I think calling Isles of Sea and Sky an "open-world" sokoban game is a little overblown: when it says there are "multiple ways to progress", it does not mean that there are multiple ways to solve any particular puzzle, just that you need X macguffins to get through a gate and there are more than X macguffins on your side of the gate. It's not Breath of the Wild, it's Super Mario Galaxy. None of this is bad, of course - intricately designed puzzles are the bread and butter of the genre, and going for truly open imsim-style design would probably just result in a mess. But a good amount of why I tried this was that it sold itself as unique and accessible in a way I don't really think it lives up to.

That said, there is a lot about its pacing and design that I can appreciate. Individual screens in the game tend to house two or three related puzzles which are squirreled off into their own sections, and you can get a rough estimate of their relative difficulty based on which flavor of collectible they reward you with. This lets the game be very efficient with its space, densely packing itself with puzzles without needing to be overly complicated right off the bat. I'm not really sure what the point of all that efficiency is, especially when it gets in the way of just navigating from point A to point B, but it's still neat in an abstract sort of way.

Another way the game paces itself is by giving each major island three "tiers" of puzzle, each centered around its own mechanic. The first type is available right away. Solve enough of those and you'll awaken that island's guardian, along with a bunch of elementals that become their own complicated push-block for the next tier of puzzle. Lastly, each island has a more abstract overarching puzzle that you'll need to explore the entire island to figure out. Your reward for doing this is an item that gives you a new ability which makes the last tier accessible. I've read a lot of other reviews that bemoan this pacing because it makes it more difficult to tell whether any individual puzzle can be completed or if it's actually in a higher "tier", but I didn't feel that way very often. Each island's mechanics are totally local until the very end, too, so if you are confused you can just beeline your way to the guardian and item and then you'll know you can do everything on the island.

Ultimately the reason I dropped this wasn't for what it did differently but what it didn't - the puzzles just got too damn complex for me. I just do not want to wrap my head around how to push a block that moves two spaces up, rotates 90 degrees, and spawns a frog in front of itself that you can use to cross pits but only if they have water in them already (to avoid spoilers I made that example up, but they really do get about that complicated).

Not scoring this because it would feel disingenuous to rate it highly when I didn't care to finish it, and equally so to rate it lowly when I think it does a lot of things well and few things bad. Wouldn't review it at all, honestly, but I feel like I need to so I can "exorcise" it from my backlog instead of feeling vaguely guilty about not booting it up for two weeks.