One day the well of dead videogame granddads with overgrown plots of farmland will dry up, but today is not that day. Starsand Island is full of those fuzzy cosy farming sim familiarities,. Despite it doing almost nothing new, I “one more’d” myself through all 10 days of its extended press demo anyway.
Starsand Island reminds me a whole lot of the Rune Factory games—janky 3D animations galore, anime art out the wazoo but with a charming Eastern vibe that makes me overlook the weirdness that seems to inevitably come from adding a third dimension to farming sims these days.
I was given a map, a rickety small farm, and a whole lotta freedom from minute one which was mighty refreshing. No going around introducing myself to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the island. There’s just a bit of hand-holding with some introductory quests, and the encouragement to go and become certified in a number of professions.
These professions cover the standard go-to farming sim stuff: farming, exploration, crafting, fishing, and ranching. Each one is headed up by a mentor—and oh, god dammit, I’m going around the island introducing myself to everybody without even realising. That’s how they get ya!
Completing quests for mentors unlocks new blueprints and shop items that I can take advantage of to snag rarer materials or items to make everyday farming life a bit easier. The characters themselves are, currently, not much to write home about. That’s thanks to the fact that Seed Lab is currently using machine translation for its non-Chinese dialogue—a tactic that I’m choosing to overlook in the spirit of getting this prototype in front of more eyes, but one I strongly hope the developer to ditch in favour of proper human-crafted localisation for the full release.
Bland, questionable dialogue aside, Starsand Island was an absolute time-sucker. I always had a quest to do, a cave to explore, or a harvest to sell. And when I wasn’t doing those things, I was rearranging and adding new pieces of furniture to my house or industrial-scale tools around my farm.
Sow fun
It’s almost too easy to be constantly crafting new things, because Starsand Island does something that some farming sims frustratingly overlook—it lets me craft out of chests from anywhere. I was deep in forest exploration before realising that I needed an upgraded tool to go further.
In some games that would be traipsing back to my farm and stored materials, killing the flow I’d so successfully cultivated. But Starsand Island handily dots crafting tables around checkpoints, and walking over to one gave me access to all my materials back home. One upgraded pickaxe later and I was able to continue just mere steps away from where I had hit the initial roadblock. A small quality-of-life feature on paper but one that feels huge in practice.
I will say that I found it difficult to stop and take everything in and embrace the cosy, in part due to the limited demo. But also because—despite its emphasis on slow living—days in Starsand Island seem to whizz by. And as we all know, if you’re not tucked up in bed by 2am you will pass out on the spot. Cardinal farming sim rule.
I would have appreciated the days going by just a tad slower, if not to save me the devastation of landing myself outside a shop right at closing, watching the doors slam shut on me as the NPC I need to talk to gets locked away from my reach until I go find ’em the next day.
It’s perhaps a blessing that Starsand Island has limited me to 10 short-feeling in-game days though, because I could already feel that cosy winter lure of wasting all of my real free time planting crops, feeding animals, and rizzing up shopkeepers.
It’s got a strange charm to it despite lacking anything particularly distinctive artistically, mechanically, or narratively. But maybe that’s exactly what I need right now. A warm, familiar hug wrapped up in pickaxes, felled trees, and tilled soil.
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