Len’s Island Review – Marooned

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that a good survival crafter has to have certain elements. There has to be a reasonable progression of materials and equipment, a map which is broad enough to explore but small enough that you can learn to find your way around quickly, and there has to be an interesting narrative which motivates the player to get out there and find interesting stuff. Len’s Island claims to have those elements present. It’s the execution of those elements that irritates me.

Len’s Island prologues with a tale of a strange meteor which hit the planet, bringing forth new power in the form of a substance called “lightstone”. One civilization rose and ultimately fell using the material, leaving behind ruins of inscrutable purpose and cyclopean design. Now, humans have rediscovered lightstone, and it’s turning people into creatures of darkness. For some reason, you as the titular Len are heading out to the site of one of these old ruins, possibly in the hope of saving local residents while running around barefoot.

It’s a modest little hovel.

I don’t believe I’ve ever been quite so openly angry about the graphics in any game quite so much as I am with Len’s Island. The visual aesthetic leans towards the impressionistic rather than the realistic. There are a number of great effects which are nicely handled. Lighting seems to be done well, particularly with point sources. Character and creature designs are interesting. Different biomes are recognizable. The different architectural styles for base building and based on materials are certainly evocative. So, what seems to be the problem? A large part of it is the constant nagging that “your GPU doesn’t meet requirements (which aren’t actually posted on the Steam page outside of memory requirements) or is using onboard video”. This is bothersome because the implication is that either the drivers aren’t updated (which is easily checked and remedied) or the game isn’t capable of detecting a discrete GPU (particularly on something like a laptop). The greater aggravation is that if this is so important, then there’s some serious problems with Flow Studio’s engine because it’s either a pig for resources or it’s not optimized correctly. An extra twist of the knife is that, if it’s being resource intensive, it’s wasting a lot of those same resources for absolutely no discernible return. Considering the same laptop can run Death Stranding without any complaint, I find myself deeply concerned. Also considering the far greater difficulties a colleague of mine experienced with a dedicated GPU, there are legitimate concerns involved which need to be addressed and quickly.

Soundwise, Len’s Island just doesn’t impress at all. There’s no voice acting, which is fine, particularly since this is ostensibly an indie. Beyond that, however, there’s nothing which especially stands out. There’s some musical pieces which don’t quite take up enough space to be a theme and aren’t recognizable enough to serve as a leitmotif. The sound effects are probably the best part of the audio package, and they still come across as marginal. If you can play a game with the sound turned off, and you have no alteration in the quality of the experience one way or the other, you’ve dropped the ball on your sound design.

“I should have paid more attention watching Life of Pi.”

The gameplay in Len’s Island isn’t particularly bad, but neither does it prove to be especially good, either. Base building is pretty straightforward, and the ability to repair structures is quite painless. But your progression through the various qualities of gear and the different types of materials is likely to be fraught with lots of “hurry up and wait” thresholds as you try to find resources and survive the process. There seems to be an unspoken bias towards multiplayer in terms of difficulty. Yes, you can play solo, but there are certain points in the quest checklist which demand a team (or an absolutely unconscionable amount of grinding). Unfortunately, the more people you add, the more difficult the gameplay gets, which seemingly punishes a player for doing something which the game is notionally equipped to handle. Certain big boss fights do tend to go a little faster, but it feels off, as though the health bar is being multiplied by the number of players. During the periodic “Harvest Moon” event (analogous to V Rising‘s “Blood Moons”), this mechanic is more obvious when hordes of monsters descend on your base or one of the resource outposts you can obtain to feed your crafting and base building needs. You can theoretically harden your outposts and bases with different turrets and walls, but the monsters become considerably more numerous and harder hitting when you have friends with you. The only saving grace is that combat is pretty straightforward: click till they drop, or you do.

You can escape the Harvest Moons by wandering around in the underground areas (which also neatly avoids exposing your infrastructure to damage) during those events, but you lose out on opportunities for XP. This leads in to the exploration mechanics of Len’s Island, and they are by turns both simple and obnoxious. The surface world really is a bunch of islands, and you’re expected to sail around in your efforts to find quest objectives. The underground is kinda vaguely sorta a bunch of islands (if you squint right), but the bulk of them either have bridges which allow you to cross or can be connected by bridges of your own construction. You don’t have to worry about sharks like you do when sailing, but slimes and lots of “void monsters” abound. On the upside, when you light a lantern in the underground, you don’t have to constantly resupply it with Coal to keep them lit. On the downside, you’re half-wondering when the Balrog is going to show up because you’ve delved too far. Underground navigation is complicated by the fact that you can’t always go in straight lines, and the entrances to the surface you discover do not map directly to the islands above, which means you’ve got no good way of realizing how far you’ve traveled or your position in the world. Moreover, the markup options for the maps are limited to a series of icons. We’ve got no way to identify islands except by putting down signposts and getting close enough to read them. Exploration’s a fine idea, but we’ve got to be able to cross out “here be dragons” and put names to points on the map.

Marc Summers is just going to have an absolute fit after I’m done over there.

A final issue I came across relates to progression, and how one player’s progress absolutely screws over anybody else joining them in that instance. Quest progression isn’t tied to a world instance, it’s tied to the character, and that progress gets set for any players joining them. If Axel goes running around, puts some levels under his belt, and gets some quests done, those quests are unavailable if Bobby decides to join Axel’s instance. Worse, if Bobby goes to make his own instance, his quest progression is still set from what Axel’s instance was at, which basically means you have to start a whole new toon and level that one up in a fresh instance and try to grind out progress to match your buddies. It’s the worst of all possible worlds, penalizing everybody if they don’t play together constantly.

There’s absolutely nothing noteworthy or remarkable about the narrative elements of Len’s Island, because it doesn’t have any to speak of. A couple of unimpressive “conversation” options with vendors does not make for compelling characters. Clickable Rosetta Stone-like slabs to “decipher the ancient language” does not create narrative tension if you can figure out the missing characters and get the rest of the message. The big infodump happens in the prologue and nothing in the game actually ties into that. We have no good explanation on why our character insists on going barefoot. We have no connection to the different “regions” our character could be from (selected at character creation). Any claims of “environmental storytelling” or “emergent narratives” would be a contemptible lie. Whatever narrative efforts were undertaken burned out in the opening cinematic and didn’t have anything left over for the actual game.

“All right, let’s get this over with.”

I don’t know what Flow Studio was hoping to accomplish here with Len’s Island. It’s got pieces and parts and sweeping ambitions, none of which form a cohesive game. This is one island-hopping campaign you can miss.

Axel reviewed Len’s Island on PC with a provided review copy.

Special Thanks to Tim Jewett and Inanna Carter for their assistance with this review.

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James Garcia
James Garcia
23 days ago

Been playing the demo on steam, has been good fun. 9/10 general consensus from steam users, just more out of touch game critics