I spent the last year or so on tenterhooks waiting for the next great indie game inspired by ‘80s Zelda, though with anthropomorphic characters instead of people, using Game Boy Color graphics & audio with an extensive catalog of passive upgrades, and accessibility features that would spin me a yarn of hope and revenge and building a better world that you might never get to see. Can you believe my luck that we got two of these this year??? The first one was Mina the Hollower, which was everything it promised and then some. For those craving even more, then Isle of Reveries is your next stop!
When you boot up the game, you are greeted with an absolutely spot-on Game Boy Color audio system. Those sawtooth tones exfoliated my eardrums and took me back to playing my Game Boy in my childhood room. The bootup sequence gives way to the title screen, and it feels at once so fresh and new but also so inviting and familiar. The opening track is just perfect—the rhythm canters forward like a horse race, and I am filled with determination. You start your new save file, find out your playable character is a bug-eyed owl fella named Lief, and the adventure begins.
The game takes place, guess where, on the Isle of Reveries. For generations, pilgrims have come to the island to make a wish to the all-powerful being who will grant it. The weird thing is, no one has ever returned. I guess they must be so happy with the results that there’s no need? Well, you’re here now, and you’re going to see what’s going on. Right off the bat, this is a Zelda game. We have caves, dungeons, forests, and random enemies. The first thing we have to do is get the power glove item so we can move those pesky boulders. Then we need a weapon to defeat these monsters (why are there monsters on the island where dreams come true? Very odd) and cut tall grass. It’s an oldie but a goodie. The first ten minutes ease you into the gameplay, and then the next 12-30 hours are entirely up to you, your brain, and your sheer gumption.
For the record, the game took me 22 hours, and I absolutely followed the dungeon guides the devs kindly provided. I’m either that bad at puzzles (likely) or that I was invested in discovering EVERY SINGLE SECRET THE GAME CAN OFFER (definitely this one, though I haven’t 100%’d it yet).
The game is tagged as a Metroidvania, and it certainly does qualify because the world may be open-ish, but the story is linear. There’s plenty of backtracking with new items, abilities, and knowledge to gain. It’s that third one I want to emphasize. I would almost say it’s a Metroidbrania with lots of combat rather than a Metroidvania with lots of puzzles. This distinction is tricky but important. The dungeons are some of the hardest, most mind-melting puzzles I have ever encountered. To place me on a scale of puzzle gamers: I flaked out on Baba is You because it’s too hard, but I usually don’t need a guide for Zelda dungeons. But these dungeons…these are next level.
What makes the dungeons so different is that this game values change over destruction. Rather than lots of swords and bombs like most adventure games (though we also have those), you’re going to do a lot of a) switching the places of two things, b) duplicating things, c) flip-flopping time, and d) slide-block shifting the dungeon layout. I always started the dungeon confidently, feeling like I had mastered the latest item in my arsenal. For the sake of not making this review any later than it already is, I would finally check the guide for a hint to get back on track. I should have kept track of the number of times I exclaimed, “WHAT!” out loud to myself; if you are someone who is good with creative and incredibly cerebral puzzle navigation, you’ll absolutely love Isle of Reveries. If you’re more of a normie like me, please don’t throw your computer out a window. Just check out one of the guides on the official YouTube channel. They’re quite helpful.
Part of the difficulty in navigating the dungeons, as well as the overworld, comes from the map being the most barebones sketch possible. It’s just…squares. If you have visited a square on the dungeon map, then you can see which other squares it connects to. There are no icons to remind you of locked doors you’ve encountered. You cannot modify or mark up the map (at least not in the game; a screenshot with annotations might not be a bad idea). You can use one of your precious relic slots to make the dungeon guide appear, but he’s also hardly worth it. After you pick up the map and compass and talk to him, he’ll mark the missed loot on your map. By the time you have both the map and the compass and navigate back to him, you have completed the dungeon and are ready for the boss battle. You are truly better off on your own with a notepad. Also, I took a note that in the final dungeon, where you have a boss rush before the final boss (a common trope in Zelda-likes, of course), the runback to the boss chambers was too long even with shortcuts. On the bright side, the inconvenience did encourage me to “git gud,” and I didn’t have to do too many runbacks in the end.
The overworld is too big for a notepad, but its map is just as convoluted. In the overworld, areas of interest are marked with symbols, such as the two ends of fast travel portals, but once again you have no idea how to get there. “What do you mean you have no idea? Just follow the flow of connections between the squares and you’ll get there,” you say. Oh sweet summer child. There is no simply following the flow of connections. The number of one-way jumps, one-way doors, and simply parallel but completely separate paths that cut through the map is boggling. What’s worse, the map is either focused on one biome, or it is the whole island, but you can’t tell where the biome boundaries are. Figuring out how to find the right fast travel point in the wetlands to cross into the forest to find the cave shortcut to the desert should have earned me a university course credit, I swear.
A couple more general critiques: I didn’t love how Isle of Reveries felt hard just to be hard sometimes. The map was so very barebones, and I often felt like I was fighting with the map instead of making progress. I had a few deaths that felt cheap. The accessibility is nonexistent. Literally; the Steam page does not list any accessibility features at all. The best I could do was use my three precious relic slots to give my character some passive buffs, like avoiding pitfall damage or walking normally on ice, but these felt insufficient, especially given how missable half of them are. I stan a well-executed retro game with a retro feel, of course I do, but it is in fact 2026, and we have modern standards of accessibility that I just didn’t see here. As a puzzle-normie and directionally challenged person, to be totally honest, I would not have finished it if I weren’t writing a review about it.
And yet.
I loved this game. I loved the little quests to improve the town of resident pilgrims. I loved the clever side-screen inventory that book-ended the square game area à la Game Boy (I didn’t get into it in this review, but I love how lately retro games use the sidescreen real estate for UI and HUD information). I loved expanding my brain to the point where I started to understand quantum physics. I loved the graphics that reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap (I know that’s Game Boy Advance, not Color, but go look at it and tell me I’m wrong!). I loved all of the music. It felt good to play on both the controller (8-bit Xbox-style) and the keyboard (left hand on WASD, right hand on JKL, no mouse needed). The ending was perfect. The last ten minutes really sealed the deal for me. The writing team stuck the landing flawlessly, and I am so glad I made it to the end.
