Hello Kitty Island Adventure Critic Reviews

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think Hello Kitty Island Adventure is one of my favorite mobile games of this year so far. It’s so much more than I expected it to be, so much more than it needed to be, and I genuinely appreciate just how compelling it is from head to toe. I’ve been vocal amongst my peers about how Apple Arcade needs more reasons to subscribe these days. Well, here’s one extremely good reason. Butters was right the whole time.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is so much fun to play, with so many things to do, cute characters everywhere, and a world ripe for exploration.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is a polished, adorable Sanrio life sim jam-packed full of delicious treats and areas to explore on launch. The perfect game for fans of cats, cakes, and cuteness.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure was an absolute delight to explore with plenty to keep me coming back and seeing what else it had to offer each day.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure presents strong reasons to return daily, with story hooks, moreish quests, and fun bite-sized puzzles to romp through. It struggles to retain the excitement of its opening pace in later-stage gameplay, where quests become more reliant on higher, more difficult-to-obtain friendship levels – but beyond this foible, it maintains a warm and wholesome charm that should keep fans of cosy adventure games enthralled.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure serves as a minor getaway to a place that is cheery with friends and full of adventure.

More than an Animal Crossing clone or South Park joke, Hello Kitty Island Adventure offers one of the more fulfilling exclusives for Apple Arcade.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is one of those games that could only come from Japanese culture. There aren’t many other cultures that see an inherent spirit and soul in a mascot, and to most of the rest of us, mascots are tools to use for branding and marketing, or otherwise become famous because of their association with a product like a film or a game (hello Mario and Mickey Mouse). It’s rare that a mascot IS the product. But that’s what has happened with Hello Kitty. Before today, most Kitty games came across as a cheap effort to extract more cash from that lucrative product, but Hello Kitty Island Adventure is different. This is a genuinely worthwhile use of your time, and the fact that it’s “free” but also free of microtransactions, thanks to being an Apple Arcade title, makes it all the sweeter.

It's surprising how this has come together to be a quite good game. Animal Crossing is clearly the model here, but Hello Kitty Island Adventure turns out to be a pretty peculiar game with a distinct identity.

It doesn’t have the depth of some similar simulations and I’m not sure it will have the staying power of an Animal Crossing game. It’s definitely a pleasant, simple simulation.

While not perfect, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is off to a solid start, offering some fresh ideas for the cozy genre with fan-favorite Sanrio characters.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure isn’t the be-all and end-all for a franchise aimed at girls, nor is it the crowning achievement in the sim game genre. It’s something smaller and sweeter. It’s another flashpoint in a summer that has already felt like a celebration of all things girly. Sure, Sanrio isn’t just for the girls, but that’s sort of the point. This game, along with Barbie, is here to say “Hey — all this girly stuff? Well, it’s cool as hell.”

Gameplay mechanics like this make Hello Kitty Island Adventure feel, occasionally, ridiculous, but no more than any other Animal Crossing offspring where you get to put talking animals in a sundress. My few hours with Island Adventure have been promising, and entertainingly instant-gratification. It so far seems simple and relaxing, a summer without any heatwaves, but with a cartoon dog that has a butthole.