Nintendo Switch Just Quietly Added A Cozy Puzzle Game With A Surprising Challenge

There’s always something a little worrying about starting a sequel to a game you loved. There’s a chance that part two will either ruin the original’s greatness with unsuccessful new additions, or hew so closely to what came before that it hardly feels like a sequel at all. Sometimes, the best option is to just do what worked the first time with a few new bells and whistles, and trust that what you already had didn’t need to be improved upon much.

That’s the case with Islanders: New Shores. The original Islanders is a city-building puzzle game with a chill vibe and a brutal scoring system that challenges you to build a series of perfect, pretty islands one building at a time. That’s exactly what New Shores is, too, with a few new smart improvements.

You start New Shores with an empty island and a few buildings to choose from, and placing one grants you a certain number of points based on each structure’s rules. Mills are worth more points if they’re next to wheat fields, fishers score lower if they’re near seaweed farms, and almost everything dislikes being placed next to an identical building. The more buildings you place, the more opportunities you have to combine these rules into huge bonuses, but your chances of losing points by crowding incompatible buildings together grow too.

To earn new buildings, you need to constantly hit increasingly challenging score thresholds. You can place your first few buildings willy-nilly, but you’ll quickly need to start agonizing over every placement and plan ahead to maximize the bonus you get from every single move. Once your score gets high enough, you’ll unlock a larger island and start the process all over.

New Shores takes that formula from the first game and adds a few complications to enable new combos and more variety. You now get a choice of two different islands every time you move, and each island has unique characteristics and special buildings that enable different playstyles. The difference between a water-focused island with a central temple and a rocky island with lots of cliffs doesn’t change the core gameplay, but it does ask you to consider different strategies, which means you’re not just repeating the same pattern time and again.

The sequel also adds a new mechanic called boons, which can change your approach without upsetting the core of what you’re doing. Now, hitting score thresholds will sometimes reward you with boons instead of buildings, which are one-time bonuses that can play into whatever strategy you’re playing into. One might plant a huge group of trees, while another might increase the score of the next building you place. You get a choice of two here as well, and picking between them is a nice bit of strategy that feels in line with the rest of the game.

New Shores also features great music, a photo mode with some fun filters, and an even lovelier art style than the gorgeous original. Otherwise, it’s the Islanders you already know and love, or are about to get hooked on. Islanders: New Shores strikes a tricky balance between new and old as much as it does between challenging and relaxing, and I can’t wait to sink as much time into it as I gave the original.

Islanders: New Shores is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.