Puzzles and Team Gotham’s Creative Vision in Solo: Islands of the Heart, Available Now on Xbox One
Solo: Islands of the Heart is a game all about taking a moment to sit, think, and reflect on the place love holds in your heart. The heart can be a tricky puzzle to solve in and of itself, and Solo aims to give the player a clearer understanding of life and love. The actual puzzles in the game act as the vehicle that drives the player to become more self-aware, as they answer all sorts of questions about themselves and their loving relationships.
They are specifically designed to encourage players to work their way up to understanding themselves a bit more. Your main aim should be to eventually understand and listen to your heart, making sense of your thoughts and feelings in an increasingly stress and distraction-filled world. By taking the time to sit and think in a relaxing environment, where the puzzles are stress-free and designed to help you on your journey, the truths of your own heart should reveal themselves eventually.
Just like with love however, the puzzles in Solo don’t offer a single, definitive solution. The challenges players will face are designed to encourage creativity when thinking of and coming up with solutions. In a way your solutions reflect your own heart – how do you overcome obstacles in your own life? Solving puzzles in order to reach the totems – which will ask questions about the place love holds in your heart – ultimately acts as a metaphor for the journey you will take to the truth of your own heart.
The boxes you’ll encounter are also a metaphor for the different relationship topics the game covers. The past (wind boxes), understanding (bridge boxes), attraction and being together (sticky boxes), all help you to understand your own heart whilst simultaneously solving the puzzles themselves. And with that, the archipelagos where you discover each box are also related to those themes as well. Love is an abstract concept and difficult to define, so by breaking down the topic into different categories, the daunting task of understanding your own heart seems much more achievable. The puzzles of your heart and the puzzles of the game seem to become one and the same in Solo: Islands of the Heart!
Solo is a contemplative puzzler set on a gorgeous and surreal archipelago. Reflect on your loving relationships by exploring contemplative, dream-like islands:
- Reflect on love’s place in your life with a personal and introspective branching narrative
- Combine blocks with different properties offering multiple solutions for most puzzles
- Contemplate and explore a living world: take photos of the charming, colourful islands amidst tranquil tunes, or play the guitar for cute creatures
Solo: Islands of the Heart is available now for Xbox One on the Microsoft Store. Click here for purchase details.