Hello Kitty Island Adventure surprised me in the best way possible. While I was expecting an Animal Crossing-style game of lower production value, painted in Hello Kitty colors, designed to capitalize on the runaway success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and pitched to the lucrative mobile audience, the demo at which I played introduced me to so much more. I explored, made friends, and completed challenges around an island in an early version of the Switch port for Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure was originally released on Apple Arcade last year, blending simulation-style management mechanics with light exploration, platforming, and puzzle solving to create a comprehensive and comfortable adventure. Think Animal Crossing or a less intensive version of Stardew Valley combined with A Short Hike or the exploration and questing systems you'd find in a 2D Zelda game. If you've played Animal Crossing, you'll find a lot of that game's setup pretty easy to parse. It's about building your island and inviting adorable Sanrio characters to live there.
I watched an early story quest for about half an hour. I helped My Melody find new clothing racks for her clothing store while playing as an adorably chunky, self-designed cat in a Gudetama outfit. I came across so many fun little diversions while looking around that kept me occupied during what would otherwise be a simple fetch quest in the starting area.
One task made me relive the challenges of Mario 64 Red Coin as I raced to collect a handful of pink coins in a quick amount of time. Another was less of a deliberate challenge and more of a collectible: statues of Gudetama, the lethargic Sanrio Egg mascot, are scattered around the island for you to photograph. I only found two or three of the 132 oval statues scattered around the island, but you'll be rewarded with special decorations, clothing, and other rewards for every 12 you find and capture with your camera .
These little diversions are admittedly minimal, but integrating microscopic platforming challenges and puzzles into the management sim-style quest structure adds enormous value to your time. It encourages you to get off the beaten path and explore. That coin challenge I mentioned earlier, for example, led me to find a new item.
After that, I started a story quest that helped me unlock a swamp-like part of the island, which helped me make new friends, like Keroppi. My demo ended shortly after unlocking this new area, but I was blown away after taking a look at the full Hello Kitty map, which dwarfed the starting area. My half hour with Island Adventure was clearly just the tip of the iceberg.
Developer Sunblink has been supporting and supplementing Island Adventure with free content updates since its original release on Apple Arcade nearly a year ago, regularly adding new characters from Sanrio's surprisingly rich roster of characters to bond with of friendship. While the developer I spoke with didn't confirm any details about who or what we should expect to see in the future, he did promise full parity with the mobile version on the day and date it launches on consoles and PC next year.
Sunblink has done such a good job supporting its Apple Arcade success, in fact, that my only concern about its future is its Switch port. The demo I played was shown on Switch and it did pretty poorly. It was still playable, but it was losing a worrying number of frames. It's a problem that I hope will be resolved by the time Hello Kitty and Friends move to Nintendo's handheld hybrid, but knowing what we've seen in other ports on the Switch, I'll believe it when I see it.
Aside from the performance, I had a great time running around the island with the lovely Saniro stars. Whether I was doing some light platforming or completing a quest, I was always impressed by how Island Adventure took the opportunity to give me things to do while I completed story quests. Fans of cool games or those looking for a fun adventure for a young gamer should keep an eye on Hello Kitty: Island Adventure if they haven't already had a chance to play it on Apple Arcade.
