Starsand Island

won't let me refund it bc i bought it back in feb, but this whole dev cycle has been a complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. so many broken promises and lies. literally don't even bother with this game unless its on sale for like, a couple bucks. that's all it's worth. a couple bucks.

I am someone who played during early access and had high hopes for this game. I followed the official discord to keep up to date on all the updates and announcements. The main reason that drew me to this game was the advertised dating and cinematic scenes. The NPCs seemed charming and full of life and personality. Personally, I love cozy games with the relationship aspect (ex: Fields of Mistria, My Time at Sandrock, Story of Seasons). Seeing the official steam page to this game, I was immediately hooked and bought the game in early access having believed the ads. There were a lot of bugs, but the devs seemed very responsive at first, even putting out updates on a weekly basis. It was great to see progress coming from them often. The building was my favorite part of the game. But it wasn't enough, and the NPCs really killed the game for me. They repeated the same lines over and over on a daily basis and didn't have any character development, the romance was not there at all. The cut scenes were a mess and half of them didn't really make much sense. The dialogue is bland and pretty boring. This isn't at all what was advertised on the steam page. Still, I figured that because the game was in early access, that the devs would be working out the issues. I stopped playing and decided to wait for the 1.0 release. Fast forward a few months later, and the game releases. To say I'm disappointed in the game and the devs is an understatement. This game is the definition of false advertising. It doesn't seem as though they took any advice to change the lifeless NPCs. They didn't fix the move in bugs or the dialogue, and the romance is more platonic friendship with no real development. They also removed Youfang as a romance option, which is a shame because he was one of my favorites. The full release was very underwhelming, though some may still enjoy this game. I would recommend this game to anyone that doesn't care much about NPC interaction or storyline. If you like building, pretty clothes and environments, you'd probably like this game. But if you go into this game expecting the romance and NPCs to be as great as they were advertised, then you'll be left as disappointed like I was. I will admit that I thought the building in this game is very fun. I spent many hours building and farming. But in my opinion, it's not enough for me to support this company in the future, especially when there are much better games to spend my money on.

I had hopes for this game to become something good. Even when I first played it, I could feel how empty it was, the lack of care towards the character writing or the supposed 'story'. You know it's bad when I played just 7 hours and thought, 'I'll wait for some updates and hope it gets better.' But it didn't get better. In fact, there has been practically nothing added in terms of content since it first came out in Early Access. And in actuality, some content has even been REMOVED since the start of Early Access. I've also seen people say that there's a good bit of generative AI used in the game, which is not disclosed, and I did get that feeling when playing it. Some of the assets and art just feel strange, to a suspicious degree. Hopefully, Steam will do something against them, as this is against their rules (AI use without disclosure to customers). As for me, I have put in a refund request detailing reasons that the game has failed to deliver on it's promises and deceived the community.

This game has so much potential but they keep ruining it. they even dare to launch 1.0 version with a small update multiplayer mode and one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ festival. how could you call that a proper update for the full game? don't even bother to fix those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ soulless NPC that clearly wrote the whole damn script by AI. shame.

I very rarely leave reviews but yeah, listen to all the other negative reviews. The 1.0 release is disappointing and frankly I 100% believe they just released it like this so they won't have to issue refunds to their donors/patrons at Kickstarter. It's a loophole because they "released" the game and contractually they fulfilled their obligations, even if the game the released is barebones. It's kind of the same thing with what happened with Ashes of Creation. Personally I couldn't complain much. I bought the game on sale (not the "release sale" but much lower) and got 100 hours off it. I enjoyed the game and it kept me entertained for a while. I stopped playing because I couldn't solve the FPS drop issue after my house and farm is now extensively developed and have so much assets within my space. The game couldn't handle that much, which is really disappointing. I definitely wouldn't recommend anyone else to buy this game as it is now. Take your money elsewhere, there's much more other farming/life sim games worth buying

Me gustó el juego, pero gustaría mas si estuviera en español, así entender un poco mas de la trama.

The game is unfinished. Shallow Dating System: The hyped-up dynamic relationships are completely missing. NPC dialogue is paper-thin, and dates are literally reduced to a lazy fade-to-black screen. No Marriage Feature: For a cozy life sim, having zero marriage mechanics completely destroys the long-term endgame. Building intimacy and gifting NPCs feels entirely pointless.

Thank you for teaching me to never trust EA again ^^