Cozy games have become a bigger sub-genre than ever thanks to the rise of Animal Crossing on the Switch and franchises like Story of Seasons, Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley shining brightly. Now, a new contender enters the fray in the form of Starsand Island. This offers up an anime-infused cozy experience with a lot of promise when it comes to a premise that combines many things — but with that comes a bit more risk in some of those elements not working out well. The concept of having an open world life simulation with many gameplay elements is sound, but in its pre-release state, Starsand Island has rough edges.
There’s a lot to enjoy from the jump with it, though. You start off meeting your longtime friend and creating a character before roaming around Starsand Island and picking a job role to start out with. There’s a lot to enjoy here as with Fantasy Life, you can partake in several different jobs, but unlike Fantasy Life, you can go from job to job as you see fit. I chose to start off as an adventurer because one thing I love about these life sim adventure games is that blend of slower-paced sections alongside combat. It’s a balance that was struck nicely with My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock, with Fantasy Life featuring the best combat of anything the genre and Starsand Island featuring a solid variety of short and long-ranged combat.
Short-range attacks deal out more damage with an increase in risk because enemies are closer to you, but ranged attacks offer more safety at the expense of needing to do more of them to deal the same amount of damage. Combat feels fine with the ranged items like slingshots, but does feel wonky with short-range attacks because animations are stilted and beating enemies doesn’t feel rewarding. Contrasting that with Fantasy Life, where a victory feels like an accomplishment and the real-time combat has depth to it, it’s clear that this part of Starsand Island will need some work.
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Going with the adventurer job is something that I felt would add a faster pace to things, but the earliest dungeon gatekeeps a lot of its progress in odd ways. After getting used to Fantasy Life guiding the player with ease from point A to B, a vague goal of something like “unlock gate” is met with a fetch quest with no guidelines, so you’re just left to leave and hope you stumble upon a solution. It’s one thing to challenge the player and it’s another to not respect their time in such a way as to make seemingly small tasks take an hour or more. There’s a fine-line between hand-holding and leaving the player flailing in the breeze, and at least in its early form, Starsand Island leans more towards the latter than the former.
While that aspect of the pre-release adventure needs some work, the traversal mechanics are honestly the best in the life simulation genre to date. Having bikes, scooters and motorcycles available to rent to zoom around makes going around the town and up staircases just for fun a riot. It also makes going from the town to a dungeon or to the home base to make adjustments a breeze too. When it comes to traversing the world, Starsand Island shines brighter than other life simulations.
Be a Farmhand in Starsand
When it comes to traversing the world, Starsand Island shines brighter than other life simulations.
The interior decorating side of a life sim can be a big time sink in a fun way, whether it’s designing your house in Animal Crossing or your shop in something like TCG Card Shop Simulator, being able to tinker with a space can be an expression of the player, and Starsand does this well even early on. Being able to craft different things from the many items and resources found during exploration, shop visits or dungeon crawls is rewarding and the green and red color-coding for where you can put things makes quick changes easily to implement.
The in-game camera being slow to move does cause issues there, though, as it rotates slower than any life sim that I can recall, which adds more time to changes. Traversal with the in-game mini-map can be tricky due to this as well since you can run in one direction and wind up not being able to see where you’re going because the camera is so slow to move, so you have to use the mini-map to get a rough idea of where you’re headed. Fortunately, since combat is locked away in dungeons, you’re not going to find yourself in a situation where you’ll take damage from a fight while roaming around the world map, but it’s still annoying and something that hopefully gets ironed out before the full release.
Building Bonds
Navigation issues creep up more when the camera also gets stuck behind walls while navigating through buildings. In-world exploration is impressive even with the early build because so many places in the small town can be explored. This helps avoid the feeling that you’re in a massive void of a town with nothing to do in it. That’s something that can drag down a life sim because having a big world with a small world’s variety means it’s better to just do it this way and streamline the experience. It’s a case of addition by subtraction and it’s something that makes me look forward to the full game and see just what improvements are made across the board.
As it stands, Starsand Island has the foundation of being a good life sim, but is a more flawed execution of that premise than Fantasy Life or other games that blend that genre together with combat, at least so far. The navigation and objective-tackling issues got in the way of having fun with the game and that’s stuff that can be remedied hopefully to a large extent over time. The smaller cast of characters aids the experience as does the world being smaller because it packs more things to do overall with most people you meet having some role to play with different jobs you can take on.
Rollin, Rollin’
Starsand Island is due for a full release via Steam in early 2026 and it’s an intriguing release to be sure. There’s a lot of beauty in the world, the combat is fun when the camera isn’t janky and going down a checklist, it does many things quite well even in pre-release form. Playing this after playing so many other similar games this year makes it stand out in positive ways even then, with flaws being something that will hopefully be ironed out. In playing it for many hours already, it’s showing a lot of potential even with rough parts.
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