Demo Disk is a series of first impressions posts for new releases and quick opinions.
I make no secret that I’m a massive fan of collectathons. In fact, I may be considered a bit of a packrat. On top of collectathons, I also enjoy games where there’s just a ton of stuff to gather and make into other stuff. You should see my chests in a standard Terraria playthrough. Just absolutely stuffed to the gills. I fear if I ever played Minecraft, I’d never come out. I need limits, smaller worlds, and definitive endings. So when Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure came across my radar, with the promise of resource gathering and crafting on a small island, I jumped at the opportunity.
What exactly is “Earthlock”?
Earthlock is frogs, frogs everywhere
Never heard of it? Don’t be surprised. It’s not exactly a large game universe. In 2018, the developer, Snowcastle Games, released their first game, Earthlock, a standard RPG stylized after the games of the late 90s with a variety of characters, including humans, animals, and humanoid animals. Over the next few years, they also released comics exploring the world and characters, expanding the Earthlock universe. Then, on August 18th, a second game released into early access, developing the Earthlock world even further, and that was Ikonei Island. It seems that an Earthlock 2 is also in development, so clearly, the world is an important one to the developers.
Desert Island Life
Where the first game was an RPG, Ikonei Island is less about fighting and more about growth and teamwork. It’s meant to be a game where survival is less important than exploration and progress is done entirely through finding the next place to go and items to combine. An upcoming update promises multiplayer, potentially speeding up the gameplay loop (and decluttering the inventory). For now, though, it’s just you and four potential characters you can swap between rather easily. The smart thing to do in these circumstances is to set up each character with different jobs (the human male sets crafting work in motion, the boar girl handles the garden, etc) and swap between them while your primary character does the bulk of the exploring.
I did not do the smart thing.
You CAN pet the dog in Ikonei Island. And the bird, and the boar.
But despite that, the world is small enough and eventually you have enough teleporters that running around alone and handling everything with one character isn’t a huge waste of time, and some items are so easy and common to make that you don’t even need to run back to a base to craft them. Which is good, since your axes, hammers, and swords will break. A lot. Tool stamina isn’t my favorite mechanic in games. For the axes and hammers, it’s manageable since they’re made with the most common items found on the ground.
Eventually, you’ll end up replacing these tools with some unexpected friends. Pirates have locked up all the native wild animals on the island, and when you free them, you befriend them. They’re not just normal critters, though. You get boars with hard heads that are more than happy to bash down large rocks, and some rather dumb birds who happen to have beaks like axes. You can summon these friends to help you with your gathering, and the more you use them, the better they get, eventually knocking down bigger and stronger trees and rocks, including many in your way to open new areas.
What about swords? What about monsters?
Wait I’m unarmed!
Similar to but not quite the same as the tools, swords take a little more effort to craft, but they also can go further than the basic tools. For the tools, you can only craft simple ones that break easily, but for swords, you can make stronger ones, better ones. And you have to. The beginner’s sword does fine against the basic slimes (there are always slimes), but the further you explore into the island, the harder the enemies get, and very quickly, your little leaf blade is barely making a dent. A metal sword, however, is going to do a lot more damage and last a lot longer. You just need to start gathering some ore first.
However, if you find yourself surrounded by enemies and your last sword either broke or isn’t pulling its weight, don’t panic. As I said earlier, survival is less important than exploration. You’ve got a health bar, but death is meaningless. Run out of health, and you pop right back to the central hub fully healed. You lose nothing but the time to get back to where you were. This may change in later updates, but considering multiplayer is their big goal, I don’t see major punishment for death as an intended future update.
Making Space
The biggest struggle is, as it always is in crafting games, inventory management. You start off with a bag barely bigger than your pockets and can find upgrades around the island in pirate bases. It’s still not quite enough for just how much there is to shove in your pockets. One upside of Ikonei Island’s storage and crafting, though, is that you’re not limited to where you set yourself up. Yes, there’s a central hub area with shops in desperate need of tenants and repair, but you can put tents, chests, and crafting stations down wherever you like. As long as there’s ground space, you can set up an unlimited number of bases. You can drop chests filled with healing items and weapons and tools by the teleporters and restock when you head off instead of having to hop back to a single location every time your stuff breaks.
Yeah, that also would’ve been a smart thing to do. You know what they say about hindsight.
The great thing is, though, as with many crafting games, there’s not really a “right” way to play. There are slower and less efficient ways, but they’re not wrong, just different. Ikonei Island, in its current state, isn’t as open-world as some crafting game players may like. You do have to explore places in a mostly set order to unlock the next thing you need to get to the next zone (usually crafting materials or animal companions.) However, once you’ve opened the world up, what you do next is all up to you. More crafting and improving the stores and buildings you’ve found? Decorate every inch of the island in your own distinctive style? Hunt down monsters in the quest for Even More Stuff? Tend your gardens? You’ll have a lot more to do coming down the line, especially once multiplayer is added.
So much to make, and all the time to make it
Is Ikonei Island worth playing?
So, is Ikonei Island a game I’d recommend now? If you’re a fan of exploration crafters, definitely. Just go in knowing what to expect if you choose not to wait for the 1.0 release. Right now, it’s an incomplete game with a lot to explore but the ending is just not there. Literally. The story leads to an end goal, but the end goal doesn’t exist right now. At least, it isn’t accessible in the game’s current state. There’s still plenty to do. I put about eight hours into it as is and I’m sure I’ll put in more as the devs update. Just don’t expect it to be in a state where you can say you beat it for a few updates.
Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.
