I found a lot of joy in Hello Kitty Island Adventure when I first started playing its closed beta for IGN’s guide, way back before it hit Apple Arcade in 2023. Getting to create my own little Sanrio character and run around a tropical island collecting bits and bobs to gift to my new animal friends was pretty relaxing and fun. But day by day, that motivation to complete all my quests, find missing friends, and unlock new regions started to wear off. At a certain point it felt like a chore to log in, spam friends with gifts until I hit obnoxious daily limits, and hope I’d be allowed to progress my friendship levels a little further. Sadly, it’s the same situation on Switch and PC a year and change later: this island is still just as large, colorful, and geographically diverse as it was on my iPad, but it’s as frustratingly gated, repetitive, and stale too.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty to like about Hello Kitty. The crafting, for instance, feels simple and intuitive. There are many different things you can make, from a variety of food items to cute plush pals. But at the end of the day, the main purpose of crafting is to get better gifts for your island friends. The better your gifts, the quicker you’ll advance friendship. That means there is very little incentive to craft things outside of gift giving or unlocking the next step of the very light “story.”
Gifting is what makes the world go ‘round in Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Everything revolves around giving your island residents presents and receiving resources (which you’ll use to make better gifts) in exchange. Progression in the story is largely locked behind different Friendship levels, which can be a slog to get through unless you’re gifting your residents two- or three-heart items – but the catch is that you won’t even be able to craft those higher level items until you’ve hit certain Friendship levels. It feels like a carefully curated maze of roadblocks to keep you from progressing too far too fast.
Although discovering the best order to level your residents while trying to figure out each of their favorite three-star gifts can be a fun challenge, gifting eventually starts to feel more like a tedious chore. You can’t even deliver multiple of the same gift at once to hurry up the process. And since gifting whatever earns you the most Friendship points is the only correct option, there’s nothing creative or rewarding about it – it’s a thinly veiled spreadsheet color-coded in bright, bubblegum pink. Even the dialogue triggered by gifting remains largely the same from friend to friend, only varying depending on the “tier” of the item you give.
The characters themselves are super cute, and are sure to spark some nostalgia for longtime Sanrio fans. They have a bit of spunk to them, with the odd moment of humor which livens up otherwise-dull dialogue interactions. Other than that, though, talking to the island residents each day feels fruitless. You don’t really get any new interactions with them as time goes on. You just have to keep plugging along giving gift after gift to unlock their quests if you hope to see anything new or different.
So if Friendship and gifting are simply the keys, surely the questing door they open is where more interesting or engaging experiences must be hidden… right? Unfortunately, all that awaits you is even more flavors of busy work. From quests unlocked by reaching new levels of Friendship, to the story quests which reveal the “mystery” of the island, these objectives are another never-ending list of to-dos, with very little variety in the simple puzzles, object fetching, crafting, and more they ask of you.
That means quest tasks get repetitive fast, and I had very little motivation to complete them outside of unlocking more of the story (which itself is full of dialogue that often falls flat) because rewards felt either minimal or inconsequential. We’re talking about a crafting material here, a “spooky” furniture item there – nothing that changed anything about the way the next task would unfold.
That’s because furniture and decorating are just as underwhelming as the crafting and collecting that precede them. You can decorate your own island home, plus the other homes you unlock to attract new Visitors, using the friendship and quest rewards. If you’re lucky, you might find something in a random chest hidden around the island. It’s a while, though, before you’re able to craft your own furniture.
Once you’ve unlocked some variety, the options are… okay. While you could mix and match, the decor isn’t very versatile, leaving little room to get creative and design your own style outside of the “themes” each furniture set comes in because they just don’t play well together. What am I supposed to do with a Hello Kitty bookcase, a Spooky Candelabra, and a Pirate chair? I can’t make my house look like a bookstore, or a cafe, or even redecorate for an upcoming holiday with such limited options. Heck, you can’t even rotate furniture at quarter turns or place objects on tables! Overall, unless you like decorating your houses in full-on Kawaii styles, you’re out of luck.
One of the areas where Hello Kitty Island Adventure’s customization is more successful is its character creator. I love that you get to build your own little Sanrio character, rather than the Animal Crossing approach of you being the only human on an island full of sentient, talking creatures. There’s a nice variety of different animals to choose from, including birds, bunnies, and even sheep (though I am bewildered that it doesn’t have frogs as an option). As you play more and level up your Friendship, you unlock even more “avatar” color options to choose from.
Tuxedosam has some cute clothes available to purchase at his island shop, and you’ll get the odd outfit from a chest or quest. However, much like the decor, there isn’t enough variety to inspire my creativity or make me want to dress up every day (or even very often) like I usually enjoy doing in games like this. I found one outfit I kind of liked and it became my “uniform.”
This lack of interesting hooks is a big reason why my motivation to continue playing started to wane once I reached a certain point. Sure, there are lots of things to collect in Hello Kitty Island Adventure, including furniture, clothes, critters, fish, and more, but there is very little incentive to do so other than simply for the sake of keeping you busy.
There is at least the Nature Preserve to fill up with critters, as well as the Fwishing Well to give fish to, both of which would normally satisfy someone like me who enjoys “catching ‘em all” and hitting collection goals. But, once again, the rewards for adding these places are so minimal they might as well be nonexistent. You’re telling me that for donating all the critters that can be found in the bog area of the island I get… 10 mushrooms? I could gather those myself in a single day!
It does help that the designs for the critters themselves are unbearably adorable, branching off beyond bugs to also include frogs, chickens, and even turtles. But that’s not enough to change the fact that bug catching itself is overly simplistic, and doesn’t offer much to make certain bugs more of a challenge than others besides having them vanish quicker. Of course, you can enlist Kerropi’s help to get a buff that makes the bugs stick around longer – but, as you might have guessed, this too is locked behind their Friendship level.
In comparison, I really like the fishing minigame, which puts a small spin on the typical “keep the fish in the colored bar” mechanic by turning the bar on its side and testing your reaction time to keep an arrow balanced in the center. However, there isn’t much more to fishing beyond this. There are no upgrades to get and no fishing collection challenges that I could find, other than hitting certain milestones by giving gifts… sorry, I mean making donations to the Fwishing Well. That’s a shame, because the designs of the fish are really cute, colorful, and match the unique vibe of the regions they are found in perfectly.
At this point, you’ll probably be making comparisons to another cozy tropical island game. Allow me to be the bearer of bad news: No, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is not really comparable to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. While these two games might seem very similar on the surface (you are stuck on an island with some cute animal companions, tasked with sprucing the place up), they couldn’t be more different once you actually jump in.
Animal Crossing is all about collecting and crafting as you shape your own personal dream island, essentially a sandbox decorating game full of fun little guys who live alongside you. Hello Kitty, on the other hand, is all about transforming an abandoned island amusement park into the best (read, predetermined) version of itself along a linear path. The lack of customization for not only the island itself, but also your own house and visitor’s houses, means it feels less like your dream island, and more like a dream of Hello Kitty’s that you’re just visiting.
That makes it feel like Hello Kitty Island Adventure is asking nothing of me except for my time. While a game coming to more platforms is never a bad thing on its own, I fear this one was better off played on a phone – something to open up and fill the dull moments on long commutes or in waiting rooms. Despite the disdain mobile games often unjustly draw, there is no shame in wanting something that serves as a casual distraction for short spurts at a time. (That isn’t even to touch on the fact that many mobile games are so much more than that.) But even in that context, this isn’t one I want to spend my spare time on, and it makes me sad to think it could be what some people now think all cozy mobile games are: colorful, cutesy, and totally mindless.
