With the release of Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town today, I can’t help but feel like Sunblink’s charming, cozy game/life sim has made it to the proverbial Big City. Like the protagonist in a coming-of-age story, that vibrant little game, which started as a rare exclusive for Apple Arcade (before popping up everywhere else), is poised to stand with the other titans of the genre.
Despite having absolutely zero initiation in the world of Sanrio’s cheery mascots (and only the giggle-worthy association with a South Park joke from twenty years ago), I found the base game to be surprisingly fun to explore upon its initial release. At the time, Apple Arcade didn’t have much in the way of killer apps, and Hello Kitty Island Adventure proved to be more “adventure” than “cozy.” Once out in the wider ocean of console games, it still shone, but had much stiffer competition.
While it’s somewhat unfortunate that it’s arriving in the wake of the phenomenon that is Pokémon Pokopia, the Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town DLC is a massive expansion that helps elevate the entire game, positioning Hello Kitty Island Adventure to truly stand alongside the titans of its ever-growing genre. Virtually everything that was promising about this game before is enriched in its new urban environments.
In this expansion, your avatar and Hello Kitty’s crew discover a brand new environment beyond the island: a sprawling metropolis, waiting to be explored and revitalized. Here they meet Usahana, a new addition to the Sanrio roster, who becomes a guide of sorts to this new frontier.
“Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town keeps the ‘adventure’ in Island Adventure, with a hefty amount of new ground to explore.”
Though the environment is very new, Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town doesn’t reinvent Island Adventure‘s wheel: interacting with the other villagers and raising their friendship levels unlocks new sections of the overarching story and further features. With the new area comes a new library of critters to catch, a slew of new platforming races, and (perhaps most importantly) more Gudetama cameos to capture on film.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town keeps the ‘adventure’ in Island Adventure, with a hefty amount of new ground to explore. Doing parkour and climbing the skyscrapers was an immediate draw, thanks to challenges and barely visible pickups that lure players to explore the fringes of the area. Later on, though, the sewer environment was remarkably robust with an array of stimulating puzzles, elevating one of the base game’s best surprises.
One of the first features Usahana will unlock is the new Imagination Cafe, where players can cook up a smorgasbord of new recipes like mochi, dango, sushi, ramen, and boba. Upgrading her friendship gradually unlocks these recipes and expands the cafe’s offerings, which enriches the associated minigame, where the player can open for business and take villagers’ requests for custom culinary creations. Matching the requests to the ingredients at hand was a pretty fun pastime, and seeing the cafe upgrade gradually was a worthwhile reward.
“For longtime players or those who only dabbled in it before, however, Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town is a sensational expansion—adding new layers to the proverbial cake.”
Progressing through the new facility and friendship levels peels back the many layers of Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town‘s new content, and helps the city itself truly come alive. The Imagination Cafe is only the tip of the iceberg; many new shops wait to be unlocked, like Pekkle’s music store or My Sweet Piano’s “Plush Pals,” like an in-game Build-A-Bear.
A lot of the new content revolves around customization, which is sure to please many players—especially the new options for tweaking the avatar’s appearance, or the apartment complex. Between unlocking these options and pursuing over 90 new quests, Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town is always dangling some shiny new morsel in front of our eyes.
While there’s an embarrassment of riches here in terms of things to unlock and tweak, some of the core things that I didn’t love about Hello Kitty Island Adventure still lurk beneath City Town‘s streets. Early on, there’s a lot of back-and-forth between the city and the larger island, usually revolving around fetch quests to seek out a certain character and bring them to another location. Fast-travelling mailboxes are sufficiently scattered through the city, but having to zip back and forth so often and immediately sapped some of the momentum from exploring the new streets.
The same can be said for the friendship-gating. Questlines still have a habit of grinding to a halt until an arbitrary friendship level with the associated character is raised to the right level, at which point a new morsel of adventure is doled out. Thirty-five levels of friendship is a lot, especially when it’s driven by hollow conversations and repeated gifting. Interacting with the characters feels shallow still, as the various responses we can choose almost never have any overall impact on dialogues. In this regard, I don’t know that a great big sandbox is necessarily going to convert any non-believers who have already firmly bounced off the game—the core is still the same.
For longtime players or those who only dabbled in it before, however, Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town is a sensational expansion—adding new layers to the proverbial cake. There’s so much to do in The Big City beyond the mainline scenario, like customizing the town, playing games in Badtz-maru’s Arcade, or seeking out new Figments. Other cozy games should be taking notes for their own expansions.
