Starsand Island

I definitely can't recommend this game anymore... undisclosed gen AI use after promising no AI use and the addition of an AI modding tool has soured me on this game. prior to becoming aware of this I would have said the game is a fine, but ultimately not exciting farming sim that has some things I like and some things I don't... but was a playable enough experience that I was planning to try for all of the achievements whenever I felt like spending the several minutes it took to load the game up (as it clearly doesn't play nice with an older computer, worse than any game I've bought recently). now I'm just uninstalling and wishing I never bought it.

A lot of false advertising, the relationships and story are almost nonexistent. It's mostly a chore simulator. There's been a lot of smoke and mirrors, and avoidance from the team, so I highly recommend not getting it in EA. They've been breaking trust and their word since the KS, so I would urge those considering the game to wait until full-release to see if they actually make the game that they're saying they will.

despite a lot of the drama and unmet promises of the game, I still loved it and bought it. but i cant rec this to anyone. they promised no paid content, while there are multiple paid DLCs already. the dating they added is a joke. there is almost no romance at all in this game, all you really do is farm the same interactions everyday for what? a dating scene? no in game interactions, none of the lovers have any life put into their interactions. the game becomes bare bones late game, where you do the same tasks over and over to build, while building is very scuffed and every tiny plant counts as a item. since the release of EA there has been almost no good new content, or nothing to speak about. I find myself extremely bored with little hope. the dating update was meant to be this big cool update which is what i was waiting on, and it was a MASSIVE let down. dont waste your time until he full game comes out at least, but still the price is not worth it for EA or full game. over priced and greedy devs.

If you're familiar with the My Time games, a lot of what you see in Starsand Island will look familiar to you, and that's discounting the direct cameos from those games that show up here. The processing-crafting-building gameplay loop is present, light exploration and combat add some secondary objectives, and of course you have the small picturesque town with 10-14 single men and women as is required in every farming-style sim game. But as indebted as this game is to the My Time series, it compares unfavorably in just about every respect. From quest design to world layout to character writing, the game lacks the ambition and execution that distinguish the truly great games, and for $30 its Early Access status is no excuse. The setup is familiar to fans of the genre, with the city-wearied player character showing up in the titular village to get a fresh start in their life. A conveniently abandoned and disproportionately large plot of land at the edge of town is yours for the taking, and it's on you to build your farm/factory into working shape. One interesting wrinkle here is that the PC grew up in Starsand Island, and many of the named characters already know you and treat you as an established friend. Granted, you're starting at 0/5 friendship hearts with everyone regardless, but it's still a good enough explanation for everyone gifting you animal feed and hundreds of gold from day one. That's as intriguing as this game's setting gets, however. Where series like My Time or Rune Factory have a strong narrative hook to establish your presence in the town, this one keeps story elements light. You're back in town, you can build, you can farm, you can flirt -- what more do you need? It's somewhat in the vein of Story of Seasons in that regard, though SoS generally feels more lively than what you get here. The main goal thus far is completing your five certifications in the game's main systems -- crafting, exploration, farming, and so on. Each layer of these quests builds on what you did before and ask you to construct more advanced machines and explore further in the game's singular dungeon to complete them. The quests are structured well in guiding you through the advanced mechanics of the game, but the setup for them is pretty bland, basically amounting to, "Complete these arbitrary tasks to get another stamp on your certification card." The daily fetch quests function as expected, and are the main reason you'll be producing things at your homestead. Again, the workshop gameplay is broadly similar to My Time, in that you move from raw materials to processed components to finished products, ready to use yourself or hand over to quest givers. Interface stuff here is still a bit sloppy and slow, which hopefully will be improved over the course of the early access period. Using your machines is finicky -- you'd do well to space them out a bit to avoid constantly interacting with, say, the cutter when you were actually checking on the furnace next to it. Farm animals are touchier yet, with so many interactions from brushing to shearing to milking tied to the same keys, and the animals wander around and get in your way constantly. Like a busy and poorly-coded website, you think you're clicking on a chicken until a darned sheep steps into view and steals your focus away. Animations for animal care sometimes take a second or more to load and cause your character to warp/snap into position awkwardly, but again that may be refined over the next few months. Outside of the workshop, the village occupies much of the map, along with a hilly section containing several Chinese temples, with wooded areas filling in the gaps. The town looks pretty nice, with pleasant Mediterranean blues and greens throughout, and its layout isn't too confusing -- you'll quickly learn to avoid the pathways to the riverwalk when you actually need to cross the bridge just up the road. The whole island has that off-brand Ghibli look that's popular with a lot of so-called "cozy" games, and it looks fine. The main issue is how far away everything is from each other, without a lot to do in between. The fishery/aquarium/whatever is well out of the way from where I'd normally need to go, at the end of a beach that just has some minor marine life to forage, so that ended up being a bit of a grumble when I would pick up fetch quests that led me there. That's still not a bad as quests leading to the monk in the temple at the top of the hill, though. Thank God for the upgraded skateboard allowing me to plow through that area before sunset. On an absolute scale the world is probably not actually that big, but there are so few interesting landmarks or things to do that traversing it is a bit of a drag. Rough edges like these are forgivable in my book if the characters and writing are high quality, but that's not the case here. Sadly, it's probably the biggest downfall of the game. There is not a single character whose name or face I can remember after almost 30 hours of gameplay; it might be the worst instance of Same Face Syndrome I've seen in a game. It wasn't until my last play session that I realized that there were actually two "tough cool chick" characters instead of one that sometimes took off her jacket. (OK, maybe that one is on me.) Characters have little in their dialogue to set them apart, with all of them having basically the same generic vocabulary and "voice." One of the first characters you meet is the woman tending the general store, and she's of that tiresome "very meek and c-constantly s-stuttering but is also good at tech stuff" archetype that is omnipresent and entirely without originality. Hilariously, she's the only one with something resembling a distinct voice by virtue of her vocal tics. Everyone else could have their dialogue shuffled at random and you'd have no way of telling the difference. That's the main problem with Starsand Island -- the whole thing has this layer of generic blandness that brings down the parts of the game that show promise. There's no in-game reason to do quests other than someone said you should; nothing is changed by breeding a four-trait chicken other than the nice farmer lady gives you an attaboy and another stamp in your job book. There's one early quest that has you help fix a dock and that's the extent of world reactivity on display. I haven't mentioned the mining/combat dungeon but it's so short and basic that there's really not much to write about it. Combat might as well have been cut for how sporadic and challenge-free it is. Whatever merits may exist in the writing is covered up with ChatGPT junk.* It looks nice enough but lacks the ambition to do more than imitate better games. It is strictly inferior to even the early Early Access versions of Sandrock, which despite barely functioning at that point had obvious charm and style. This is, at its best, a passable "one of these" games, which is not a game I'd recommend to others. *(This game allegedly doesn't use AI, but I call BS on that. The writing absolutely stinks of LLM use, from its mind-numbing genericness to its overuse of em dashes. I saw a couple instances of "It's not just X—it's Y" sentence structure used, which I would expect to see approximately zero times if the words were written by a human. If it's not written by AI, it's someone doing a damn good imitation.)

首发EA阶段抢先开玩，忍耐了你们无数个BUG， 近期在B站每次提问，都删我评论或者直接无视， 然后去回一些不知所谓的评论， 那些评论就好像你们花钱买来的黑幕演员一样。 行，你不回评论和私信也罢了。 进你们官群提问，管理各个也是不理人。 然后完全没按照你们的流程发布游戏， 反而做这种不明就里的蓝图装饰活动， 你们B站社区号说好的5月份创意工坊6月份联机功能， 直到今天哪一个都没兑现。 优化是一点都没有的，拿着手游的思路运营个买断制单机游戏 又称休闲游戏，又啥都得要时间等，手册成就，材料也多的不行还杂乱， 前期累得要死，后期一点事都没有，比上班还累。 懒得喷了， 你老冯真的是死了。

undisclosed ai, tencent backing. not an indie studio. kickstarter was a success, scammed tons of people who STILL haven't gotten their keys. the day 1 dlc is $20 for a recolored $100 kickstarter tier outfit. idk. just not a good look. if you don't mind that, then i can say i also dont care for the gameplay. sure it sucks you in right away, but the market for farming life sims is SOOO busy. the one thing it really offers that's different from most is the progression system you have to do "trials" to get to one tier to the next. like grown gigantic crops to reach the next tier's unlockable items that include saplings and other things. the trials aren't hard, but some are season-locked so you'd have to wait for a greenhouse (which i think is unlockable, not in base play) or wait til next year. it's best to grind it all out immediately if you want the content all at once. but you WILL get burnt out. (unless u have the stamina to play for 10s of hours for it) so i don't recommend due to crappy practices and lies. i also don't recommend for the gameplay. for these types of games i usually have 100s of hours in them. but this one is just... not there. even 1.0 has no content. GG

I have never seen devs work so hard to update a game and be there for the community, holy moly. I don't understand the discourse. A lot of people like to be mad about stuff, but from an objective standpoint, just look at all the update announcements on the page since the game came out. Some of them are HUNDREDS of items long, and the second they hear about a bug, they're off fixing it. It's actually inspiring, and makes you have hope for games like this that tend to get dropped. Also they wanted to extend the Steam sale for the game since it's still early access, but Steam has a time limit. What'd they do? Created a tiny "furniture pack" which basically lets you bundle the game for the sale price to get around it so that people can enjoy their game at the Early Access price still. If you already have it? Cool, enjoy a handful of furniture for I think literally $1 CAD. Yet people are getting angry about it still. I'll never understand it. --- The game itself? It's good. I mean REALLY good. I'm a sucker for QoL things in games and it's always what I look for in reviews for these types of games. It's got everything: you get mounts right away, building is like if you modded the Sims (it still needs some tweaking but I'm shocked that you can mess around on basically any axis), tools don't need to be repaired, breeding animals is really cool and fun with some wild looking variants. NPCs look fantastic and ACTUALLY look all different ages so as a middle-aged woman I can actually pursue the adult looking ones and not feel weirded out. I also hate mining in every game ever, and this one actually makes it SUPER fun. So mega bonus there too. Nothing feels like a slog, it's all just seamless progression that feels so satisfying. Also good lord the amount of furniture and cosmetics. Again, huge sucker for games that let me do this endlessly, and they're all REALLY pretty. Is there bugs? Yeah, it's EA. But there's a CRAZY amount to do in this game from the get-go and I'm shocked at how much I enjoy this. When I played the demo back at the Next Fest when they debuted it, I had my doubts. But these guys are on the ball and when you play this game, it's so obvious how much love they've put into it.

It’s understandable for the game to feel unfinished during Early Access. What’s disappointing is that even the full release feels just as incomplete, since there’s barely anything meaningfully new. them emphasizing that they’re a "small indie developer" to gain goodwill from the playerbase is just pathetic. Being a "small indie studio" is not an excuse for releasing an unfinished mess of a game. The trademark "Starsand Island" is registered to Zhuhai Kingsoft Digital Network Technology Co., Ltd. not "Seed Sparkle Lab" that means the legal ownership of the IP belongs to Kingsoft. Kingsoft, is a multibillion dollar corporation generating over $1.4 billion in annual revenue and employing more than 8,000 people worldwide. Given those resources, calling yourselves a “small indie developer” feels disingenuous.

*I will edit this review if the issue is addressed.* I invested a significant amount of money into this game during the Kickstarter campaign, and I still remain hopeful that the English translation will improve. That being said, the current dialogue is, unfortunately, making it very difficult to stay immersed and emotionally invested in the gameplay. I will also add that I intentionally waited a few months before trying the game, despite being genuinely excited for it, because I wanted to give the developers more time to release updates and improvements. Because of that, the current state of the dialogue and localization feels even more disappointing. In life simulators like this, the characters who inhabit the world are incredibly important. Games such as Fields of Mistria, My Time at Sandrock, and Stardew Valley do an excellent job of fleshing out their characters and creating meaningful, natural interactions. By comparison, the current dialogue in this game feels choppy, awkward, and often unintentionally unsettling. For example, NPC's frequently refer to the player in the third person, with lines such as, “Is (player's name) feeling happy?” This feels unnatural and eerie rather than charming or immersive. To the developers: please consider investing significantly more time and resources into the English translation, localization, and voice acting. Strong characters and believable dialogue are essential in a life simulation game. Beautiful visuals are wonderful, but they cannot carry the experience on their own if the writing does not allow players to connect with the world and its characters.