Hello Kitty Island Adventure Review - is it worth it?
I make no secret that I’m a fan of Animal Crossing and I have many reasons to enjoy it - I love the cosy characters, building relationships with my villagers, decorating spaces and generally just having a chilled out time navigating a world at my own pace. So, when a game which offers me all of those things launches, you should believe that I’m paying attention.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure has frequently been compared to Animal Crossing since it launched on Apple Arcade. It has the cute Sanrio characters, a simplistic but beautiful world and you can build relationships and decorate homes, all of which are available for you to do in Animal Crossing.
But, is it the replacement to the Animal Crossing franchise that many Animal Crossers are desperately needing since the game no longer was updated with new features? Would it keep a hard core ACNH player going whilst we wait for news on a new Animal Crossing title? I was about to find out when I tried Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
What is Hello Kitty Island Adventure about?
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is a social simulation game with decorating elements. It was developed and published by Sunblink and is their first major title having previously developed a small game called HEROish.
The way Hello Kitty Island Adventure starts is pretty different from what is typically seen within social simulation games. You start the game on a plane travelling with Hello Kitty and her Sanrio friends to a peaceful island getaway, but your quiet flight turns sour and you crash land on a completely different island called Big Adventures Park and all of the Sanrio characters are lost around the park. Your job is to reunite the Sanrio characters and build out Big Adventures Park to welcome in other Sanrio friends who may want to visit you.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is not a new game, it originally launched in 2023 on Apple Arcade and made its way over to Switch and PC in January 2025, with PlayStation versions also planned to launch later this year. For the main platform launch outside of Apple Arcade, there are two different options - a standard edition and a deluxe edition which contains a load of previously released cosmetic content on Apple Arcade.
Stunning game with issues
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is an adorable game both auditorily and visually. The design of all of the characters makes them look like you are playing in a world that is full of plushies, and with the world being made up of bright and fun colours, it is certainly a game which will appeal to you if you are looking for something a little different from the farming simulators which dominate cosy games.
Credit: Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Sunblink
There are eight gorgeous and stunning worlds to explore from active volcanoes to deep, dark swamps with mysteries to uncover. Every world comes to life the moment you step into it and all of the interactions you do with the world match with what you do in each biome. It makes for a really visually immersive experience which feels more like stepping into a toybox than something which is reminiscent of real life.
What was less appealing to me was the incredibly limited character customisation options from the outset. Because you are in a world which is dominated by animal-like characters, the character you embody is also an animal. There are no real options to make a character look like you if that’s what you want to do in social simulation games. This isn’t an issue in terms of setting the scene for the world you are in, but it can make you feel less attached to the world if you don’t have a character which looks like you.
To make things worse, the game presents you with loads of different character customisation options at the beginning of the game but basically all of them are locked away until you make progress through the game.
This limited choice right at the start is not just limited to clothing and fur options either. You also don’t have the ability to name your character. This doesn’t feel like a big deal, but as someone who has played a lot of cosy games, not having the option to name my character just added to the feelings of detachment I had in Hello Kitty Island Adventure because your Sanrio friends only refer to you in the second person, which makes all of the interactions you have with them feel hollow.
Adorable is the name of the game
When you finally get into playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure, you are greeted with a familiar gameplay loop which is seen in a lot of cosy games. You have to speak to the Sanrio characters scattered around the world, give them gifts to boost their friendship levels and complete quests to help them out in their lives. The idea being that you log in every day to gain new materials, unlock new quests and get a new opportunity to level up your friendships.
Credit: Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Sunblink
The act itself of logging into a game everyday to complete tasks is not new, and neither is it difficult to do. In fact, the daily quests you receive in Hello Kitty Island Adventure are very simple in nature often requiring you to find one or two characters, and then either speak to them or give them an item and that’s it, you are free to explore the world at your leisure for the rest of the day.
The quests you do to advance the story are very simple in nature and at most require some minor puzzling in one of the temples which are scattered around the Amusement Park. What I did find was that as soon as I was done with these tasks, there wasn’t really a huge amount to do.
At one point when I had completed the quests for the day, I went around looking for ways to advance the story for an hour and couldn’t find anything. So, I logged off for the day sad that I couldn’t play for longer. This is a common occurrence with Hello Kitty Island Adventure. It’s not that the game time locks you from doing any more, but there’s not an obvious next step shown in your quest logs so you end up with very little that you can do for the day other than exchange resources for items in the shops.
There’s also a very heavy focus on gifting the Sanrio characters to level up their friendships. As is seen in the likes of Disney Dreamlight Valley, there are quests which are locked until you gain a particular friendship level with that character. However, in Hello Kitty Island Adventure, you are only limited to building friendship with the villager through gifting them and you can only give them three gifts every day. So, if you don’t give them their favourite gifts, you are going to be logging in every day just to see miniscule amounts of progress in increasing their friendship levels.
This causes major blockers in progressing the story as well because if you want to get the most out of a play session and you want to complete a particular quest, it ends up feeling like you are stuck with no way forward because you need the friendship level to increase with a character before you are able to do the next step.
Do we go this way?
Despite the simple nature of the gameplay and how frustrating it can be waiting for new quests to open up by levelling up the characters, there’s one thing which frustrates me more about this game than I expected it to. Hello Kitty Island Adventure isn’t always clear on what you need to do next to progress the story. More than once during my time playing the game, I had to pause and look up a guide because I had a quest with no clear direction on what I needed to do to finish the quest.
Credit: Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Sunblink
I’m in favour of games not telling you outright what you have to do and instead offering you a cryptic hint along the lines of “maybe I should talk to a character who likes…,” but that direction isn’t present in Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Instead, the quest will be something like “Find the snorkel,” and that’s not particularly helpful if you don’t know where to go to find it in the first place. Simple updates like adding in a hint for those sorts of quests would be helpful so that you don’t end up getting to a point in the game where you feel like you can’t make any more progress.
There is an option in the game to turn on a guide to help direct you to where you need to go for your currently pinned objective. This is helpful to an extent, and if you have actions you can take straight away, it is incredibly helpful for navigating a really large map. However, if you don’t have any actions you need to take right away, this guiding light leads you in circles when you pin a quest you can’t make any progress on. It took me about an hour to realise that I was being led nowhere by this apparently helpful guide. The positive from that experience was that I unlocked basically all areas of the map.
General navigation in Hello Kitty Island Adventure is actually not that bad. The walkways are expansive and it is clear when you move from one biome into another despite the map being much larger than other cosy games.
There are shifts in lighting and style which makes it clear when you enter a new zone which really helps you learn where you are in the world and where you need to go next to get around. There are also map options which show you where you are going both in a large format and in the minimap on screen with Sanrio characters displayed to help you find them if they move around the biomes. However, there’s one thing missing from an expansive world like this which is sorely needed as an update - map markers.
The number of times I have looked into the map and said to myself that I want to go to a specific spot and can’t actually pin the location is crazy.
When you are playing in a large and open world, one of the things you need to make navigation easier is a map marker. If you need to speak to a specific character and they move around, being able to tag them makes it easier to follow them so you don’t head to the place that they were a couple of minutes earlier. It also helps to be able to see the quest on a mini map as well so you always know the general direction you are going in.
There are elements of navigation which work well in Hello Kitty Island Adventure, and it definitely seems like they have tried to make the game more accessible by having a guiding light, but it feels like these have not been optimised enough to work with a console or PC audience. Some small tweaks here and there would make the world of difference to help players feel more connected to the Amusement Park and make it easier to find everything you want to get to.
Lots of performance issues
One thing that is quite common with mobile ports to consoles is that the games are not reoptimised for the consoles they are planning on launching on and this can cause a lot of issues in how well they run. With Hello Kitty Island Adventure, I would be lying if I said it ran well on Nintendo Switch and had no issues, but I don’t think this is entirely due to older hardware.
Credit: Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Sunblink
The one which could be due to older hardware is the loading times to get into the game itself. It takes an absurdly long time to boot the game up and that’s just to get to the starting menu. It took so long for me that I had to question if Hello Kitty Island Adventure required an internet connection and if my internet had gone down as an internet connection is required with a lot of mobile first games. In this case, Hello Kitty Island Adventure does not require an internet connection and because of how slow it was to load up, I think that’s probably a Switch issue.
The other thing which happens way too often when playing the game are the frequent lag spikes. Randomly you will catch your game freeze for a moment not from having loads of details in the island load in all of a sudden, just from you walking. It happens periodically enough for it to not be an inconvenience, but often enough that you will notice it and you may even be annoyed with it or think that your game is broken. There’s no real way to get around this on Nintendo Switch because you can’t turn down any performance settings to make the game easier to run. However, whilst these lag spikes did come up often for me, they didn’t really harm my enjoyment of the game outside of commenting on the lag.
Accessibility in Hello Kitty Island Adventure
For a game which is not quite a triple A release, you would expect there to be pretty decent accessibility options to make Hello Kitty Island Adventure more comfortable to play. However, there aren’t really any options for you to change here.
Credit: Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Sunblink
Outside of separate sliders for music and sound effects, you don’t have any options to manipulate to make the game fit better to you. The lack of subtitles is not a matter of concern in a game like this which is reliant on a text speech system. However, what does concern me is the lack of button remapping.
The number of times I have found myself pressing the wrong button to interact with a character really concerned me and I wanted the option to make the gift button something completely different so I could always find it or move the map or quest log onto different buttons so I could access those more easily is insane for the period of time I played Hello Kitty Island Adventure. If that is something which you are going to need to do, then Hello Kitty Island Adventure is not the game for you.
What I did appreciate the developers did for accessibility in the game was to make collectables flash a bit so you can see them better. It did act as a distraction from a quest and sadly the option to turn this off is not there if you don’t want that, but if you are needing to collect resources and you are struggling to find them in the environment you are playing in, having them have a slight flash around them when you are moving around really can help you out.
Is Hello Kitty Island Adventure like Animal Crossing?
This brings me to the ultimate question of if Hello Kitty Island Adventure is the right game for those of you who enjoyed Animal Crossing and are looking for a replacement after Nintendo stopped giving us updates.
Credit: Hello Kitty Island Adventure - Sunblink
In many ways, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is very similar to Animal Crossing. It has cute and adorable characters, you can decorate houses in whatever style you want and you build up relationships with the characters you interact with in the Amusement Park. But, despite all of those core features, that is ultimately where the comparison stops.
Even though there are those elements there, the big thing for me which makes it very different from Animal Crossing is the quest heavy nature of the game itself which makes it feel to me more like a crossover between Ooblets and Disney Dreamlight Valley.
There are many elements in how Hello Kitty Island Adventure works as a quest driven game which are very similar to those found in Ooblets, but because you are dealing with intellectual property, it gives me very strong Disney Dreamlight Valley vibes.
Like DDV, you go around helping out characters from a particular set of franchises and if you are really into your quest driven games, you are going to love Hello Kitty Island Adventure, but if that’s not what you want from a social simulation game, then this is not the one for you.
The downside of having a game like Hello Kitty Island Adventure is that if you are not really into the Sanrio scene, you won’t understand the references nor the stories associated with each of the characters.
Whilst it features heavily in this game, a lot of the references are lost on me and the characters felt very similar to each other with no distinct personality because I’m not familiar with the Sanrio world. If there had been some explanations in the game to make it easier for me to understand, that would have been helpful but it doesn’t detract from your enjoyment of the game if you aren’t too familiar with the franchise.
I also couldn’t get over the character customisation in Hello Kitty Island Adventure. As someone who is used to playing with humanoid characters in cosy games being made to play as an animal felt really unnatural and unnerving for me, particularly when I couldn’t style my character as much as I wanted. Compared with the already limited character customisation options in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there was actually more you could change in Animal Crossing than there is in Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Yes, you can change your look in Hello Kitty Island Adventure basically straight away, but if you don’t have the clothing options you like in the shop and you don’t have the resources you need to exchange for those items, you are stuck not looking as you want until you make more progress in the game and that can be frustrating and jarring for those who value character customisation in their games.
The other thing which is made very clear right at the start of loading into the Amusement Park comes from a letter from Sunblink which clearly warns you that time travelling on Nintendo Switch will break your game. This is similar to the warnings which came out for Disney Dreamlight Valley and as the game is reliant on the internet clock to run the in game actions, it’s really important that you aren’t playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure on a Switch which you are time travelling on for Animal Crossing to keep your save file safe.
Summary
Would I say that Hello Kitty Island Adventure is the replacement for Animal Crossing? No, I wouldn’t. There’s a lot that the game gets right with having a lot of the core elements of cosy games, but with the unclear expectations and quests that the game throws at you, you end up spending a lot of time reading through guides, which isn’t how I want to spend my time playing video games.
For the price that it is, I do think there’s a lot of good that comes from Hello Kitty Island Adventure, but given the number of issues which are born out of porting a mobile first game over to consoles without optimising it for a new platform, I don’t think it’s worth the money that you pay for any platform other than Apple Arcade. I felt like something was missing every time I opened the game. So, whilst I enjoyed the time I put in, I don’t feel like I’m in a position to go back to the game to finish up the story line.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is a really cute game and the design of the world and characters is really appealing, but if you aren’t too familiar with the Sanrio characters outside of Hello Kitty, this game is not for you and there are other social simulation games which I would recommend above this one.
If you want to try it out, it is worth picking up on Apple Arcade and seeing how you feel about it if that option is avaialble to you, but it is difficult at this point to recommend getting it as a full price game on any other platform.
