Shaki Shaki Island is a beautiful Game Boy-style adventure where you must use your artistic skills to redraw sprites to progress.
Created as part of the Game Off 2024 game jam, Shaki Shaki Island is a deceptively smart ‘sketch-em up’ that really pushes expectations through its dual-interfaces. In this game, you’ll travel to a distant island equipped with only a drawing pencil and notebook. From then on, you’ll explore the island, talking to the inhabitants and attempting to collect secrets. However, most of your interactions will be done through doodling things you see around you in the world.
Doodling, in this case, means picking one of three colours for your pencil and filling out blocks on a handy-dandy, stuck-to-the-bottom-of-your-screen eight-by-eight notepad. If those shapes happen to match select things in the world then something will happen. Regardless of what that actually is, it’s really, really satisfying when you manage to convert the ‘world’ instance onto the palette, even if it does take a little bit of getting used to.
The main reason that it might take a little bit of getting used to is because it’s not made abundantly clear that the colours aren’t important to the drawing, and because the sprites in the world are not 8×8, instead being (possibly) 16×16. Once it’s clicked though — and that will have almost certainly happened by the time you’ve sketched the first couple of flowers — it feels really, really satisfying and, critically, cool. It’s incredibly easy to lose yourself in Shaki Shaki Island‘s whimsy.
At present there’s no definitive end. However, with 22 things to sketch there’s more than enough there to lose yourself for a while. That said, the developer has said that they’re planning on adding more content, including an ending, to it in time.
Shaki Shaki Island is playable now (for free) on itch.io.
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