Hazel Sky

I keep a mental shelf for small games made by improbably tiny teams, and Hazel Sky earns a spot on it. Coffee Addict Studio, a Brazilian outfit of roughly six people, built a third-person puzzle adventure around a premise that sounds almost too tender for the medium: a young engineer named Shane Casey is shipped off to a remote island chain in the flying city of Gideon, where he must pass a series of mechanical trials or face banishment. No combat, no weapons, no enemies. Just three islands, a stack of blueprints, and the creeping question of whether Shane even wants the life he is being tested for. The core loop is satisfying in a way that rewards patient players. Each island contains an aerial machine in disrepair, and you hunt the environment for the parts needed to get it airborne again, guided by blueprints rather than waypoint markers. The first trial has you sourcing components for a Da Vinci-style glider; later islands escalate to hot air balloons and full plane fuselages, with the repair steps growing more involved as you go. Movement toggles between sprinting across open terrain, swinging on ropes, climbing, and the occasional swim through an underwater passage. The platforming draws comparisons to Uncharted in its structure, though it lacks that game's production muscle. Controls are serviceable rather than elegant, and a few actions like the rope swings and the giant magnet sequence feel slightly awkward under the grip button. A forgiving checkpoint system means fumbles rarely sting for long. Visually, Hazel Sky lands well above its weight class. Built in Unreal Engine with a cartoon-adjacent 3D style, the island environments are colorful and genuinely striking at times, with light doing impressive work on shadows and rain-soaked camera lenses. Character models are rougher, with clay-doll geometry and occasionally stiff facial animation, but the environments themselves pull you in. The soundtrack and ambient soundscape are a genuine highlight, immersive and discreetly expressive in ways that suggest the team spent real care on their audio tools. It is one of those games where sitting still for a moment and just listening rewards you. The story is where Hazel Sky gets complicated. The world-building is intriguing, built around a clash between an Engineer caste and an Artist underclass, with scattered books and documents fleshing out the lore in ways that feel genuinely authored. Shane's off-island relationship with a character named Erin carries real warmth. But the narrative is fragmented in execution, the English voice acting lands in the mediocre range, and a number of story threads are introduced and then quietly abandoned, leaving a feeling that a larger game was written but not finished. It does not sour the experience so much as leave it feeling like a first chapter waiting for its sequel. Replayability is essentially nil: there is no chapter select, cutscenes cannot be skipped, and the one-path structure means a second run offers nothing new. For the audience likely to love this, the rough edges are manageable. If your gaming shelf leans toward Rime, Journey, or the quieter end of the adventure genre, and you can accept a short runtime of roughly four to six hours as the whole proposition, there is something genuinely lovely here. The puzzles are well-considered, the world has a melancholy beauty, and the ambition of what a six-person team managed to ship is hard not to respect. Just do not go in expecting resolution.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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