Islands of Insight is closing servers in a proper way. The game will be 'permanently modified to be offline only' next month, so that the promising puzzler may continue to live on.

Islands of Insight, a shared-world puzzler game that was released in 2023 to much fanfare by my PC Gamer colleagues. Unfortunately, it didn't find an audience and today publisher Behaviour announced that the servers would be shut down, like many other online games. The good news is you can still play even without remote servers.

In July, an offline mode was released that allows players to play the game without the need for internet access. It includes the same biomes, respawning puzzles, daily quests and daily quests. Islands of Insight doesn't have social functionality, but it's not a big deal. Interactivity with other players wasn't that great anyway, and that was one of the notable weaknesses of an otherwise excellent puzzle game.

Behaviour Interactive claimed at the time that offline mode would "enhance our play experience" and allow more players to join us on the islands. But that didn't pan out. As recorded by SteamDB the player counts have been on a long-term, slow decline since a giveaway at the end of June brought an all-time high concurrent player count of 7,755.

Here we are. Behaviour explained that the final Islands of Insight Update, scheduled to launch on October 30, will "permanently modify the game so that it is only available offline." This will allow Islands of Insight, which is still available for Seekers to enjoy and find, to continue to exist while we concentrate our efforts on our next projects.

Players have until 30 October to transfer their online progress into the offline version via the "Download Gameplay" option within the account settings. After that, you can exit the game and restart it. Then, choose "Play Offline", to continue from where you left off.

Islands of Insight will not receive any new content or bug fixes. This left some players disappointed. As described in this Steam forum post, the game's off-line mode writes saves extremely frequently, causing performance problems on some PCs, and also placing significant stress on SSDs. Publisher Behaviour Interactive has since edited the original post to confirm that no bug fixes will be coming. "We are reducing the number of saves for player positions in response to feedback from the community about SSD wear and possible file corruption."

Many games simply disappear, leaving players with only memories and a defunct Steam page. It's a big enough problem that California recently passed a law that requires sellers to inform consumers that they do not own the online games that they purchase. It's a shame to lose online support, and I wish Islands of Insight could have lived up to its promise. However, I applaud Behaviour Studios and the original developer Lunarch Studios who ensured the game remained playable even after the servers were gone.

Lunarch is working on a new project, but it hasn't revealed it yet.

The studio stated that it had not planned to post anything today. However, we were disappointed to see how many of our fans were upset by the announcement. Several of you reached out to us. "We wanted to share what we have been cooking up in secret this year. Lunarch began working on several projects in March. One of these is a single-player logic game. It's not related to Islands of Insight but features new creations from the same team of world class puzzle designers who worked on IoI.

We learned a lot while working on Islands of Insight, and we are extremely proud of the puzzles that we created and the world in which they were set up. Please check back for future announcements."