Well, since you don’t have Animal Crossing on your PlayStation 5, the next best thing has arrived with Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Trust me, it’s a solid stand-in.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure, developed by Sunblink, is an interesting, cozy game that doesn’t require much effort to get into, nor does it take much to walk away from. The adventures on the island are short stints of fun with a hefty amount of exploration through large bits of land. While accomplishing quests and gathering items might keep you hooked here and there, the game has a ‘go as you please’ type of drive, where constant commitment need not apply. That isn’t a knock; rather, it’s a good game that has some longevity, and that was built on a mobile gaming backbone.
So, break out your favorite bit of Sanrio clothing and let’s talk about this mobile-to-console game.
Doesn’t take much
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is built to provide many short quests, which eventually help you unlock places to expand the resort island you’re vacationing on. It’s built on a circular gameplay blueprint that starts with meeting the needs of an island resident through questing, which leads to unlocking a new piece of the island, and then unlocks even more quests to continue to help the residents. Again, circular in its design.
But as easy as that sounds, the good folks at Sunblink make the quests meaningful and help make the player feel like they’re accomplishing something. It’s a positive message that leads the player from quest to quest, even when the quests are simple in their design.
Now, staying with quests, the gameplay in Hello Kitty Island Adventure is driven by accomplishing small quests. You are given an island of Sanrio friends to work with and who provide a unique variety of questing requests, which makes the adventuring portion of the game always fresh. For example, you might have Hello Kitty ask you to gather ingredients to help her bakeshop make an apple pie. She might send you on a task to a gloomy part of the island, which houses pumpkins, apples, and whatnot. By gathering said ingredients, you can bring them back to Hello Kitty and create a new recipe, which will benefit you on a crafting quest later down the road. Or you might get a quest to power on ziplines to help you travel between parts of the island quickly. Accepting a quest might mean creating an item, for which you must find ingredients at another place on the island. This pattern of helping, getting rewarded, and progressing is all driven by quests in the game.
The quests are also so short that you never feel like you’re wasting time on them; rather, they silently encourage you to keep taking on new quests. It’s addictive gameplay that is non-committal long-term.
To help drive the questing and expand upon it, while also keeping it fresh, you will gradually meet and greet new residents as you slowly complete more quests. The residents generally live on their unique part of the overall island, which helps to expand the game’s adventuring space, while also upping the exploration value of the game.
When you open the map of the game up for the first time, you’ll find lots of clouds blocking the view of whatever is underneath them. As you continue to complete quests and visit new lands/residents, you will slowly see those clouds go away, which reveals the girth of this game and how much exploration you get to look forward to while adventuring. I found myself several times wanting to keep playing and exploring for this very reason. The exploration connected beautifully back to the questing, which slowly but surely provided more access to new parts, and those new parts provided me with new access to material that I could gather for crafting. Sunblink did a superb job of balancing out quests and exploration, and did well to connect it to crafting.
Staying with the topic of crafting, Hello Kitty Island Adventure does a wonderful job of pushing players to collect as much as they can find everywhere. For example, you might need/want to create new clothing or even a hat for a quest. You must find material to create the clothing or hat in particular areas, as well as obtain unique dyes that help customize whatever you craft. You will find these ingredients lying around everywhere, some out in the open, and some in treasure chests. The more you collect, the more you can access new quests that provide you with new material once accomplished, eventually circling back to unlocking new areas.
During my review period for the game, I did my best to gather as much as I could as I went along. This included finding flowers on a riverbank, happening upon the occasional comic book lying around in strange places, or even finding locked treasures that require additional efforts to unlock. There are items/ingredients everywhere on the island without numerical restrictions on how much you can carry. Gathering as much as you can helps keep the progression in the game going, while at the same time creating motivation to keep exploring and gathering. The gathering and crafting are balanced well with questing and exploration. This game does a fantastic job of giving you an Animal Crossing experience.
Customizing
When you’re not gathering material, completing quests, or unlocking the next piece of the island adventure puzzle, the game allows you to decorate and customize your character and homestead. Hello Kitty Island Adventure provides another avenue for creativity by giving you a home early in the game and allowing you to make it the way you want it. The customization is a solid part of the experience, but not as heavy as the other parts of the game.
While you will find a good dose of this customization in some quests, especially as you want to populate the island with new guests by attracting them to small houses you unlock, it’s a come-as-you-please type of gameplay. It’s important at times, but it’s more for player downtime than it is to constantly have to think about it when it comes to game completion.
At most, the customization option makes the experience feel like it’s the player’s own experience. That’s important when it comes to engaging and hooking your players to continue adventuring. There’s a lot to do in the customization category, as the sky is the limit with what a player can concoct to make the experience personal, but it won’t drive the gameplay.
Customization is a sideshow at best, which isn’t a knock; rather, it’s a mobile game personality trait, but it’s still a good trait to have as you play. At the very least, it gives the player a break and will make them feel like the adventure is theirs. That is a good accomplishment for Sunblink, as it will make the experience feel personal.
PlayStation 5 traits
While I love the mobile version of this game, as well as the Switch version, the PlayStation 5 has some minor tweaks in comparison. Firstly, the graphics, while like previous iterations of the game, look a little sharper on the PS5. It’s expected, considering the hardware the game has at its disposal. The character models are colorful, cute, and perfect representations of the Sanrio cast.
The environments are also big and bulky, with unique details. The island pieces/parts feel bigger, livelier on the PS5. There are a lot of little details going on, such as waves going to and from islands, fish swimming often in the ocean around the lands, and unique environmental attributes, such as fog in the spooky area of the island. It just seems like the bigger and more powerful console acts better and allows more things to go on visually.
Now, speaking of visuals, I was quite surprised to see rendering pop-ups occasionally happen during exploration. Rocks and objects would randomly ‘pop’ on the screen when I explored around the island. I was walking and not running, which makes the rendering lag more surprising. That seems like it needs to be cleaned up a bit. It didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen occasionally.
Finally, the PS5 does a great job of making fast travel loading times non-existent. You will happen upon mailboxes during gameplay that act as fast travel spots. The more you discover, the more you can easily hop from island to island. The amount of time it takes to go from one place to another is less than two seconds. This means the environment is fully loaded in a short stint. Loading time has rarely been an issue on this console, depending on how developers use the hardware, so it’s nice to see it continues to meet that quick expectation in Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Anyway, the PS5 does a great job of facilitating and handling this game. It isn’t perfect in every aspect, but it’s better than the others.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Hello Kitty Island Adventure from developer Sunblink isn’t going to replace Animal Crossing anytime soon. However, it’s a worthy cozy game that offers simple gameplay that is driven by quests, solid exploration, and a good crafting system, which will keep players coming back for more. It’s a good game, especially for a younger gaming audience. It’s a good way to waste time for older gamers.
