Sky Islands

Sky Islands is a gentle exploration platformer painted the way a picture book is painted: soft brushwork, warm evening light, no hard outlines anywhere. Three large islands hang in the clouds — Dawn Reach, Storm Shelf and Star Harbour — and each one is a wide, tall map you are free to wander. Pip runs and jumps the way you expect, with a little forgiveness at the edge of a ledge and a jump that still counts if you press it a moment early. Hold the button in the air and the glider cape opens, the cape meter starts to run down, and a gap that looked impossible turns into a long, slow drop across open sky.

Every island is built around the things you find rather than the things you beat. Thirty feathers are hidden on each map, some in plain sight on the grass and some tucked behind a waterfall or down a shaft you have to want to explore. Three sky-whale eggs per island sit well off the road, usually one bad idea away from the route you were following. Lanterns are your checkpoints: light one and the flame stays lit, so a mistake costs you a walk and nothing else. There are no lives and nothing to lose — the thorns and the long drop just send you back to the last light you lit.

The islands themselves do the moving. Warm columns of air carry you up shafts if you hold the jump, wind pushes you along plank runs and off them, rope bridges sag and swing under your feet, and whole islands drift up and down over the deep. A great white bird in Dawn Reach teaches Pip the second jump, gates open once you have found enough feathers, and lightning lights the clouds over Storm Shelf. It plays on a phone as happily as on a desktop — portrait gives you a tall window for the vertical shafts, with a pad under your left thumb and the wing button under your right.