{"id":19342,"date":"2019-08-16T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2019-08-16T00:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=19342"},"modified":"2019-08-15T02:21:42","modified_gmt":"2019-08-15T02:21:42","slug":"solo-islands-of-the-heart-ps4-switch-xbox-one-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/16\/solo-islands-of-the-heart-ps4-switch-xbox-one-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"Solo: Islands of the Heart (PS4, Switch, Xbox One, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In Solo: Islands of the Heart, you play as a sailor man or woman who sets out to sea to find true love.\u00a0 Along the way you\u2019ll visit colorful islands, interact with critters, learn about how you view relationships, and mostly solve block manipulating puzzles.\u00a0 It\u2019s available on all current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.<\/p>\n

Your sailor person runs around in 3-D space, and you can pick up blocks and rotate them in your hand.\u00a0 Your main goal is to find a lighthouse on an island, turn it on, which in turn wakes up a nearby sleeping totem.\u00a0 Talk to the totem and answer a question about how you view relationships and love, and then the totem will open up a new island for you to visit.\u00a0 Wash, rinse, repeat.<\/p>\n

So the trick is figuring out how to reach the lighthouse and then the totem.\u00a0 To do this, you\u2019ll pick up and move blocks around so you can climb on them like steps or bridges.\u00a0 There are many types of blocks.\u00a0 Some even have fans to blow other blocks higher, and some have built in bridges.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s up to you to figure out how to place these blocks so you can reach your destinations.\u00a0 Sometimes they\u2019ll mix things up with shadow casting puzzles and such.<\/p>\n

As you play, you\u2019ll pick up items to help you out.\u00a0 You\u2019ll get a parachute for slowing your descent in the air.\u00a0 A magic staff will let you pick up far away blocks and place them anywhere you wish without having to hold them.\u00a0 You can also play a guitar by pulling it out and tilting the R stick.\u00a0 Eventually you\u2019ll learn songs that some critters may want you to play for them.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, there are a variety of sidequests on these islands, including playing songs.\u00a0 Other times you may simply need to find food for an animal, or solve an extra block puzzle to water plants to guide to animals to each other.\u00a0 These are purely optional but they are cute and fun to do.<\/p>\n

I loved the colorful graphics and the puzzle solving gameplay, but sometimes goals and objectives were a little unclear.\u00a0 I even had to watch a video to figure out what you were supposed to do at the beginning of the game.\u00a0 Certain actions just require a push of a button, while others require you to hold the button down, but the game doesn\u2019t make it clear when to do that.\u00a0 Plus, no action in the game I found really needed for you to hold down a button.\u00a0 Just pressing it to do things like turn on the lighthouse would\u2019ve worked just fine.\u00a0 I appreciate there wasn\u2019t much spoonfeeding in this game, but there is a fine line between that and good instructions, and this game didn\u2019t do that too well sometimes.\u00a0 Plus, I felt the relationship questions and love themes didn\u2019t really need to be there.\u00a0 It just made the game sound pretentious and haughty.\u00a0 I would\u2019ve been OK with them taking that part of the game out entirely.\u00a0 Maybe they could\u2019ve used the extra text to, I dunno, tell you what you should be doing sometimes, perhaps?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Solo: Islands of the Heart is rated T for Teen with an ESRB descriptor of Sexual Themes.\u00a0 Some of the relationship questions can get pretty heady, but that\u2019s about it.\u00a0 Nothing violent either.\u00a0 Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Solo: Islands of the Heart, you play as a sailor man or woman who sets out to sea to find true love.\u00a0 Along the way you\u2019ll visit colorful islands, interact with critters, learn about how you view relationships, and mostly solve block manipulating puzzles.\u00a0 It\u2019s available on all current consoles and PC, but reviewed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19342"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19344,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19342\/revisions\/19344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}