Hello Kitty Island Adventure is for Animal Crossing fans with wanderlust

polygon.com:

After seeing Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie and playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure last weekend, I have to wonder: Is it cool to be a girl again? But actually. We’ve gotten glittering pop tracks featuring Power Puff Girl-inspired visuals from NewJeans and Gerwig’s movie has been released to theaters to seemingly universal fanfare and pink. Now, fans of mobile games get a little cherry on top: a social sim featuring Sanrio’s cast of characters. The summer of 2023 has been a great season for media aimed at women and girls.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure – not to be confused with the fictional game from South Park – is a social sim from developer Sunblink (Heroish). One part A Short Hike and another part Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Island Adventure focuses on the usual sim-game attractions of collecting items, crafting, and baking, but also goes hard on exploration by allowing me to climb and glide anywhere. It’s being published by Apple Arcade, where it will remain locked behind Apple’s subscription for the time being. While it’s compatible with a controller, I reviewed the game on a fifth-generation iPad Air and stuck to the regular touch controls.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure kicks off with a fever dream in which a veritable who’s who of Sanrio characters jump out of an airplane mid-flight after an onboard cake-baking catastrophe. I, and others like Hello Kitty, Kuromi, Badtz-maru, and Keroppi, all leap from the emergency exit, and soon the sky above the island is peppered with big-eyed puppies, bunnies, and more floating down as they hold onto bundles of party balloons. We land, and the real challenge begins: It’s up to me — an unnamed cutesy cat character I designed myself — to find everyone scattered across the