Rex: Another Island

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that quietly lands on Steam, asks almost nothing of you financially, and then delivers something that feels handmade from start to finish. Rex: Another Island is exactly that kind of game. Shysaursoft's debut is a 2D side-scrolling platformer built around a single, continuous open world rather than a traditional level-select screen, and that one structural decision lifts the whole experience above what its modest runtime might suggest. The island is divided into distinct zones, each with its own visual identity and musical theme: a forest, caves, a lighthouse, a quarry, an airship. Pete Gresser's soundtrack is one of the quiet stars here, each area's composition doing real mood-setting work without ever becoming background noise. Because the zones bleed into each other on one seamless map, the sense of spatial continuity builds a kind of geography in your head that a level-select would immediately collapse. Moving from the caves upward into the lighthouse section feels like actually climbing the island. That accumulating sense of place is the game's best trick, and it punches well above what a solo developer working in Construct 2 had any obligation to achieve. The movement is clean and unhurried: a fixed-height jump, a double-jump you time manually to vary your arc, and a drop-through-platform input that becomes second nature within minutes. Checkpoints, styled as flag poles, are generous enough that the difficulty sits comfortably in the casual-to-moderate range. The real tension comes from the coin system. All 777 coins are scattered across the world, death strips unbanked coins from you, and banking requires reaching a checkpoint. That push-pull between pressing forward to explore and retreating to secure your haul is the game's central friction, and it is also its most debated design choice. Aggressive backtracking to bank small coin clusters can interrupt the exploratory flow that makes the island feel alive. There is a score-attack angle here, rewarding players who bank rarely and risk losing everything, but it is under-explained in-game. If you treat the coin hunt as the main event rather than a completionist afterthought, the banking tension resolves into something genuinely exciting. There are also five hidden gems scattered across the island unlocking an alternate ending, and a permadeath mode for anyone who wants to suffer beautifully. The fast-travel shrine system is worth flagging as a practical concern: navigating the map screen and accidentally warping when you only meant to check your position is a real source of frustration that a small UI adjustment would have fixed. Keybinding customization is also limited. Neither issue breaks the game, but both show the seams of a first project. What does not show seams at all is the overall judgment call to keep Rex: Another Island short and complete rather than padded and sprawling. The whole thing runs about 90 minutes for a standard finish, somewhat longer if you chase the full coin count and all five gems. That runtime is precisely right. The game knows when to end, it earns its quiet resolution, and it does not outstay its welcome by a single room. For anyone who grew up with SNES-era platformers and misses the feeling of a world that fits entirely in your head, Rex is a small gift from a developer who clearly cared about every pixel of it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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