Hello Kitty Island Adventure Review

Now, dear reader, I understand your potential confusion upon looking at the words on your screen, phone, tablet, however you happen to be reading this review. However, while due to the nature of our subject today we do in fact have time for the obvious questions, let’s just move past those for when when the time is right, shall we? As, such, let’s get what background information there is out of the way. There does not seem to be a lot to talk about with Sunblink, the Boulder, Colorado based developer of our dearest Hello Kitty’s game here, development-wise. It would appear to be just today’s title, and a head-to-head castle defense title named HEROish that was also originally released on Apple Arcade back in 2022, and this game’s original debut also on the Apple Arcade as an exclusive for a few years, until the island expanded to consoles and PC, and that’s essentially where we find ourselves. So, do we find ourselves in a good place? Let’s take a walk and find out, shall we?

Mind Your Step

You start Hello Kitty Island Adventure on a plane. Why? Because this is a life sim, and you have to get to your location first. In this case, your character, and a considerable number of the Sanrio cast, are on their way to an island resort to take a vacation. All is going well, and you have the chance to introduce yourself to everyone, from the titular Hello Kitty herself, the pink hooded bunny My Melody, the goth-theme bunny Kuromi, and the red panda Retsuko from Aggretsuko, who I am rather quite embarrassed to admit thought was a collaboration character before fact-checking themselves and finding out she’s also Sanrio.

Then Kitty, intending to be nothing but nice, heads into the cockpit area to get the player character, fresh off the create a character screen and hobnobbing for a bit with the main cast, some cake to eat. The cakepit promptly begins to malfunction, as you do, and post Badzt Maru getting verbally fed up with the cake situation, everyone forms an orderly line, grabs their balloons, which very neatly serve as both a parachute and a gliding tool across the island, and jump. After a brief skydiving through rings segment, you touch down, get the lay of the land from the cast that landed in the main hub and daily starting position with you, and, well, off you go!

Day To Day, Step By Step

So, we have the set-up, and have arrived on the island, so, what we actually do, here? Quite a bit, actually! Hello Kitty Island Adventure is, at it’s core, intended to be a comfy life sim, and it does it phenomenally well. You get settled in, travel the island, try to find the villagers that didn’t land at the hub, make tools, gifts for other villagers, gather items, and do various quests to progress the story and gain access to new tools to make accessing new areas ever so slightly easier. It’s a Sanrio title, the cast are super nice, the music for every area is calm and relaxing, very much a low stakes, you-do-you sort of deal.

The areas themselves are varied, although I am still mildly uncertain how certain later areas of the game manage to coexist in the same general space as both a haunted swamp and a rather peaceful volcanic mountain, although I have lived in stranger places myself. Is what it is, really, and each area does a pretty dang good job of having it’s own little arc and continuing the main story, which, as I belatedly realizes I forgot to really go over, generally involves you and the cast learning more about the island itself, why exactly they seem to be the only living people on what’s purported to be a resort island, and about a curious round ball with a cool hat that keeps disappearing and reappearing in front of them, as well as said ball’s relationship with who the inhabitants of the island are and were.

Don’t Exhaust Yourself, You Have Time

As for how the game itself plays? It’s exactly what you’d want from a title like this. You have access to a good deal of the island from the off, given a little platforming ingenuity, but Sunblink did a fantastic job of ensuring the game can’t be accidentally or intentionally broken, in either the ‘getting places that you’re not supposed to be quite yet without what you’d need to succeed’ sense, and the ensuring everything runs smoothly together sense. Everything in HKIA is integrated neatly with each other, you and the characters all play by the same set of rules traversal wise. Additional systems get added at a good pace, and the game itself gently encourages not trying to brute force progress, or spending too much time with the game per day.

Everything feeds into each other, occasionally quite literally, as a considerable amount of the activities involve gathering ingredients from each area, and making food, largely to use to give as gifts to your fellow vacationers, they grow to like you more, they teach you how to dive to reach deeper underwater bits of the island, for example. You explore a haunted mansion with a friend, you, after pretending that you didn’t completely misread the passcode for how to open the door to the next room and hole yourself as a direct result, restore power to the area that the haunted mansion is in, and get a bit closer to learning more about the island and how it came to be. Simple, effective, very good and charming game design.

Not An End, Just Another Day

And, to paraphrase a wise man, “The word of the day is: charming!” That’s what Hello Kitty Island Adventure is, and it has a near endless amount of said quality. It, as a former Apple Arcade exclusive, is, as far as I can tell, clearly meant to be played for a short amount of time each day, so you, and the game itself don’t burn yourselves out. Each day you play, you move a bit further, learn more about the island, get friendlier with the cast, get a bit closer to figuring out what’s going on here. It’s a relatively simple, admittedly somewhat repetitive, but always, once again, charming and comfortable game for when you just want to relax for a hour or two, occasionally more.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is near perfect for what it probably intends to be, a daily sojourn for you to relax, hang out with some of the most legendary characters in Japanese media history, and have fun. Hello Kitty and My Melody, for example, have been around since the 70s, they’re likely older than a considerable number of the people reading this review. Sunblink has done an incredible job in treating the characters with the respect they deserve, and a very good job in making a very comfortable title.

If you like Sanrio, or comfy life sims, can’t recommend this title enough. A calming vacation… presuming you, unlike poor, poor Retsuko, aren’t also getting daily messages from work on what’s meant to be a vacation, or whatever the gaming equivalent of that would be. The worst thing I can say about it is that it can feel a bit shallow and repetitive at times, but that’s a natural part of the genre… and life itself at times, let’s be real here. Fantastically sweet little title, if you need a game to relax with for a little bit after work, Hello Kitty Island Adventure will 100 percent help you actually do so.

[psxextreme_rating]
Publisher: Sunblink
Developer: Superblink
Platform: PS5
Genre: Cozy Island Life Sim
Release Date: August 5, 2025
Review Copy From Dev/Pub/PR: Yes
Final Rating: 8.7
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