The success of Apple Arcade Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is coming to new platforms in 2025. The Animal Crossing-style life sim will launch on Nintendo Switch and PC in early 2025. It will be a timed console exclusive for Nintendo before arriving on PlayStation 4 and PS5 shortly after.
Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is Apple Arcade's most popular game, Arcade senior director Alex Rofman told me in a interview earlier this year. The iOS game takes the basic concept of Animal Crossing and adds popular Sanrio characters. This experience has only been available to Apple Arcade subscribers for a year, but it will soon be available on more platforms.
I spoke to the Sunblink developers at Summer Game Festival, where I demoed an early version of the port on Nintendo Switch. It was still a work in progress, with long loading times and a frame rate below 30. However, the developers in attendance assured me that the version I was playing was completely unoptimized. Keep in mind that Apple Arcade has exclusivity deals with some releases, meaning work on the port only started fairly recently.
The team also confirms that the PC version will support mouse and keyboard from day one. The Sunblink team expects the PC and PlayStation versions to run at 60 frames per second (fps), while the Switch version will run at a locked 30 fps.
While it's still early, Sunblink says the new releases will contain all content currently available in the mobile game and feature synchronized events like holidays. Larger updates will come to mobile first, and these changes will then be applied to other platforms. The console and PC versions will also not interact with the Apple Arcade version, as cross-saves will not be supported.
Sunblink also still has major projects in the works for the game. The team is currently working on a big 2.0 update that will bring another explorable island to the game. The developer I spoke to also said that the update would be accompanied by an unidentified feature requested by fans and which is standard in life simulators. Ports will include this update, as they will launch after it goes live for mobile players. This should hopefully make it a more robust alternative to Animal Crossing once it launches on new platforms.
Hello Kitty: Island Adventure will launch in early 2025 on Nintendo Switch and PC, with PS4 and PS5 versions planned later.
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