Rising Islands Preview

It shouldn’t be hard to notice from my past articles that I’m into moving fast and making impossible looking jumps. So, when I first saw Rising Islands being shown off by Lone Star Studios at EGX Rezzed in April, I was immediately interested. This is a third person game about running through a broken world, and the demo I saw at Rezzed was very promising. It looked great, felt really tight to control and seemed to have exactly what I want. I made a mental note to pick this game up when it came out in early August.

So, guess my surprise when we received a preview copy. I jumped at the opportunity to play more, and more there was! The preview copy features the five levels and a small tutorial that make up the first world, with two more worlds adding to that to make up the full game. The levels are generally linear affairs made up of a series of floating islands connected by climbable and wall-runnable panels that exist in one of two dimensions, one blue tinted and the other red tinted.

This is Rising Islands’ main mechanic that separates it from other running games: the protagonist is given the ability to swap between dimensions by Guardians, which are relevant to a story that is only partially implemented in this build. In these two dimensions there are different obstacles that exist in one but not the other, such as blocks that you need to jump on to reach higher platforms to the aforementioned panels. These obstacles turn translucent when in the opposite dimension and are colour-coded so you can more clearly tell on the fly.

 The the right!

This is really necessary, because this game is best when taken at high speed. When you get through a section of jumps and wall runs without making any mistakes at full speed, the feeling of elation is great. This must be what speedrunners feel like. Speaking of which, outside of the story mode there is also a time trial option accessible from the main menu, which isn’t available in this preview build but was there in the EGX demo. It’s a pretty standard timed mode, and I can see this being where I’ll spend an hour or four, getting to know each of the levels until I can do them blindfolded.

All of this is set to a wonderfully calming Eastern-inspired soundtrack which, no matter how annoyed I got at messing up a section, always kept me level-headed and calm enough to not rage quit. Given how stressful speedrunning - and shaving seconds off each level - can be, I can see this being a big selling point.

If I have one thing to complain about, it’s the focus sprint mechanic: to run up or along walls, or even make most of the jumps, you need to hold down a button to sprint. All throughout the demo, I honestly didn’t see a point to not sprinting, so this meant I was always holding down a button. To me, that’s kind of redundant and just making it so the player is always sprinting would be a great help.

 To the left!

I’m really looking forward to seeing what else Lone Hero Studios have in store for me come the second of August. I have hope that the story isn’t too cringey - though some of the dialogue in the preview build is a little strange. Ultimately though, this is a gorgeous game that I fully intend to play until I can’t tell the difference between blue and red anymore.