Rising Islands

My honest first impression of Rising Islands was curiosity mixed with mild heartbreak. The central concept is smart: you play as Hairo, a young woman gifted with the ability to flip between two colour-coded dimensions, red and blue, mid-sprint. Walls, rails, and platforms only exist in their matching dimension, so you are constantly toggling your reality as you wall-run, grind along rails, air-dash across gaps, and chain jumps through thirteen levels spread across three worlds. On paper, that sounds like a tight, kinetic little gem. In practice, it lands somewhere more complicated. When the dimension-shifting clicks, it genuinely sings. The later levels layer the mechanic with real confidence, demanding that you toggle mid-wall-run, dodge colour-coded electric hazards, and land on a specific platform, all in a single fluid motion. Those moments of everything going right carry a rush that hints at what the game could have been with another six months of polish. The Time Trial mode leans hard into that speedrunning fantasy, and if chasing sub-30-second level clears sounds appealing to you, there is a specific, niche joy buried in here. The soundtrack has an easy oriental warmth to it that suits the floating-island aesthetic, even if it wears thin across a two-to-three-hour run. Here is where I have to be direct with you, though. The camera struggles badly to keep up with the speed the game demands of you. Mouse-and-keyboard is a genuine ordeal; a controller is practically mandatory. There is also a noticeable input delay on the dimension-switch button that feels less like intentional design and more like an unresolved technical issue, and in the later levels that delay becomes the game's loudest flaw. The story, a light myth about guardians and relics and chaos, is told through silent text boxes and adds almost nothing. Cutscenes feel placeholder-quality. Graphics options are bare-bones, and turning up the visual detail introduces frame-rate wobble on older hardware. It is a short game even by indie standards, with a determined platformer veteran potentially clearing it in under two hours. Rising Islands is the kind of release I genuinely feel for: a solo indie shot at a complicated genre, with one strong idea at its centre that the team did not quite have the resources or time to fully realise. There is no combat, no padding, and no pretension. What you get is a stripped-back parkour challenge that shows real craft in its best moments and real roughness in its worst ones. If you love the feel of Mirror's Edge or Cloudbuilt and want something short and scrappy in that neighbourhood, you might find something to appreciate here at a deep discount. If you need a polished experience from start to finish, Rising Islands will frustrate before it satisfies.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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