Amber Isle

Genre: Management Simulation / Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Amber Isle, released in 2024 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2025, is a Management Simulation with some light Action-RPG elements that would best be described as a “Shop Management Simulation”, vaguely similar to games like Moonlighter and Marenian Tavern Story, albeit without the combat those two games feature, and with more of a focus on the social elements involved in maintaining relationships with your recurring customers.

The presentation here is mostly quite nice, with the game’s characters represented by anthropomorphic dinosaur people (complete with plenty of dino puns) with 3D character designs featuring some endearing animations, backed by a pleasant but forgettable soundtrack and joined by some slightly-unsettling gibberish sounds for character speech. It all mostly works for a unique and appealing presentation, though it’s undermined a bit by framerate hitches and ugly shadows.

The gameplay itself has some interesting ideas, taking shop management that feels very close to what we had in Moonlighter, but instead of fighting monsters to get your wares, you’re going out during the day and collecting it from a fairly open area with Farming Sim-style tools. This seems somewhat unnecessary, as there’s no clock you’re racing against and no stamina meter to be mindful of, reducing all of the resource collection to busywork with a crafting system on the end to tie it together. It works, but it feels like it’s reusing these elements from other games without really thinking through how they fit into the gameplay.

One other element that’s interesting is the game’s relationship system, that has you building up relationships with the game’s townsfolk who serve as your returning customers. Treat a customer well with a good price and you’ll earn less, but unlock bonuses and quests to get yourself more opportunities… or you can price-gouge them for more cold hard cash. Furthermore, different customers have different preferences, which can help you determine what to stock your shelves with.

While there are good mechanics in the background, I think this game has some serious issues closer to the surface. Despite the game being in 3D, there’s very little camera control, something that would have made it easier to see where you’re going in larger areas. The option to remove items from shelves is unclear, and there doesn’t appear to be any option I can find to remove shelves once they’re placed. When you go to the counter to see the shop menu, the text crawls slowly, but when you instinctively press the A button to skip through it, it selects the first option, to open the shop, whether you actually want to do so or not. No warning for this option you can’t undo, yet when you want to enter a doorway, you have to wait until a prompt appears and then wait some more to hold a button to select that prompt.

Because of these frustrations, it feels like Amber Isle’s development skipped over some important playtesting that would have drawn attention to these issues, and highlighted questionable design choices that detract from the overall experience. I do think this is overall still an enjoyable entry in the genre that offers players a decent no-combat alternative in the Shopkeeper Simulation space, but it definitely feels like this game could have used more time in development to work out some of the issues that keep it from reaching its full potential.

tl;dr – Amber Isle is a game that combines Management Simulation and some Action-RPG elements in a “Shopkeeper Sim”-style game set in a world of anthropomorphic dinosaur people. There are some interesting concepts here, with a customer relationship system that has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, some clunky menu controls and questionable design choices add a lot of unnecessary frustration and keep this game from reaching its full potential. Still, fans of the genre looking for a take on this genre without combat may find this game worth a look if they can get past these irritating issues.

Grade: B-

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