replay value once the boat gets made? Perhaps there is room for speedrunning, but I couldn’t see myself coming back to Isle of Spirits after that gets accomplished. Nevertheless, this game could entertain diehard fans of the genre, but everything you can do here, you can do in Minecraft. It’s your call, as Isle of Spirits releases June 10th!

A Steam review copy of Isle of Spirits was provided by Silver Bullet Games for this review.

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Isle of Spirits

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Solid music
• Easily accessible
• Good first effort

Cons

• Unrewarding gameplay
• Lazy sound effects
• No options menu
• Cooking minigame isn't coded well