Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Online)

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

Hello Kitty Island Adventure, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2, is a game starring an assortment of beloved Sanrio-brand characters including the titular Hello Kitty, Chococat, Keropi, Retsuko, and so on, and I would categorize this as an Action-RPG, though both the “action” and “RPG” halves of that categorization are pretty light. I’ve seen others compare this game to the Animal Crossing series, and while there are similarities, there are differences too. However, I think the comparison does at least get you thinking in the right general direction, and in any case, this is definitely a game that has “cozy game” written all over it.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure starts with your custom-made anthropomorphic animal character on a plane with a dozen or so of these characters headed for an island getaway complete with a theme park, and after a short chat with Hello Kitty herself, the plane’s cake-making machine goes haywire leading all of the passengers to decide to jump out of the plane using bundles of balloons to break their fall. Yeah, I guess in this world planes have cake machines and skydiving out of a plane without a parachute is universally-agreed to be preferable to risking getting splatted with flying cakes.

Upon landing on the island, the plane’s occupants find themselves in an island resort suffering significant disrepair, and set about making themselves at home while gradually repairing the busted facilities. Players will join them, helping the various Sanrio characters in ways that generally involve collecting items or performing simple tasks. Over time, the game gradually opens up and more of these tasks become available, ranging from foraging for items to photography to collecting small animals to place in a wildlife preserve to baking to interior decoration.

At this point, this is sounding a lot like Animal Crossing: Hello Kitty Edition, but there are distinct differences too. While decorating is one of the activities here, it’s nowhere near as prominent as it is in Animal Crossing, and far more noteworthy is the fairly large island area to explore, with players able to clamber up steep inclines with a stamina meter and float down on balloons in a way that vaguely resembles The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There are various challenges sprinkled across the island that let you race to collect items on a pre-determined path as a timer ticks down, or solve simple puzzles. Suffice it to say, there’s quite a lot to do here.

That said, I feel like this game suffers a bit from a lack of an overarching goal of any kind – where Animal Crossing has you overall aiming to eliminate your debt to Tom Nook, here you’re presented with a bunch of tasks, none of which is given more importance than the others. There’s also improving relationships with the Sanrio characters by giving them gifts, but as they always respond to getting gifts by giving other gifts, it’s hard to feel like you’ve accomplished much beyond exchanging one in-game item for another without much of a point.

There are other frustrations here as well. The walking speed is a bit too slow. Sometimes parts of the game will be locked off from the player, such as unusable ziplines and boarded-up cabins, until they speak to the right character or complete the right goal, without any clear idea what that is. And sometimes you’ll be tasked with getting an item without any clear idea where it can be found.

The presentation is overall quite good, with appealing, colorful 3D visuals that look nice even if they don’t seem especially impressive in any way, with lots of nice detail in its textures. I did notice a bit of pop-in and occasional moments where the framerate hitched for a moment when loading a new area, but overall, this game looks pretty polished.

However, I think the visuals may well be outdone by the soundtrack, which is wonderfully lighthearted in tone, with a great mix of instrumental elements and acapella voice, with an overall great island vibe to many of the themes, though you also have themes for other areas that suit those settings. Some noteworthy songs including the Title Theme, Surfside Sunrise, Resort Roundabout, Clues on the Beach, Reef Revival, . This is exactly the sort of soundtrack you look for in a nice “Cozy game”.

Overall, I think Hello Kitty Island Adventure’s lack of focus and lack of clear indication how to accomplish some of its goals keep it from reaching the same heights as the likes of Animal Crossing, but this is nevertheless a satisfying, relaxing game that does a great job giving players something similar yet distinctly different within the world of Sanrio’s characters. If this is a genre you particularly enjoy, or especially if you’re wanting to enjoy a nice cozy island getaway with Hello Kitty and friends, I do not think you will be disappointed with Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

tl;dr – Hello Kitty Island Adventure is an Action-RPG starring Sanrio’s famous cast of loveable characters that’s light on the action and RPG elements, but rather delivers an experience that somewhat resembles the Animal Crossing games, while placing a bigger emphasis on exploring a large island area and helping other characters with various tasks. The lack of focus and direction here keeps this game from reaching the same highs as Animal Crossing, but overall this is a wonderful “Cozy Game” that fans of this sort of game will delight in, especially if they also enjoy Sanrio’s characters.

Grade: B+

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Hello Kitty Island Adventure – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Online)

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Review:

Well before Animal Crossing: New Horizons received its own Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, Hello Kitty Island Adventure got one of its own, with owners of the Nintendo Switch release of the game able to upgrade for $10. Let’s have a look and see what it includes!

The eShop page for the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of this game boasts improved framerates and resolutions, and these are both noticeable upon firing up this version of the game, especially the improvements to the framerates, which are much smoother and more fluid here. However, this version doesn’t fix everything from the Nintendo Switch version – we still have noticeable pop-in in places, and there’s still that brief stutter as you move into a new area and the game takes a moment to load it.

This release also makes use of two of Nintendo Switch 2’s features, CameraPlay and Mouse Mode. The former’s use is primarily for multiplayer, but the latter is used throughout the game. You can use Mouse Mode to select things in menus or to place objects in your home once you get it, but you can also use it pretty much any time to select parts of the interface to interact with them directly, or even to control your character using an on-screen directional input. I’ll say this is definitely not what I would consider an ideal way to play this game, but it’s cool that it’s included all the same.

In addition to this, we see improvements to loading times. On Nintendo Switch, it took me 17 seconds to load to the main menu, one minute ten seconds to load into the game, and another 5 seconds to move into doorways into shops and homes. On Nintendo Switch 2, those times were cut down to 9 seconds, 28 seconds, and 2 seconds, a significant reduction that should save players a lot of waiting as they play the game – in particular, cutting 3 seconds off of every time you enter a doorway might not seem like much, but over the course of the game’s long campaign, it’ll surely add up to quite a lot.

However, in the end, I’m not sure if all of this is worth $10. The graphics and performance boost is definitely noticeable, but not a night-and-day difference, and this upgrade doesn’t add any new content or must-have features, even if it does add a few features that are nice additions. If you already own the game on Nintendo Switch and want to play it on Nintendo Switch 2, it may be worth your while to get it just based on how much you’ll likely be playing this game, but that doesn’t make the price seem any less bloated.

tl;dr – Hello Kitty Island Adventure is an Action-RPG starring Sanrio’s famous cast of loveable characters that’s light on the action and RPG elements, but rather delivers an experience that somewhat resembles the Animal Crossing games, while placing a bigger emphasis on exploring a large island area and helping other characters with various tasks. The lack of focus and direction here keeps this game from reaching the same highs as Animal Crossing, but overall this is a wonderful “Cozy Game” that fans of this sort of game will delight in, especially if they also enjoy Sanrio’s characters.

Grade: B+

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