Hello Kitty Island Adventure launched on Apple Arcade last week on July 28th and quickly became the #1 game on the Apple gaming subscription service. It’s like Animal Crossing but with Sanrio characters, and that’s a fun ingredient with fan favorites such as Hello Kitty, My Melody, Keroppi, Kuromi, Badtz-Maru and more.
In the life simulation game developed by Sunblink, players are able to create their own Sanrio avatar including clothing options. After creating your character, you’ll be a passenger inside an airplane, getting to interact with different Sanrio characters. Your mingling is cut short due to an accident, causing all those inside the airplane to balloon down onto a deserted island. Now it’s up to you to bring life back into the abandoned island and make it a welcoming place for the new inhabitants.
I was invited to the Hello Kitty Island Adventure launch party at the Hello Kitty Cafe in Irvine, CA. It was a perfect venue for the event with Hello Kitty and Keroppi mascot appearances, latte drinks, macarons, and more. The Bow Room is usually booked with reservations, but this was my chance to check out the back room during the event. Also in attendance were team members from Sunblink and Sanrio. Check out our adventure in the video below.
“So this is one of our big mechanics for current and future extensibility,” Sunblink Founder and CEO Julian Farrior tells Nerd Reactor about the importance of the cabins. “So if you decorate the cabin in a certain way after you play for a while, you can bring new characters into the game that have new classes, new content, new items, new friendships, all of that. It makes it an even bigger world than it currently is. So one of our goals here was to create a really big world from the get-go with about 20 known Sanrio characters. But what we want to do in the future is continual updates and almost treat it like a live game. We’re bringing content on a cadence – a cadence that will keep players happy and engaged and enjoying the experience. So that’s kind of the goal.”
“We got a team of 35 people together to make this,” Farrior continued. “Relatively small team [building] kind of the dream of this massive open world life sim in the Sanrio universe. And you would be surprised at how compelling that was. Obviously, Sanrio wants to build up their digital world. We worked with a lot of other IP holders, but this was the perfect marriage for that. So I see is that the climbing meter that i saw. Exactly. So look you know, this is probably sometimes like animal crossing one part breath of the wild one kind of original and so there’s a rich question.”
About Hello Kitty Island Adventure
Synopsis: When My Melody is invited to open a gift shop at Big Adventures Park, she invites Hello Kitty and her friends—including you!—to come along for a tropical island getaway. But things go sideways upon arrival, with the friends separated and the park found abandoned. Join forces with Hello Kitty to restore the island’s beauty and the desolate theme park to its former glory!
The game features a massive world with over 40 hours of gameplay, with more content to come. You’ll be able to visit places like Spooky Swamp, Mount Hothead, Gemstone Mountain, Rainbow Reef and more. The island offers plenty of activities including crafting, creating, collecting, baking, brewing potions, fishing and more. You’ll be able to invite a friend in multiplayer with an invite code and have them check out your decorations or vice versa.
