Finally, an online game shutting down the right way: Islands of Insights will close servers next month and 'permanently modify the game to be offline-only' so the promising puzzler can live on

I liked the shared-world puzzle game Islands of Insight quite a bit when it came out in 2023, and so did some of my PC Gamer compatriots. Alas, it wasn't able to find an audience, and today publisher Behaviour Interactive announced that, like so many other online games, the servers will be shut down at the end of August. But the good news is that even without remote servers, you'll be able to keep on playing.

An offline mode was released in July that keeps the game world intact, with the same biomes, respawning puzzles, and daily quests, without requiring an internet connection. Social functionality isn't available, of course, but that's not really a huge loss because interactivity with other players was never all that great in Islands of Insight anyway—one of the notable weaknesses in an otherwise very good puzzle game.

Behaviour Interactive said at the time that the offline mode would "expand our play experience and provide more players with the opportunity to join us in the islands," but that didn't work out: As recorded by SteamDB, player counts have been in a long, slow decline after a giveaway the end of June brought in an all-time peak concurrent player count of 7,755.

And so, here we are. The final Islands of Insight update, set to roll out on October 30, "will permanently modify the game to be offline-only," Behaviour said. "This will allow Islands of Insight to live on for all Seekers to find and enjoy, while we focus our efforts onto our next projects." 

Players have until October 30 to transfer their online progress to the offline version through a "Download Gameplay Progress" option in the account settings. Once that's done, exit the game, restart, and choose "Play Offline" to continue where you left off.

No further content or bug fixes are planned for Islands of Insight, which left some players unhappy: As detailed in this Steam forum thread, the game's offline mode writes saves at an extremely high frequency, causing performance issues on some PCs and also putting significant stress on SSDs. Publisher Behaviour Interactive has since edited the post to confirm that while no bug fixes are coming, "we are reducing the frequency of player position saving in response to community feedback about SSD wear and potential file corruption."

So many games just dry up and blow away, leaving their players with nothing but memories and maybe a defunct Steam listing—it's enough of a problem that the US state of California recently enacted a law requiring sellers to warn consumers that they don't actually own the online games they buy. It sucks to lose online support and I really do wish Islands of Insight had been able to live up to its early promise, but I give full props to Behaviour and original developer Lunarch Studios for ensuring the game remains playable after the servers are gone.

As for Lunarch, it's got a new project in the works, although it's not ready to fully reveal it just yet. 

"Lunarch was not planning on posting anything today, but we saw many of our fans disappointed by this announcement, and several of you have reached out to us," the studio wrote. "So we wanted to share a bit of what we've been secretly cooking up this year. Since March, Lunarch has been working on several upcoming projects. One of them is a new single-player logic puzzle game. It is unrelated to Islands of Insight, but features new creations by the same team of world-class puzzle designers that worked on IoI.

"We learned a tremendous amount working on Islands of Insight and are incredibly proud of the puzzles and the world we created. Please check back soon for future announcements."