I bought Hello Kitty Island Adventure thinking it’d be a fun game to play with my toddler: cute, easygoing, and ideally not a drag to play, like most toddler games out there.

That was a mistake. It was too fun. She got annoyed that I was too interested in the game than in her, so I started sneaking in sessions during nap time. 130 hours later…

This game is really enjoyable. I think most of it being so great boils down to game design, to it being carefully crafted, and even if very cute and obnoxiously wholesome at times (for better and for worse), it has many nuances that made me discover, little by little, that the game definitely is targeted towards older audiences.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure (HKYA for short) is a huge daily quest simulator. It has all the goods and bads that come with it. Everything is time-gated, from the number of gifts you give to your friends every day go the resources you collect.

And thus, fear of missing out will drive you. It rewards you for logging in every day but also at specific days, to the point where you feel you are missing out if you have to skip. Some content is trickled down, and depending on the day and on the (very short) story quests you have to do, you might need to play anything between 20 minutes to 2 hours at any given day.

Still, if you don't mind much the daily time-gated nature of the content, the game can be incredibly fun. It's also a puzzle on its own, to figure out how to maximize your days and how to unlock the main story elements in the shortest possible time.

Things I did not expect to find in Hello Kitty Island Adventure:

- An actually fun world to explore, akin to "A Short Hike" but much larger.
- A love triangle (Carl, you're bad!)
- Amazing soundtrack, like the Ennio Morricone inspired area.
- A red panda who aggressively sings (screams?) heavy metal to blow off steam.
- Edgy dialogue options for your character (they don't affect their responses, but still).
- Extremely easy puzzles altogether with an extremely complex "puzzle" in the game: figuring out how flower hybridization works.
- Lots of content and story quests for hundreds of days.
- Finding out how complex the Hello Kitty universe is.

At 130 hours played, it's one of very few games who haven't tired me out by this point. Quite on the contrary, it has me even more invested in it.

I got this for my kid. She lost interest. I now log in daily like it’s a second job, only cuter.

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It scratches a lot of itches that Animal Crossing: New Horizons just can't reach. Initial leveling friendships seems unnecessarily difficult without looking up an online guide, and I think some areas should be unlocked sooner in the game, but overall I will continue to play it and enjoy the time more than if I had spent that time watching the news cycle.-