If you are a small mouse living on the fractured remains of a destroyed floating island, then you’ll find a lot in common with the heroes of the outrageously gorgeous metroidvania Islets. Like your home, the island of Islets was once held together by an enormous magnetic core, but as the millennia wore on, people failed to remember that it needed maintenance and care, and eventually—like an ancient myth—it was forgotten. Inevitably, it broke down, and the island cracked apart into disparate floating sections.

Our little mouse friend, however, wants to do something about this. Each section of the former island—which one might call “islets”—has become infested with monsters, which has left evil to run rampant throughout the lands. Fortunately, a brave (and not-so-brave) few are attempting to reunite the segments and restore order. You are the littlest among their number, mocked by fellow attemptees for your size and your terrible flying boat—but dammit, you'll show them.

So begins one of the loveliest platform adventures I've played. Islets is crafted with such a degree of love and care, its animations border on Studio Ghibli levels, and its design is built with mortal humans in mind. It is, more than anything else, a game that wants to be played.
Yes, this is absolutely a tacit denouncement of so many metroidvanias that lean toward extreme difficulty to make up for their lack of interesting facets. (Well, no longer tacit.) Islets is by no means an easy game, but it’s a very approachable one; it's not interested in kicking players out early on with tiresome difficulty spikes. Its boss fights are not endurance tests for the hardiest of hardcore players, but are more in-depth encounters with tougher enemies. And while you'll need upgrades to explore much of the game's world, wow do they come thick and fast.

It’s this sumptuous art and generous design that makes Islets so immediately appealing, but it’s the brilliant island-uniting design that locks you in. There’s a central hub area between sections where you and your allies can interact, which itself offers its own puzzles to solve, and even boss fights to clear. Here, too, you can buy upgrades for your character and your ship, but it’s the fact that it’s a living, changing space that is so winning.

Then there’s a brilliant twist: Successfully uniting two section of the island clears pathways that were once blocked (or very tricky to navigate). They fit together in a jigsaw-like way, opening up new routes to previously inaccessible chambers, or revealing new shortcuts and secrets—the enormous, ever-expanding area becoming more engrossing the more you play.

In many ways, Islets feels like a delightfully progressive platformer for the rest of us—a marked contrast, given that so many in the genre now seem aimed at the very few. It’s adorable, welcoming, and eminently reasonable. This has slipped under far too many radars, and hopefully you’ll be among those to put that right. That this is the work of just one person is frankly unreasonable.