Starsand Island Review (PS5)

After a long wait since our preview last year, Starsand Island is finally here.

This cosy life simulator with its gorgeous anime-style art direction sends you to a magical island where you are free to explore, build, craft and farm to your heart's content.

The game begins with designing your character and I enjoyed taking the time to create a design that resonated with me. You can play as either a male or female, and there is initially a good number of options for hairstyles, eye shapes, and clothing. You can also freely adjust the colour of your hair and eyes to create a unique character that fits into the wider world.

The game clearly takes inspiration from titles such as Stardew Valley, Palia, and My Time at Portia, but has its own unique mix of farming, complex house building, platforming, and even light combat.

The bulk of the game is based around the five careers you can pursue, which are crafting, farming, ranching, fishing, and exploration. Although it's implied you can choose one career and ignore the others, you'll often find that their requirements overlap as they progress, meaning you'll probably end up dabbling in all of them.

Crafting is probably the most general career and involves following increasingly complicated recipes to create items you can sell at a good profit. There are a lot of different workbenches you need to place and manage to do this from the get-go, and I found it frustrating to arrange them all in a location I found aesthetically pleasing.

Farming is much like most games in the genre: plant, wait, then harvest. As the career progresses you can also build trellises and eventually crossbreed to get unique varieties. Ranching is similar but involves looking after the needs of your animals rather than plants.

The fishing career is also like other games: cast the line in front of a fish’s shadow and reel it in. I did enjoy the reel-in mechanics; they aren’t complicated of course but it did feel satisfying.

Exploration is probably the most unique of the careers and involves going into a different dimension called the Moonlit Forest.

This area contains basic puzzles and platforming and some simple combat which gets progressively more challenging the further you venture in. You'll have to visit this place often for crafting materials even if you're not interested in the exploration career.

Other than the careers, the other main activity you will probably spend the most time on is designing your character’s house and grounds. As I mentioned when I first previewed the game, I was surprised and impressed by the amount of customisation the game lets you do with buildings.

You can place individual wall, floor, and roof parts like building blocks and change the exterior to look like anything you want. You can build off grid to precisely place objects where you want them, and objects are allowed to clip through each other to make unique designs like Planet Coaster.

The controls are where this building system fell apart a bit for me, though.

Just trying to expand the starting house to make the room bigger was a much more difficult project than I expected, as each building piece needed to be picked up and altered individually. Even worse I couldn’t find a snap to grid function which made placing each piece by eye a tedious and frustrating process.

While I personally struggled with the controls, I can imagine some players being fully invested in this system. The extensive customisation allows players to perhaps spend most of their playtime building rather than anything else as some Sims 4 players do.

When you’re not building or grinding a career goal you will be spending most of your time exploring and living in Starsand Island.

The Island feels big enough and has delightful town areas full of shops and things to see. You can buy new crafting patterns and farm supplies from shops, you can stop by the café for a drink, or you can simply sit on a bench and absorb your surroundings. You can have a romantic relationship with most of the named npcs after earning their affection through giving them gifts.

There is a large variety of vehicles to help you get around faster, including cars, mopeds, and roller skates. The skateboard you get early in the crafting career feels fun to zip around on.

I did find the physics (or lack thereof) of most vehicles rather unimmersive, though. The skateboard, for example, goes at the same speed both uphill and downhill and you can even skate directly up steps. Likewise, if your moped accidently crashes into a pedestrian nothing happens. Now I wasn’t expecting GTA here, but it would have been much better if the NPCs at least tried to jump out the way or wave a fist at you.

The vehicle issues are part of what I feel is an unfortunate general lack of polish with the game. A lot of the areas on the island feel empty with few NPCs around and there is also no road traffic at all which I felt gives the game this weird liminal quality. I didn’t encounter any game breaking bugs but NPCs would occasionally glitch through walls or furniture.