Hello Kitty Island Adventure is for Animal Crossing fans with wanderlust

28.07.2023 - 15:45 / polygon.com / Greta Gerwig

After seeing Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie and playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure last weekend, I have to wonder: Is it cool to be a girl again? But actually. 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. The summer of 2023 has been a great season for media aimed at women and girls.

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 A Short Hike and another part Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Island Adventure focuses on the usual sim-game attractions of collecting items, crafting, and baking, but also goes hard on exploration by allowing me to climb and glide 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 others like Hello Kitty, Kuromi, Badtz-maru, and Keroppi, all leap from the emergency exit, and soon the sky above the island is peppered with big-eyed puppies, bunnies, and more floating down as they hold onto bundles of 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.

From here on out, Sunblink tries to do a lot: I can fish; I can cook; I can solve block puzzles in micro dungeons; I can restore cabins and decorate them with themed furniture sets for visitors, a la Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise; all the while, I’m collecting items with which to bolster my relationships with the rest of the cast. Despite the sheer variety of different activities, however, exploration forms the backbone of the game. The island feels sprawling and filled to the brim with simple timer challenges, items to forage, and critters to catch. It’s not overwhelmingly big, but it contains a variety of regions, including a spooky swamp and a blistering volcanic expanse.

Although Sunblink mostly leaves me free to roam from the start, there are certain parameters that direct where I can go. To unlock certain items or quests that open up other areas, for instance, I need to level up certain relationships. To do this, I need to give characters gifts tailored to their