I’ve had a bit of a thing with noticing so many life/farm sims going <astral object><thing> <geological feature> since Stardew Valley did it, and kinda glossed over a bunch of titles because of it. This means I really underestimated Starsand Island and it’s ability to get it’s hooks into me. I played a hearty chunk of it on stream, and went back today to find out the demo does end after day…5 I think. It’s left me wanting more.
The island itself is fairly lively, with a number of NPC’s you work with for the various professions/skills that take you on as an apprentice to help you advance, as well as a number of named npcs for flavour and just randomly generated tourists on the island. Additionally, there are a number of animal friends to make, on top of a ranching skill. Resources seem to regenerate fairly freely, making it so you don’t have to work too hard to make anything you’re working on. There is work involved though, I felt constantly busy, even with the generous time of the days, and I didn’t even unlock one apprenticeship.
The game references so much, with automation being possible, building a huge house as shown in the trailer, having some of your romance interests move in…there seems to be a lot of game still to come in the full version to look forward to. I know at some point I’ll have to decide on which is best girl (all the options seem to be pretty good, I think.)
There are accusations of gen ai being thrown at the game, but nothing is disclosed on it’s steam page. They do admit to/apologize for MTL, which sounds like is a work in place to replace and localize, but I found untranslated bits of text in the game, so I’m guessing they haven’t used it that extensively. I don’t want to give MTL entirely a free pass as it still costs jobs for translators and localization staff who are waaaaaaay better than a machine could ever be. Especially with a language like Japanese that doesn’t use pronouns (and the number of games I’ve seen blindly machine translated that flip what they use for the player or an npc every line).