In one of the all-time great episodes of South Park, “Make Love, Not Warcraft”, the grade-schooler Butters decides to quit the high-stakes, punishing World of Warcraft to return to the relaxing coziness of the then-fictional Hello Kitty Island Adventure. That was in 2006. In 2023, 17 years later, the real-life version of the game debuted on Apple Arcade. And today it arrived on Switch and PC. After spending a couple of weeks with the game, I sympathize with Butters. Island Adventure is a peaceful, cute, diverting game, although one not without flaws.
Island Adventures starts inside a passenger plane on its way to Big Adventures Park. You, the blank slate protagonist, are onboard alongside a group of Sanrio mascots, ready to start your vacation. When Hello Kitty creates a safety hazard (in the cutest way possible), everyone decides to leap from the plane and parachute down to the island below. The core group settles in rather quickly — Kitty reopens the bakery, My Melody dusts off the furniture store, Tuxedosam occupies the clothing shop, etc. — and tasks you with locating the other mascots who went astray and landed elsewhere on the island. Thus, your island adventure is born.
The storytelling in Island Adventure is fine. There isn’t much drama, or intrigue, or even real conflict, but that’s basically what you would expect from a cozy life simulation game. It’s all about making friends, exploring at your own pace, and leaving your mark on the island. That said, developer Sunblink deserves credit for adding an overarching plotline on top of all the daily deeds and goings-on. Big Adventures Park is not all it seems at first glance. There are mysterious blob-like creatures in every corner of the island, and a strange holographic AI that seems to be suffering from a severe case of amnesia…
Helping get the island up and running, and restoring the AI’s memories in the process, is a big part of your experience in Island Adventure. But it’s only one of dozens of quests that you’ll come across. At different times you’ll do favors for your Sanrio friends, deliver items, take photos, reel in fish, catch critters, rebuild dilapidated structures, reopen rides, craft important items, and create inviting homes for Hello Kitty’s visiting friends and family members. The game boasts a nice mix of short-, medium-, and long-term goals and projects, which means you’ll almost always have something to do.
Almost always. If the gameplay loop in Island Adventure has a flaw, it’s the reliance on friendship levels. You see, in order to trigger important quests, you have to become closer friends with Hello Kitty and her pals. That means giving them presents, particularly presents with some elemental quality important to them. My Melody adores sweets, for example, while Badtz-Maru loves pranks. At times, you’ll find yourself with no available story or friendship quests, so you have to ply your neighbors with gifts to quickly level up the friendship. Not too quickly, though, since you can only gift three items per person per day. It creates a bit of a bottleneck.
Even when you do trigger that new quest, it might not always be a winner. Island Adventure, like any life sim, has its fair share of fetch quests and mindless busy work. Luckily, there are two quest categories that are mostly interesting and rewarding: “The Right Tools” and “The Island Mystery”. The former unlock essential abilities and items, like the fishing pole and snorkel, and the latter open up new areas of the island and attractions.
It’s here where Hello Kitty Island Adventure begins to distinguish itself from its most obvious competition, Animal Crossing. Where Nintendo’s beloved life sim focuses almost exclusively on design, decoration, collecting, and socializing, Island Adventure adds a fair dose of action-adventure to the formula. You can explore caves, dive underwater, discover treasure chests, complete puzzle rooms & mini-games, and climb tall mountains. You even have a stamina meter and a bunch of balloons that act as a paraglider. There’s a whisper of Breath of the Wild here.
Don’t get too excited though. Most of the action-adventure elements are simplified and too easy. You might move a couple of blocks to reach a treasure chest, flip a few switches to open a door in a haunted mansion, or grab fizzy ore deposits while riding a mine cart. It’s not all that thrilling or demanding. Still, the game earns kudos for adding something a little more adventurous to the life sim format.
Thanks to all these adventures, quests, and interactions, Island Adventure is packed with things to do. The game’s Steam page advertises 80+ hours of content, but that actually might be selling it short. With over 30 NPCs, daily and weekly tasks, seasonal events, hundreds of achievements, and the ability to invite friends to your island for co-op high jinks, you could in theory play the game for months on end.
To do so, however, you’ll have to confront some technical hiccups, at least on Switch. The game simply does not handle well on Nintendo’s hybrid, which is surprising given its mobile origins and its lack of sophisticated assets. There’s a certain bumpiness to the game, as frame rate hitches and momentary freezes are common. Again, this is not a graphically demanding title. In fact, the geometry, textures, lighting, and physics are all basic. Overall, Island Adventure isn’t the prettiest game around, although it partially makes up for things with its adorable characters and cartoon aesthetic.
It also partly makes up for things with some surprisingly good music, courtesy of Phill Boucher. The main theme is breezy, catchy, and lovely. And all the regional themes evoke the ideal setting and vibe. The best collection of tunes comes from Gemstone Mountain, including “Rockadoodler”, an Old West-inspired track with plucking strings, whistles, bull whips, and wailing vocals. It’s excellent.
In “Make Love, Not Warcraft”, Butters’ classmates chide him for picking Hello Kitty Island Adventure over their preferred gaming experience. But there’s a time and a place for games like this one, particularly in this lull between Animal Crossing releases. Indeed, if you’re looking for a low-stakes, relaxing life sim to carry you over to 2027, or whenever Nintendo decides to release the sequel to New Horizons, you could do a lot worse than Hello Kitty Island Adventure. It’s colorful and cozy, and packed with things to do and discover — as long as you can overcome its faults.
Full Article – https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463704/hello-kitty-island-adventure-ns/