Sunseed Island

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG / Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Sunseed Island is a family friendly Top-Down Action-RPG and Management Simulation in the “Farming RPG” style of game pioneered by the Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons games, and later popularized by Stardew Valley. Released in 2025 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, Sunseed Island aims to bring a different angle to the formula by focusing on a story that has players seeking to rebuild a lost utopia.

Probably the most unique thing this game does is its odd story about a tree assigning people careers by… either sticking a symbol pertaining to that job on their head or birthing them with said symbol on their head, it’s not quite clear. All characters in the game are cartoony anthropomorphic animals with symbols sticking out of their head, with the player taking the role of a cat with a sun sticking out of his head… I guess to represent how his role is to bring a new day to this island… or something.

The game uses a simple cartoony 2D style with unimpressive animation, and I’m not a big fan, especially with the way your main character’s plastered-on smile seems straight out of The Stepford Wives. Creepy. Plus, the odd plants seem to have been drawn by someone who has absolutely no idea what the actual plants look like, only the fruit or vegetable they produce, which leads to some really alien-looking plant designs. Again, creepy. This is backed by a repetitive instrumental soundtrack that I quickly grew tired of.

One thing I appreciate with Sunseed Island is how straightforward and user-friendly the game is, with everything being pretty context-sensitive to use and its function straightforward. For example, the woodcutter and blacksmith’s shop menus just show the resource required and then have an arrow pointing to the resource produced, something that couldn’t be more straightforward. And chopping trees, breaking rocks, and farming all have you automatically reaching for the correct tool when pressing the A button.

I also really appreciate the focus on building back up the island, something that helps to set this game apart from many others in the genre. Each of the island’s shops and important buildings is broken down, with a recipe showing exactly what materials (and money) are needed to repair it, and this seems to be the central focus of the game. And with each new building, your ability to create new materials expands.

The problem is that progress in this game is absolutely glacial. Materials take so long to craft that you’re usually better off just coming back the next in-game day to retrieve them, and Sunseed Island is so stingy with its stamina that even just watering a plant takes up 1/20th of your energy, and your starting watering can is only able to water four plants before needing to be refilled (which also takes energy). If you’ve ever played one of the other “farming RPG” games I mentioned above, just picture only being able to water 20 plants before you were too drained to continue for a day, and that process involved walking back and forth from the garden to the well a half-dozen times. Ugh.

Oh, and on that note, despite that this is a “Farming RPG”, don’t expect to do much farming right away – there’s no farm supplies store, and no clear indication of where to get seeds. You just have to wander around and hope you stumble on one of the treasure chests that randomly populate sometimes and hope there are seeds in them. And “wandering” isn’t exactly fun either – even your run speed in this game is still pretty slow.

It’s also frustrating that as user-friendly as the game generally is, progress is gated by a lack of access to materials that are needed to rebuild some buildings but don’t appear to be accessible at first, and it’s not clear how to get them either – the best you can do is keep filling requests for townsfolk in hopes that you stumble upon what you need.

Oh, speaking of the townsfolk, don’t expect anything quite so dynamic as you usually get in this genre – while these characters do have distinct personalities, they pretty much just stay in their assigned shops, and you don’t even speak with them directly as they wander around in the shops – you can only speak to them from the register. Plus, while there is a day/night cycle, there’s no calendar, no events, no relationship system… a lot of the stuff people tend to expect from this genre is missing here.

While I do think Sunseed Island does get some things right, it also gets far too many things about the “Farming RPG” genre wrong. And as it is normally priced at just $4 less than Stardew Valley, it’s really difficult to recommend this game when the current king of the genre doesn’t cost much more, and honestly even when this game goes on sale I don’t see it as very appealing when it just makes me think I’d rather be playing one of the better games in this genre. I recommend you do that instead.

tl;dr – Sunseed Island is a family friendly Top-Down Action-RPG and Management Simulation in the “Farming RPG” style, set in a world of anthropomorphic creatures who have a symbol representing their job literally growing out of their heads. This game does a few interesting things with the genre, but progression is so slow and plodding, and player options are so constrained, that it’s hard to recommend over the better options available in this genre.

Grade: C-

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