Yes, they actually turned a South Park joke into a real game. And yes, I've actually played it.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is said to be like Animal Crossing. I've never played Animal Crossing, but I've always been curious about it. Plus, I kind of like the Sanrio aesthetic and had an Apple Arcade trial subscription. (HKIA is currently exclusive to Apple Arcade but will be released for consoles and PC in 2025.) So I gave HKIA a try.
The Basics
After you create your character, you begin the story with Hello Kitty and her friends aboard a plane, headed for an exciting vacation. There is a bit of a mishap and everyone ends up scattered on an archipelago. The islands clearly used to be a tourist destination, but have been mysteriously abandoned. You get quests to find your friends, restore the islands, and ultimately figure out the story behind the islands.
The game's economy is driven by gift-giving. You find loot around the islands and give it as gifts to your friends. In exchange, your friends give gifts to you, which you can gift to others or craft into items. As you give gifts to your friends, your Friendship Level with them increases. As a Friendship Level grows, more quests unlock and that friend can give you buffs (like faster walking speed or a chance to get extra items at the crafting station) when they accompany you.
Each island has its own biome with various critters and fish to capture. You'll discover Zelda-like puzzle dungeons, minigames, cooking stations, and shops. You can also restore and furnish vacation cabins to attract more Sanrio characters to the islands.
What I Like
At first, I wasn't impressed with the game and nearly abandoned it. There didn't seem to be much to it besides collecting stuff. There wasn't much of a story or a plethora of jokes that could hook me. But I kept coming back. I got into the routine of giving three gifts (the daily max) to each of my friends to optimize my leveling-up of the friendship ratings, which was key to unlocking the main quests. It's not a brilliant gameplay loop, but it kept my interest.
What else I like:
- The high production values of the art and animation which make the game lively and cartoony.
- Each island has its own musical themes, and it wasn't until I was 100 hours in the game that I wished the music was more varied.
- Some quests allow you to enable a Guiding Light, a little glowing ball that guides you to the quest items you need so you don't have to search the whole island in frustration. This helps a lot, especially early in the game.
- There is a generous fast-travel feature. Wherever you are in the game, you can open the map and immediately warp to any of the fast-travel points you've discovered.
- The game's humor eventually opens up. You have dialogue choices, and one of them will often be snide. Your choice doesn't make a difference in how the characters respond, but it's still kind of fun to be a smart aleck.
- Though the game is always bright, happy, and kid-friendly, it makes some surprisingly astute observations on friendship. For example, the main quest involves a friendship that takes a seriously wrong turn. Repairing the friendship takes a lot of patience, understanding, work, and healing.
- As with Animal Crossing, there are seasonal events throughout the year, and the developer is steadily making more content. In fact, the developers promised a whole new island recently.
Spoiler:
Drawbacks
I enjoyed HKIA enough that when my Apple Arcade trial ended, I started a paid subscription so I could keep playing it (and other games of course). But it has some drawbacks:
- To advance the story, you have to do the Island Mystery series of main quests. But the main quests are often locked behind friendship levels. And because you can only give three gifts to a person per day to raise the friendship level, and it rises very slowly, you might not have anything interesting to do for a while. In fact, to finish the last leg of main quests, I had to max out everyone's friendship, which took a whole 2 months of daily repetitive play.
- If a character is "busy" being part of an active quest, they can't accompany you, so you can't make use of their buff. This was a frequent annoyance during the mid-game.
- There are some obscure things you'll need to look up. For example, what are the most optimal gifts to give to characters? Where to find certain crafting recipes? How to attract certain characters to the island? Fortunately, there is a strong community around this game that's posted some very helpful wikis and YouTube videos.
- Terraforming and gardening are key features in Animal Crossing, but not in HKIA. You can't terraform in HKIA. You can garden in HKIA, but not until late-game, and there is little motivation to do so.
- The hundreds of different items are classified with picture tags. These tags are important, because only items with the right tags will make good gifts or attract visitors to the cabins. But the tags can't be searched, sorted, or easily viewed at a glance.
- On the iPad, you walk by swiping and jump by tapping. But for many hours, my attempts to walk would often result in jumping. I no longer have this problem; I don't know whether this is because the developers patched it out or I learned to apply finger pressure in just the right way.
- The late-game was buggy, with fish swimming above the water. The developer has fixed some bugs and kept the game in tune. But some features don't work as well as they used to.
Conclusion
After 170 hours of play which culminated in a celebratory cutscene, I consider the game to be finished. I'll keep playing, though. There are more quests to complete, more characters to attract to the cabins, and more seasonal events to experience. Plus there's that new island the developers promised.
I suspect that HKIA is not as good as Animal Crossing. But it's a cozy place to be. And one day, when I let my Apple Arcade sub lapse, I will miss HKIA's comforting cuteness.
Bonus
I'm going to share a few more screenshots that I think are funny or cool. I'll put them in a spoiler tag in case you're thinking of playing this game and want to discover this stuff on your own. The last two are also inspired by South Park I think.
Spoiler:
