Hello Kitty Island Adventure review: Animal Crossing meets BOTW

After seeing Greta Gerwig’s BarbieMovie and Playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure The weekend before last, I was left wondering: Does it still feel cool to be female? However, it is true. We’ve gotten glittering pop tracks featuring Power Puff Girl-inspired visuals from NewJeans and Gerwig’s movie has been released to theaters to seemingly universal fanfare and pink. Now, fans of mobile games get a little cherry on top: a social sim featuring Sanrio’s cast of characters. Media aimed at girls and women has had a successful summer in 2023.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure – not to be confused with the fictional game from South Park – is a social sim from developer Sunblink (Heroish). One part The Short HikeThere is another part Animal Crossing New Horizons, Island Adventure The game focuses on collecting items, creating, and baking. However, it is also focused on exploring by allowing you to glide and climb anywhere. It’s being published by Apple Arcade, where it will remain locked behind Apple’s subscription for the time being. While it’s compatible with a controller, I reviewed the game on a fifth-generation iPad Air and stuck to the regular touch controls.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure kicks off with a fever dream in which a veritable who’s who of Sanrio characters jump out of an airplane mid-flight after an onboard cake-baking catastrophe. I and Hello Kitty and Kuromi and Badtzmaru and Keroppi all jump from the emergency escape and the sky is soon filled with bunnies and puppies holding onto party balloons. We land, and the real challenge begins: It’s up to me — an unnamed cutesy cat character I designed myself — to find everyone scattered across the island.

Photo: Sanrio & Sunblink/Apple Arcade by Polygon

Sunblink is able to accomplish a great deal from this point on: I am able to fish, I am able cook, I have the ability solve puzzles within micro-dungeons, I’m a refinish cabin and can decorate it with theme furniture for guests, etc. Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise; all the while, I’m collecting items with which to bolster my relationships with the rest of the cast. The game’s backbone is exploration, despite the wide variety of activities. This island is huge and bursting with timers, items, and creatures to catch. It’s not overwhelmingly big, but it contains a variety of regions, including a spooky swamp and a blistering volcanic expanse.

Sunblink gives me a lot of freedom to move around, but it also has some restrictions. For example, to unlock items and quests which open other areas I must level up specific relationships. In order to do so, I must give each character a gift that is tailored to his or her personality. Characters communicate the preferences of others through dialogue, but Sunblink’s UI also comes in handy, displaying varying numbers of hearts to show how much each character will appreciate disparate gifts. Whereas a character like Hello Kitty will prefer a cake, Kuromi prefers Jack-o’-lanterns.

Images: Sanrio, Sunblink and Apple Arcade from Polygon

Apart from the exploration required to find new characters, it’s the fostering and maintenance of friendships that steers me throughout my time on the island. The only way I can give gifts to each character is three per day. Key crafting materials are also limited, as they respawn in small quantities every day. After unlocking my first area, I was able to level up friends quickly by completing discrete quests. However, I felt a lull afterward as I had to grind for the gifts that I knew would be appreciated by the unlocked characters.

By wholeheartedly leaning into the “adventure” in Island Adventure, Sunblink’s new title represents a very ambitious and earnest attempt to expand — even evolve — the sim games that have captivated so many of us since Animal Crossing New HorizonsBy combining their ideas with the exploration of The Legend of Zelda – Breath of wild (During the recent preview I was told by a developer that they intended to combine Breath Of The WildWith a simulation game).

Images: Sanrio, Sunblink and Apple Arcade from Polygon

It is so broad that it encompasses everything. Island Adventure doesn’t always live up to its own ambitions. In dungeon-like environments, such as a haunted home I explored with Kuromi using levers and trapdoors, the puzzles can be tedious and simple. There is an incredible amount of content to discover, but if you spend enough time exploring each area the locations will feel more familiar than vast. What’s more, Island AdventureThere are some issues with the game. If you become stuck during the climbing sequences, then the game will simply go black. It could have been that my screen was larger, but it would be nice to zoom in on the fixed, oblique angle of the camera.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure isn’t the be-all and end-all for a franchise aimed at girls, nor is it the crowning achievement in the sim game genre. It’s something smaller and sweeter. It’s another flashpoint in a summer that has already felt like a celebration of all things girly. Sure, Sanrio isn’t Just click here to learn more. for the girls, but that’s sort of the point. The game is a combination of Barbie, is here to say “Hey — all this girly stuff? Well, it’s cool as hell.”