Hello Kitty Island Adventure was first released as an Apple Arcade exclusive — arguably one of the only worthwhile exclusives the service has ever offered. The open-world Hello Kitty-themed life sim was well received upon its release in July 2023, but the game’s potential for competing with other great life sims was stunted by the contract. Now, a year and a half later, Hello Kitty Island Adventure finally comes to Nintendo Switch and Windows PC, with more console releases planned for the rest of 2025. And while the game screams Switch — it’s clearly designed in the style of Animal Crossing: New Horizons — some lingering mobile-only quirks might make it a tough sell for people who aren’t already invested in the Sanrio universe.
When it comes to Sanrio fanservice, though, this game is absolutely, downright, 100% delightful. You can’t compete with the joy that comes with delivering gifts on behalf of My Melody or going bug-hunting with Keroppi. There are Gudetama lazing about all over the world, and you get rewards for photographing a lot of them. I got my review code for this game the week of the U.S. presidential inauguration, and playing it almost felt like the salve New Horizons was during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — a feeling that makes me excited to check out the multiplayer mode, too.
But the more time I spent with Hello Kitty Island Adventure, the more annoyed I became with the game’s poor explanations of crucial gameplay mechanics — particularly the mechanics that start to become more relevant as you get further into the game. The game’s sense of time is the biggest problem: It has in-game days, which are mostly inconsequential, as well as mechanics that rely on the passage of time in real life. So, when Hello Kitty tells you to “come back tomorrow” to learn another cake recipe, it’s initially unclear whether that’s an in-game tomorrow or a real-time tomorrow. Items respawn depending on how much real time has passed; you can only give your friends three gifts per real day. In that sense, the game’s days feel like they’re there for visual interest alone — a bit of a disappointing departure from the cozy life sim genre.
Other departures are refreshing, like the lack of a traditional currency. Instead, you swap less valuable items, or a combination of them, for more valuable items — and it’s nice to not have to grind toward a massive savings in order to hit cruising altitude with the game. Friendships are similarly simple: It’s easy to level up your relationships at first, and each character’s preferences are denoted with tags rather than forcing you to use trial and error or keep a guide up on your browser while you play. You won’t run out of energy in Hello Kitty Island Adventure either — a core mechanic of life sims that can feel exhausting, no pun intended, and sometimes like a force-fed replacement for difficulty.
The main “grind” of Hello Kitty Island Adventure has to do with that element of time: waiting for a real-life day to pass so you can level your friendships up more, collect more items you need, unlock more daily quests, and so on. As such, I’ve found myself time traveling a lot — something Polygon service writer Ana Diaz, who played the game via Apple Arcade, told me was always possible. The fact that the game doesn’t break or punish you for save-scumming is a boon for console and PC players, because I envision them treating this game more like an Animal Crossing, with long spurts of obsessive play, than a Spiritfarer or Cozy Grove, with shorter play sessions each day to complete daily quests.
Ultimately, it feels like Hello Kitty Island Adventure hasn’t quite married its mobile-first design with its newfound foray to PC and consoles. Some controls feel clunky with a joystick, like the tool selection wheel, and the mechanics designed to keep you coming back feel shoehorned into what has potential to be a nearly perfect game for a handheld console.
All concessions aside, though, this game sold me on Hello Kitty — a franchise I’ve always found cute but never really connected with the way others seemed to — and I think parts of it, like the fishing mechanic and the minigames, would be an excellent entry to the genre of cozy games. In my first five hours or so of gameplay, I thought that’d be the angle of my review, that this game can train you up for the less forgiving titles in the genre. But as it is right now, it feels more like a really good Hello Kitty game than a really good life sim. I’m excited to see how the game changes as updates emerge, and whether its mobile version starts to differ from the console version more over time — and even though I’m done writing this review, I certainly am not done galavanting around the island, giving gifts to my favorite Sanrio characters.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure will be released Jan. 30 on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. (It had previously been released for iOS, Mac, and Apple TV on July 28, 2023.) The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Sunblink. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
