Isles of Silence

Introduction

Isles of Silence, developed and published by the small Lonely Frontier Studio, entered Steam Early Access on 25 July 2024 at NZ$8.99. It pitches itself as "an Incremental Management game about hunting increasingly fearsome monsters, using their materials to grow stronger and build a colony of survivors, each with their own unique mechanics" — a premise that combines the resource loop of an incremental idle game with the slower structural ambitions of a colony sim, wrapped in hand-drawn art and a narrated, poetry-inflected tone. Nearly two years into Early Access, it remains a small release with a correspondingly small review base: 28 total reviews, 24 of them positive.

What draws people in

The single most consistent thread across the review sample, positive and negative alike, is presentation. One reviewer sums it up plainly: "This is just a nice game. Nice art. Nice relaxing music." Another, writing a negative review that criticises nearly everything else about the game, still concedes it's "stylish" with "quite nice" written narration and "very charming" hand-drawn art — a notable point of agreement given how sharply that reviewer's overall verdict diverges from the positive sample. The premise itself — turning monster-hunting drops directly into armor while slowly assembling a village of colonists who each bring their own mechanics — is distinctive enough within the crowded incremental-games space that reviewers don't describe it as derivative of any single well-known idle template.

One recurring detail from the positive sample is developer responsiveness: a reviewer with over 200 hours logged specifically credits the developer with promptly answering questions, listening to suggestions, and resolving reported problems "on a next day basis," closing with "we need developers involved like this." For a paid Early Access title from a small studio, that kind of direct, sustained engagement is a meaningful signal about how the game is likely to be supported going forward, independent of the current build's rough edges.

The pacing problem

Where the review sample turns sharply critical is the actual rhythm of play, and it's worth taking this complaint seriously because multiple reviewers converge on the same specific description rather than raising scattered, unrelated gripes. One reviewer captures it concisely: "You get to 'idle' for 1 minute increments, just to click a button and then wait again for a minute. Now just repeat that forever." A second, more detailed negative review goes further, describing the timing as landing in "kind of the worst possible" spot for an incremental game: "It's not idle enough to leave for even three minutes, but there's VERY little to do for long stretches of 2 minutes. Consequently, most of my experience was just actively waiting." That's a genuinely awkward design problem for the genre specifically — idle games either need to be idle enough to run in the background, or engaging enough to reward active attention, and a loop caught in between risks satisfying neither instinct. The same reviewer notes hints of future automation systems that might resolve this, but reports running out of patience before reaching them.

Two further reports are worth flagging distinctly from the pacing complaint, since they point at implementation problems rather than a design disagreement. One reviewer, with nearly 90 hours logged, reports being flatly unable to progress past an early crafting step: "You can not get past the part of creating a pick, it never gets to the next part." Another describes a specific, reproducible performance bug tied to the looping soundtrack: severe lag whenever a music track finishes and restarts, which they attribute to the game likely being built on a Chromium or Electron-based framework that isn't correctly backgrounding audio processing, causing the window to hang for several seconds when it regains focus — on hardware well above the game's likely requirements. Whether either issue has been patched since these reviews were posted isn't something this review can confirm from outside actual play, and that uncertainty is itself worth naming for an Early Access title whose patch history isn't fully visible from its review base alone.

Early Access state and value

It's worth being fair to what "Early Access" is doing here rather than treating every complaint as a permanent verdict. More than one critical reviewer explicitly frames their complaints in terms of the build's unfinished state — placeholder content that becomes visible quickly, and systems that read as partially implemented rather than intentionally minimal. That's a normal condition for software still in active development, and it cuts both ways: the pacing and performance issues described above may well improve, but a buyer paying NZ$8.99 today is buying the current build, not a hypothetical future patch. Several reviewers, including at least one from the negative-review sample, specifically recommend trying the free demo before purchasing — sensible advice for a game whose core loop draws such split reactions even among people who otherwise like what they see.

At NZ$8.99, the price itself is modest, and nothing in the review sample suggests any additional monetisation beyond the upfront cost. That keeps the financial risk of a disappointing purchase low, but it doesn't resolve the more basic question the negative reviews raise: whether the idle rhythm at the center of the design is a temporary Early Access rough edge or a more fundamental pacing decision that later content and automation systems will need to work around rather than fix outright.

Verdict

Isles of Silence pairs art and music that draw near-unanimous praise with an idle loop that a meaningful share of its own reviewers describe as actively uncomfortable to play, plus at least one reported progression-blocking bug and a specific, reproducible performance issue. The 24-of-28 positive aggregate is real, but the negative reviews in this small sample are unusually detailed and specific rather than vague dismissals, and they're worth weighing seriously against that headline number. This is a game to sample via its free demo first, not to buy on the strength of its art alone.

Wanderer callout

The specific complaint that idle windows here are "not idle enough to leave, not engaging enough to actively play" is a trap Wanderer's own AFK and gathering systems have had to actively design around — the same reason offline progression and gather-mode automation exist as their own dedicated systems rather than an afterthought bolted onto active play.