Starsand Island is an ambitious ‘life simulator’ game by Seed Sparkle Lab, a game developer from China. Following many often anime-themed, similar titles like Story of Seasons and Rune Factory, it has you leave the city searching for an idyllic country life, with farming, crafting, and some light combat.
As a disclaimer, unlike most reviews on NookGaming, I have not completed Starsand Island before posting it, and as such, we won’t be awarding it a formal score. There are a few reasons behind this unusual exception, including it claiming 100+ hours of content and having been sent the review copy less than a week before the embargo to post (keep this in mind as you check out the launch reviews in general) and having experienced all the main gameplay systems at this point. But more importantly, one of the many bugs came crashing down on me, effectively blocking me from progressing any further and while I don’t know how widespread it is, I’m aware that I’m not the only person reviewing the game that this has happened to. There’s genuinely a lot to love about this game, but my notes felt more like they were for a bug report than a review, despite this being sent by the company specifically for ‘early access review’, and I felt it was important that my review highlighted that, rather than not posting one at all.
Update: While many other bugs and issues remain, a number have been fixed since release, alongside other changes being made. These include:
- The incompletable quest barring me from further progression has been fixed in an update following the original publication of this review.
- There has been some progress on the audio language bug too as NPC soundbites I checked are now in English (I cannot confirm whether this is solved in the cutscenes). However, I have noticed some voice lines being cut off too early.
- You can now manually choose the audio language from the menu instead of it being limited to the same as the text language.
If you’re planning to pick up Starsand Island, make sure to check out our Hints and Tips Guide for the Early Game too.
Welcome Back to Starsand Island
After you choose your body type and appearance through a relatively in-depth character creator, you find yourself returning to Starsand Island, where your childhood friend Solara greets you. In the years since you spent your childhood on the island, she’s since become the mayor’s assistant and is happy to welcome you back. Admittedly, it would’ve been nice if she hadn’t put us straight to work chopping down a tree that wasn’t getting in the way and building a bed, but it worked for tutorial purposes.
Once again giving us no time to rest, she tells us to learn one of (or realistically all of) the five professions: Crafter, Farmer, Angler, Rancher, and Explorer. Luckily, there are experts around the island all too willing to teach us, not too unlike Fantasy Life, and they even include an old friend or two.
The story is more set up than anything. You can spend your time wandering around and meeting or reuniting with the many residents, raising affection with them to get to know them better through standard systems like talking to them daily, handing them gifts they like (which they always provide a return gift for), and doing quests. I did feel like the residents were a weak point of Starsand Island. There were a lot of characters to get to know better, but none really grabbed my attention or felt particularly charming, like in Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ or Rune Factory 3 Special. Even by the time I was stalled (the roadblock appearing around mid-game), I’d not encountered any cutscenes other than an introduction one and nothing to really indicate that the game lived up to their claims of meaningful relationships and emotional moments with the residents. While it’s not made clear by the store page, it seems that romance and getting to know the residents mostly isn’t actually implemented yet. Still, they were nice enough, and they’re all relatively distinct…even if I didn’t feel particularly motivated to pursue them outside of the obligation to make progress, complete quests that awarded me their affection, or offload my latest collection of flowers from the Moonlit Forest before they clogged up my inventory. There were a few nice touches here and there too, such as characters remembering the last gift you gave them and bringing it up when you speak with them.
Progress is made primarily through completing quests related to the five professions. You can climb the ranks by performing related tasks, such as crafting something, defeating a certain enemy, growing a specific crop, fishing up certain fish, raising a certain animal, and so on. While they’re all connected to the profession, I did find a level of interconnectivity. Certain resources for one questline can be linked to the completion of other questlines, unless you get very lucky with random drops.
When it all works, it’s a satisfying system with clear progress, consistent direction, and new equipment or features unlocked as you go, which let you continue to progress toward new goals. This includes the standard upgrading of tools, and in this case, of crafting stations.
Early on, progress is very quick, though it does significantly slow down by the point of unlocking the intermediate profession goals. There are also plenty of other tasks to get on with, including random short quests, plenty of different pieces of equipment to craft to increase your efficiency, stations to unlock around the island for fast travel, and earning money to save to expand the amount of land you control. There is perhaps a point where it starts to feel somewhat samey, but there’s also different paths to switch between, relationships to improve, animals to raise, pets to adopt, vehicles to build (not just land ones either), a powerful building mode, and even some pretty absurdly large goals like an amusement park home layout to unlock, and little distractions like playing a Tetris-like minigame game in the arcade. I never felt like I was lacking something to do or work towards, which can be an issue with these types of games.
It helps that gameplay itself is fun too. You can skate or ride animals/vehicles around the town, and it feels great to do so. Running around a mystical-feeling forest gathering resources is relaxing, very occasionally broken up by some very simple ranged combat and small tasks to unlock new areas. There are little touches like how watering crops works smoothly by having you hold the trigger to keep pouring and having you just move over the tiles until they fill with water. There’s even a ‘smart deposit’ mechanic on chests, where any matching items in your bag can be added to the stack in the chest with just one button. It really seems like the developers behind Starsand Island took note of a lot of the frustrations with similar games and made sure to find a way to improve how things worked.
Now, if only the game actually worked properly…
The Bug Report
As mentioned, I was unable to complete Starsand Island due to a progression-blocking bug, which left me unable to complete a profession-related main quest (please see the update at the top of the article). This then had a knock-on effect on a different progression main quest. This was far from the only issue I encountered.
The most prominent issue I ran into was related to the audio language. Cutscenes were sometimes playing Chinese audio and sometimes in English. Outside of cutscenes, all characters only had Chinese-language soundbites. Checking in with a representative of Seed Sparkle Lab, they told me that the audio should always match the game language, and considering I was playing in English, this obviously wasn’t working as intended. Though I will note here that this approach is a pity in general too, since many games would let you independently choose your audio language, rather than having it connected to the text language.
In another language issue, menus sometimes reverted to Chinese, or in a couple of cases, I found a mishmash of English and Chinese on menus after going into one, then coming out.
On the topic of language issues, while much of it is absolutely fine and you might not even notice unless you’re paying attention in many cases, there were plenty of instances where I noticed issues with the localization too. From tourists NPCs calling items ‘gadgets’ when they’re ores or wood, to being told to hold the button to ‘leave’ your scooter rather than to get off, or odd terms used that had related but not quite the same meaning, like farming and planting. There were plenty of silly issues too, like NPCs telling you they ‘made’ softwood. This doesn’t even count inappropriate phrasing like “it’s the thought that counts,” used by islanders when receiving items they like, or some very awkwardly phrased lines that feel like very direct/literal translations, especially around more conversational language. It’s to the point that I was beginning to wonder whether an edited AI translation is involved or whether they’re at least not using localization staff with native-level fluency in English.
I ran into an issue at one point where the pause menu and the ability to turn my view just stopped working, and I had to force quit and lost progress, though by luck not much. There was another issue where a quest didn’t register as complete, and I had to roll back the save and ended up losing about 30 minutes of progress.
Those are the most serious of the issues. There are plenty of minor problems, which are more in line with what I’d expect from an Early Access title. Some problems around the controller scheme led me to use the keyboard to access certain features that didn’t work on it. Sometimes the wrong menus popped up. My character and NPCs often clipped through objects, invisible trees and shrubs often appeared out of nowhere, my hat-wearing character kept becoming bald whenever changing clothes for bed, enemy names were difficult to read due to blurry text, and long loading screens. These were some of the ones I noted down.
Verdict
This review does come with a number of provisos as explained, and so does the verdict: Starsand Island would be a great game if it wasn’t for all the technical issues and lacking romance content. It improves on the life simulation genre in several ways, has a really satisfying gameplay loop, and has had me playing for hours at a time despite the issues. In terms of the mechanics, it’s actually one of the better games in the genre. Unfortunately, it lies in that unusual area where it’s very difficult to give it a recommendation, even as an Early Access title, until it fixes the most serious bugs, yet it’s too good to recommend completely against it.
I would very happily come back to Starsand Island in Summer 2026 when it’s due to get its full release (along with the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch releases) and check it out again. It has the potential to be one of the most engaging games in the genre, and I can only hope it lives up to it. Just at the moment, it feels too early a build to sell as Early Access, and releasing in this state makes me wonder what the team behind it feels an acceptable final state for the game would be and if the additional social content will be worth the wait.
WAIT AND SEE ON STARSAND ISLAND
Hints and Tips Guide: Click Here
If you are looking for another life simulation game with action, you might want to check out Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time or Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma.
Many thanks go to Seed Sparkle Lab for a PC playtest code for Starsand Island.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
