Why not try out this blissful oceanic Zelda-style puzzler

rockpapershotgun.com:

Friend, are you weary of talk of blockbuster space-faring RPGs and blockbuster D&D adaptations and blockbusters in general? Do you yearn for the older, simpler days before the great Unrealification and the invention of sex scenes, when people called a spike pit a spike pit, and you could count all the different colours in a screenshot on your fingers? Do you, in fact, reject this framing of retro-styled 2D pixelart games as "older" and "simpler", regarding it as condescending and false? Look, shut up already. I'm trying to tell you about Isles of Sea and Sky from developers Jason Newman, Dan Collver and Craig Collver.

It's an oceanic, non-linear puzzle game that mixes sokoban with Game Boy Color visuals and pungent notes of Link's Awakening, in which you push blocks and ring bells to gather keys and stars while pursuing a wordless narrative "centered around the myth of creation". Katharine highlighted it in her round-up of games to play at the EGX 2023 Leftfield Collection. I've just had a quick try myself, and it seems fantastic. Here's a rather gorgeous animated trailer.

You play a bear-chested buck with huge hair who wakes on a seashore and promptly starts solving puzzles. The puzzles are single-screen arrangements of shovable objects, bells that cause other blocks to disappear, and terrain traps such as crystal barriers that solidify behind you when you step off the tile in question. It's immediately engrossing, and the visuals are lovely. It's also moderately forgiving: the puzzles are sprinkled around an archipelago which you explore on the back of a giant turtle, so you can always venture elsewhere if something's baking your noodle.

The demo - available on Steam or Itch - is apparently two or three hours