Down in Bermuda: an aviator lost in time, three islands to cross

Players and quitters end up praising the same thing: the beauty left standing once the puzzles fall too easily.

A bubble in time inside the Bermuda Triangle

Milton is a pilot, and a freak storm brought him down over Bermuda decades ago. He didn't drown at sea: he ended up trapped in a bubble of frozen time, deep beneath the island, and it's from there that he calls for help to get out. The job falls to you — crack codes, work through puzzles and collect magic orbs to open the way from one island to the next, threading the path back home across the three islands that make up the game.

Yak & Co, the studio behind it, is the same house that made Agent A: A puzzle in disguise — the spy disguise that gave the studio its name, traded here for a pilot stranded in the triangle. It's a single-player adventure, independently made, built to be worked through at your own pace, with no second player at your side.

After Bermuda, the studio never went back to the genre

Yak & Co moved quickly on complaints about the controls right after launch: two announcements from January 2021 lay out adjustments to zoom and rotation speed, prompted by feedback from early players. Anyone who found the camera sluggish could tune the sensitivity themselves, and the studio threw in extra keyboard shortcuts for turning and zooming the view on top of that.

After that, the studio didn't linger on the islands. It announced a race-track builder driven by ragdoll physics and explosions, and later a honey badger that barges into the scenery, smashes everything and makes off with whatever it finds in its path. Bermuda was left behind as a closed chapter, not the start of a collection.

Three islands solved on the first try — and the praise piles up anyway

On Steam, where the game was born and where these impressions come from, anyone who moves through the islands in a few hours tends to come away happy. You recognize the symbol before you understand why it cracks the puzzle, you press it anyway, and it works — that's the most repeated complaint, flipped into praise. Someone who played three hours called the experience a perfect puzzle for a summer afternoon, praising the sound design and the visual style. Someone who put in five hours enjoyed the story and had just one gripe: they wanted more levels. And whoever stopped after the first four hours worked out much of the puzzles by trial and error without minding, because the balance still came out positive.

The most honest praise, though, arrived sideways. A write-up from someone who reached the eight-hour mark started out as pure venting: the camera stuck on every turn, the worst control feel this person can remember in an independent game. They came back on their own after cooling off and switched their rating to positive — only to return once more, a physical controller in hand this time, admit that the comfort gap is enormous, and still grumble about the slog of tracking down every collectible to unlock all the achievements solo, with no way to restart a single map at a time.

The camera headache, and the long shadow of Agent A

Not everyone came out of that same bubble in time satisfied. The frame drops on the final island cost the recommendation of someone who pinned the blame on the optimization rather than their own machine. Sometimes you feel you've solved the puzzle without needing to understand any of it, and it's exactly that feeling that props up the most recurring complaint. Another repeated gripe is the size: too few islands, finished too fast for anyone hoping for more ahead. Some call the pace monotonous, recommending the game only to those with patience to spare for staring at a still scene. And some spot the game's mobile origin — it began on Apple Arcade and only later reached the computer — in the puzzles themselves, solved by pressing the right button or following the hint the map hands over on its own, leaving no trace once they're done.

The sharpest complaint doesn't even come from someone who hated the game, it comes from someone who expected something else. A player who spent three hours across the islands in March 2025 opens by saying she doesn't usually speak ill of games — and does it anyway, because the letdown weighed more than the wish to be kind: Bermuda's puzzles felt thin next to those of Agent A, from the same studio, and the high expectation became the problem itself. Across the Atlantic, French-language reviews take an almost schoolroom tone — grade, correction, a failing mark — to describe a soundtrack that does the bare minimum and art direction that's fine, but with nothing that stays in the memory. And some spent two hours spinning the camera, got a headache, and simply stopped halfway, without finishing. Even so, even those voices pull back at the same spot: no one, not even the person who ends their piece advising against it, disputes that the islands are lovely to look at. The disagreement isn't about that — it's about how much game is left behind the view.

Who this bubble in time is for

Down in Bermuda gives you a spare afternoon, not a whole weekend. It's the right island if you want to solve a puzzle without getting stuck in it, if you'd rather watch a pretty setting become the reason to keep going, and if you don't mind landing on the answer without quite grasping the question. Playing with a controller heads off the most repeated complaint about the camera: according to someone who tried it both ways, the comfort gap is wide. Anyone who shows up comparing it with Agent A, expecting that game's depth of puzzle, will leave the same way as the player who arrived with a headache from spinning the camera — early, and unfinished. For everyone else, it's a short crossing of three islands that promises to sort out no one's life, just enough to justify the afternoon.