Every once in a while, a cozy game comes along that challenges everything you knew about the genre, subsequently raising the bar for every other title that comes after it. For me, that game is Starsand Island.
Starsand Island is among a rare breed of games that appeals to nearly every gamer in one way or another. There’s truly something for everyone in this cozy, open-world experience: farming, mining, fighting, building, exploring, you name it. It’s a life sim, open-world RPG, and action title all rolled into one.
Even as I spent literal days exploring its every nook and cranny, Starsand Island never managed to lose its charm. Sure, I ran into my fair share of bugs, glitches, and gameplay hiccups along the way, but in a world whose endless appeal is matched only by its persistent coziness, it was hard to stay mad at it for long.
This game is absolutely massive, with every inch of it feeling alive and vibrant in ways rarely seen in similar titles. It’s absolutely overflowing with things to do, people to meet, and secrets to uncover; if I had to play only one game for the rest of my life, there’s a good chance that I’m picking this one.
In a genre so oversaturated with Stardew Valley clones and Harvest Moon lookalikes, Starsand Island stands above the rest, feeling like the next great evolution of the cozy genre—a sprawling paradise so immersive that you’re reminded why you fell in love with cozy games in the first place.
This review will go over every major aspect of Starsand Island’s gameplay, giving you a better sense of what the cozy genre’s latest masterpiece has to offer.
Making a You That Feels Like You
Before you can do anything in this game, you have to create your character, which is arguably the most exciting part of starting any new game. Thankfully, Starsand Island’s character creator does little to disappoint.
I actually found myself pleasantly surprised at the range of customization options in Starsand Island’s character creator, though maybe I’m just too used to old-school farming sims where the only options were “boy” or “girl.”
You can tweak just about everything on your character, including their name, gender, skin tone, eye color, outfit, and even makeup.
It can get pretty detailed, especially with those minute changes, but what really surprised me were the limited customization options for hair. There are maybe a handful of hair presets you can pick from, each with its own color, texture, style, and accessories; none of which can be changed.
These presets are as far as the game allows you to go for hair customization, which kind of disappointed me. In most games I’ve played, hair is usually the MOST customizable aspect of your appearance, not the least. I also found it weird that half of all the already-limited options were blonde, forcing anyone with different hair colors to choose between authenticity and style.
In a game that lets you change your character’s makeup, mouth position, and eyebrow shape, it’s weird that you don’t have much say in your hairstyle. That being said, it’s not like the hair presets it offers are ugly; I just wish that there had been more to choose from, or at least a better customization process involved.
The rest of the customization options were more than extensive, and I did enjoy every other part of the character-making process.
A Cozy Beginning
Like any good cozy game, Starsand Island doesn’t just throw you into the fray with a bag full of tools and a half-baked storyline. Nope, Starsand Island offers a much slower approach, easing you into its gameplay rather than throwing you into the deep end all at once.
Your journey begins as you step off the boat and onto the sandy shores of Starsand Island, where your childhood friend, Solara, is waiting for you. Through her excited gushing, you learn that your character had grown up on the island, but had left several years ago to pursue a career in the big city. Now, you’re back and ready to embrace the quiet island life you left behind all those years ago.
After a quick catch-up, Solara fills you in on your situation: your grandfather has left you a sizable plot of land, a small house, and a rather sad-looking workbench that looks like it’s seen better days. She’ll then explain that your first priority should be fixing up that workbench, since you won’t be able to get much done without it.
What follows is an incredibly intuitive tutorial phase, which allows you to get a general feel for the controls and basic mechanics, like foraging, repairing, and crafting.
Compared to other games in the genre, I found this game’s introduction to be incredibly accommodating. It doesn’t explain how to do absolutely everything right out of the gate; it gives you just enough information to get a feel for things, saving the more complicated stuff for later.
With the sheer size of it, I was worried that Starsand Island would follow in the footsteps of similar titles and throw all of its tutorials, characters, and storylines at you all at once, giving you more information than your poor spongy brain can soak up. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.
Overall, it was a great first look into what the game would entail, and every minute I spent figuring out the basics made me more excited for what was to come.
A Living, Breathing Paradise
If there’s one thing that this game absolutely nails, it’s the feeling that this world doesn’t just exist around you, but exists with you, constantly growing and changing along your journey.
Every inch of the island feels alive, from the cicadas that swarm your crops to the townspeople who go about their days with their own schedules, moods, and mannerisms. Every character, no matter how minor, has their own agenda apart from your journey.
Unlike many open-world games, Starsand Island doesn’t just fill its world with generic NPCs who have zero personality. Instead, it fills it with people who actually act like people. There’s no such thing as useless or insignificant characters in Starsand Island; every person has their place, even the ones that don’t have names.
Seemingly irrelevant NPCs will start conversations, give you gifts, or even give you quests, rewarding you handsomely for their completion. These are characters that don’t even have names, yet they all treat you as if they were the main character.
This goes far beyond just NPCs, too. The animals, the insects, even the surrounding forests, all feel alive in their own way, interacting with you just as much as you’re interacting with them.
One minute, you’re walking along a riverbed, and the next, that hungry kitten you fed last week ambushes you for more fish. Your actions towards these characters may inform their reactions, but every character will have their own way of going about it.
After a while, you stop feeling like the main character and more like a member of a thriving community, one where everyone has a purpose, no matter how small.
An Ocean of Possibilities
If Starsand Island excels at anything, it’s giving you more to do than you could ever possibly fit in a single day—and still somehow making it all feel worth your time.
Your main, overarching goals will revolve around working your way up the island’s five main careers (farmer, explorer, angler, crafter, and rancher), but if you ever feel like slacking off, you can always just choose to do your own thing.
You can go spelunking around the Moonlit Forest for secrets, craft cute furniture to decorate your home, go on shopping sprees for new outfits, makeup, and decor, form bonds with all of the island’s furry friends, or even just become everyone’s favorite errand boy and fill your days with endless fetch quests.
…you’ll literally never run out of things to do in Starsand Island.
The possibilities are endless; there will never be a point in this game where you won’t have an inventory filled with random tools and at least ten quests going on your back burner.
No matter how you choose to spend your time, you’ll literally never run out of things to do in Starsand Island. There’s no such thing as a boring day in this game; everyone wants your attention, and everything is always just waiting for you to notice it.
The Rough Edges of Paradise
As much as I love this game, I can’t deny that it does come with its own fair share of hiccups. While the issues I encountered didn’t end up being dealbreakers for me, I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this game without airing out all of its problems first.
The most noticeable issue comes from the in-game targeting system, which, at times, can be a little too eager to help.
When you’re surrounded by multiple interactable objects, like chests, crops, crafting stations, or even people, your character will often decide that what you REALLY wanted to interact with was something completely different.
You can dance around it, stand on top of it, and even stand a full foot away from it while glaring daggers at it; it’s almost impossible to get your character to lock onto what you ACTUALLY want, until you get rid of literally everything else in the surrounding area (usually by destroying them).
So yeah, the targeting system can be kind of wonky, but even that’s not TOO terrible of an issue. It can usually be fixed with a good few whacks from a pickaxe or swings from an axe, though I do still wish the game would just let me grab what I was after the first time around.
That being said, that’s far from the only issue this game has.
Earlier, I mentioned that you’ll never run out of things to do in this game, which can be a bad thing just as much as it can be a good one.
Between the main quests, side quests, and the daily demands of running a farm and ranch… it’s easy to feel like a candle being burnt at both ends.
While the sheer amount of content in this game feels like a blessing for some, it can feel insanely overwhelming for others. Even I felt overwhelmed a few times during my playthrough, and I normally love games that give me too much to do.
Between main quests, side quests, and the daily demands of running a farm and ranch (planting, watering, harvesting, breeding, feeding, brushing, the list goes on), your to-do list fills up fast. Add in the need to time your errands perfectly around each NPC’s schedule and shop’s daily hours of operation, and it’s easy to feel like you’re a candle being burnt at both ends.
And no matter how hard you try, you’ll always be out of some essential resource that takes almost a full in-game day to get, and by the time you manage to get enough of it, you come back home to hungry chickens that ran out of food hours ago, withered crops that dried to a crisp in the night, and the realization that you’ve just ran out of yet another essential, daily resource.
It’s enough to make you feel exhausted, even though you technically never left your gaming chair.
Speaking of running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the biggest issue deals with the sheer amount of running, walking, swimming, and even rollerblading you’ll be doing around this game’s massive map. The island itself is enormous, which is great for exploration, but feels much less so when you realize just how long it takes you to get from one end to the other.
The game does offer various vehicles to help speed things along, but the fastest ones are always insanely expensive, tricky to control, and have a bad habit of getting stuck in random spots, making dealing with them even more of a hassle than running. A fast travel network, even something as simple as a bus, taxi, or train, would make a world of a difference here.
I can’t tell you how many days I’ve wasted just chasing down random NPCs on the map, only to realize the time-sensitive quest I was on expired because I took too long getting to them.
Ironically, the Moonlit Forest, despite being smaller and easier to navigate, has its own limited fast travel system. I’m not saying I’m not grateful for it, but it really only makes me wish the rest of the island had something similar.
Catching Bugs, or Fixing Them?
With a game as big as Starsand Island, you can expect to run into a few bugs, and I don’t just mean the kind you can catch with a net.
This game comes with a whole host of bugs and glitches for you to deal with; some are funny visual errors that make you look like you’re demolishing boulders with your bare fists, while others are game-breakers that force you to lose days’ worth of progress. They’re frustrating, but I want to make it clear that I don’t necessarily hold these issues against Starsand Island in any way.
Pre-released versions of games often come with their fair share of hiccups, and I can hardly blame a game this massive for being a little buggy. Furthermore, most, if not all, of these issues will likely be ironed out by the developers at the time of its release or shortly after, so don’t immediately write the game off just because some of the characters went flying off into space a few times.
With all that being said, these bugs and glitches definitely tested my patience on more than one occasion.
I can’t bring myself to be too harsh about it… when a game is this ambitious, a few loose screws are bound to rattle along the way.
Most of the bugs in this game come in the form of visual errors, like tools vanishing from your hands mid-task, disappearing seashells in the sand, characters walking through solid walls (that one’s always fun to see), characters suddenly gaining the ability to yeet themselves into space, or your character reverting to its blank slate when it comes time to go to sleep.
These issues are minor and rarely affect the actual gameplay, though they can be jarring if you’re not expecting them.
The visual bugs don’t bother me; it’s the real game-breakers that I worry about.
One of the more serious issues happens when you enter build mode. Sometimes, usually when you’re trying to do too much all at once, the game will trap you in build mode, no matter what you press or try to do to get out of it.
The only way to fix this that I’ve found is just exiting out of the game entirely and going back into it, which sucks because you’re not able to save your progress before you leave. This has sort of installed a fear of building in me, and I try to avoid overly decorating as much as I can.
The worst one that I’ve encountered, though, is when the game won’t allow me to bring up the main menu. No matter how many times I press it, it just won’t open, which means no saving, no quitting, and no fiddling with the game’s settings in an attempt to fix it; I’m essentially just stranded in the game until I manually shut my computer off or exit out of the application entirely.
Just like with the build mode bug, you won’t be able to save your game prior to exiting, so you’re losing a ton of progress no matter what you do.
This has happened to me a handful of times, and usually what I do is wait for an autosave point and then restart my computer. That way, I’m not losing as much progress, and the game gets a full refresh before I get back into it.
Despite all of these giving me massive headaches during my playthrough, I can’t bring myself to be too harsh about it. After all, when a game is this ambitious, a few loose screws are bound to rattle along the way. I’m sure the developers will come up with a fix sooner rather than later, so these issues hopefully won’t bog the game down for too long.
(Also, it’s not a bug, and more of a visual oddity, but every morning, Delphin goes for a run along the beach, but it isn’t an athletic run, it’s more of a panicked, “oh god he’s right behind me I’m running for my life” kind of run, so it looks absolutely hilarious when you’re running after him to complete a quest. For a single moment, I get to feel like Jason Voorhees in a Friday the 13th movie, and it’s everything I could’ve ever asked for.)
An Island Adventure Worth Diving Into
At the end of the day, despite the handful of issues it has, I’d still recommend Starsand Island to anyone willing to listen.
It’s abundantly clear that this game was a labor of love, with every square inch of it filled with vibrant characters, interactive environments, and lush, lovingly detailed landscapes that stretch endlessly toward its beautifully rendered horizon.
It’s visually stunning, it’s irresistibly charming, and it’s endlessly replayable; it’s the kind of game that you can keep coming back to without ever feeling tired of it.
Now, that isn’t to say that it’s flawless. It’s still got its fair share of issues, just like every other game on the market.
The targeting system can be finicky, the massive map size can make basic travel feel like a workout, and occasionally, a bug or glitch might pop up and force a restart. But despite all of this, I still think Starsand Island is a game worth getting into.
To say that I had an absolute blast playing this would be an understatement. I went to bed each night excited to wake up in the morning and play this game; Starsand Island filled me with a genuine sense of excitement that I hadn’t felt since I was ten years old, playing Minecraft for the first time.
It reminded me why I fell in love with the cozy genre in the first place: because it manages to effortlessly capture that sense of freedom that we all crave as adults, of getting to build your own life how you want to, in a world where no one can tell you no.
Starsand Island is a love letter to the inner child in all of us, taking everything you loved about gaming and turning it into a safe space where you can fall in love with it all over again. Sure, it can be a little rough around the edges, but that just makes it feel more human, like something made with real care instead of calculated perfection.
If you’re looking for a cozy game that you can genuinely fall into and lose yourself in, then you’ve finally found it in Starsand Island.
Closing Comments:
Starsand Island is the ultimate cozy sandbox experience. Its open world is brimming with charm, personality, and potential, with a never-ending list of things to do and people to meet. It’s a genuine joy to get lost in, even if a few rough edges occasionally get in the way. It’s beautiful, it’s dynamic, it’s fluid, and it’s got more heart packed into it than a Hallmark movie; it’s by far the best choice for anyone looking to get lost in the cozy adventure of a lifetime.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
