I think everyone who likes to play videogames should attempt to develop one at some point, not anything major, can be a 15 min demo for a weird idea or whatever. It doesn't really matter because either way it will give insight and perspective into how games are made and will definitely drive home a quite important point : game development is hard. Its a miracle that any videogame is ever finished, let alone a highly technically polished one.

This is not to say that this will make all manner of shovelware barely put together cynical pieces of crap that populate the main store pages nowadays tolerable, but even those you can see from a different angle : "Ah, they forgot to tile the texture correctly", "That's to hide a loading screen", "Wow, I straight up recognize that from Epic's Quixel Library" etc.

I do think I may be more forgiving than most when it comes to Isle of Pan, which at a glance could be mistaken for another one of those so called "cash grabs" ready to be torn apart by the resident James Stephanie Sterling du jour. Well, it sort of is, but it sort of isn't. Isle of Pan is an Open World photography sim, in the vein of something like Alba A Wildlife Adventure. You photograph the creatures from various urban legends, regular animals, mythical creatures and every other inspiration that SMT has ever drawn from. Occassionally there are puzzles and a few conditions that need to be met to open portals to self contained levels where most of the meat of the game lies.

See, in the overworld the photography mechanics work mostly as scanning like you would in BOTW or Metroid Prime, there isn't all that much to make particularly interesting photos safe for the subjects themselves; just sort of waiting there for you to add them to your album. When in the portals though, there are much more elaborate sequences of characters, themes and moods. Your camera itself become a tool to interface with the world as taking a picture of subjects will cause them to react sometimes, not always in a super elaborate way but it adds to the feeling of being thought out, to me. One memorable sequence involved the stereotypical circus with various tents, one of which had a whole ass rave going on with numerous dancing harlequins and a notably bigger one going at it with neon lights and loud music blasting; taking a picture cuts the music and everyone stops, genuinely made me laugh. There's a surrealist vibe underpinning it all, somewhat reminds me of Cosmo D at times.

Honestly, I was having a blast for the most part, the conditions to find all the portals and creatures arent super complex but it really tickled my methodical exploration instincts to run around trying to find it all, enjoying the particularly funny running animations of the various unlockable models you can find. The game's sense of humour doesn't always land, especially when a couple gags are necessarily repeated like the Men In Black agents and again, a lot of the overworld objects feel sort of dropped there unceremoniously, but these didn't really get in the way of my enjoyment.

I forget where I read this, in one review on this very site talking about how the low budget games of today feel kind of similar, by virtue of the standardisation and democratization of consumer game dev tools, there will be fewer "weird ass jank game cobbled together by 3 people without access to tutorials" like previous generations and more of... well Isle of Pan. It's got all the greatest hits: Mixamo animations, unreal engine basic character movement, photogrammetry assets jarringly ctrl c + ctrl v'd against an ostensibly cartoony landscape made with the ue landscape tool (shoutout to the extremely hilly hills made by holding down the paint tool), a time changing clock that I am almost 100% sure is just changing the rotation component of the default directional light object of an Unreal Engine level with its weird jankiness included.

And yet, and this is the most important thing, it does not read to me as a lazy or hopelessly unprofessional production. Given the game as a whole, I think this is more a case of a solo developer biting off more than they could chew and using every tool available to them through the modern magic of commercial game engines and asset sharing to make something they had a real passion for, if not the ability to make fully. Even if I'm pretty sure the dev did very little modelling work, it still takes time and effort to make some of these levels, animations and interactions, and according to the dev they had a budget of 0$ and made it in their spare time from their actual job. It's a game that's firing on all cylinders to me, granted it doesn't always hit and those cylinders all seem to have "creative commons license" engraved on them but its hard to be mad at it.

Even comes with a whole gallery feature to show off your artwork, most of which is lost on quitting out of the game, I'll let you stew on whether or not this was a deliberate decision to force us to save only the picture we feel proudest and discard the rest or some sort of workaround for the size of the camera reel and saving to the hard drive on quit out.