It's the same dissolve of reality that each of this game's scenes mimics. His 2012 short film Shelter starts with the stability of an attic in a thunderstorm and then stretches and warps it in every way possible. In fact, it doesn't take a lot of Googling to see everything that eventually became ISLANDS in Burton's other work. In Non-Places, anywhere could turn into a factory floor at any moment, and this likely has some origin in Burton's first job where he provided animations to visualise scientific research. This experience is necessarily interactive rather than passive because you press buttons to advance these processes and this gives them an air of industrial protocol. In ISLANDS, electronics and mechanics cannot just be thought of as sets of hardware but must also be considered in motion, fulfilling their purpose. Burton's portraits of machinery have to exist as animations rather than stills because he wants to show these utilities transitioning from step to step of their operations.
Objects are extended, retracted, raised, lowered, opened, closed, heated, and scanned. ISLANDS speaks to a ubiquity of technology in our towns and cities, but more than just starring technology, it is also concerned with representing the procedures it goes through. Or in the case of the lounge, you must activate rising platforms which elevate the chairs in the room before it's flooded with water. So the fountain stops spraying water, has to be lifted out of the ground, and hanging from the bottom of it is a column of pipes and branches with a leak in it. That surreal shift happens either through Burton adding a magical element to something mechanical or adding a mechanical element to something non-mechanical. That construct will require some maintenance or else need to perform the function it was built for, which is where the scenes take a turn for the surreal. Each of Burton's vignettes starts by presenting an everyday human construct like a fountain, a lounge, or a baggage carousel.
ISLANDS: Non-Places is a gallery of ten 3D animations by artist Carl Burton. Other games make you ask "What's the most efficient way to solve this problem?" or "What's this character's motivation?", but for a lot of Non-Places, I was asking just "What?". A lift smoothly lowers the bus into the ground, the vehicle drives off, and then the bus stop turns into an incubator for the eggs. A bus creaks to a halt, opens up its doors, and a dozen eggs float majestically out of it, chirping as they go. ISLANDS has one of the best opening hooks I've seen in a video game.
Note: This article contains major spoilers for ISLANDS: Non-Places. Mirages: An Analysis of ISLANDS: Non-Places
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