Next year, Sanrio’s lovable cast of characters will move beyond your iPhones and iPads. Hello Kitty Island Adventure, the cozy community vibes game that debuted in July 2023 on Apple Arcade, is finally expanding in 2025 to Nintendo Switch, and PC as a timed exclusive before coming to the PS4 and PS5.
Notably absent is the Xbox. But even releasing the game beyond Apple Arcade is a welcome change for Sanrio fans outside Apple’s ecosystem. Hello Kitty Island Adventure is the kind of chill, low-stakes experience roaming around a serene isle doing fun tasks that dovetails well with Sanrio’s lovable cast.
Fans have kept playing the game, with over 40,000 people in its official discord, said Chelsea Howe, chief product officer at Sunblink. She credits the characters and the game’s uniqueness — letting you create your own Sanrio-styled character, adventure in dynamically different areas, decorate your home, craft and create — with its popularity.
“I think we always get initial surprise [at the game.] If it is a Sanrio fan, they’ve never seen a game like this,” said Howe. “They’ve never seen an opportunity where they can really get to know the characters and connect with the characters, experience the backstories of characters.”
Sunblink/Sanrio
But Sunblink has also kept fans happy with regular content expansions. Hello Kitty Island Adventure launched with over 30 hours of content for players, and studio Sunblink has kept fans engaged by adding content on a regular cadence — updates every three weeks, new features in a big update every six weeks — that’s grown the game to around 80 hours now.
At first blush, Hello Kitty Island Adventure looks a lot like the cozy game king that preceded it, Animal Crossing New Horizons. The games have a similar island setting and community vibes. But Hello Kitty Island Adventure has distinguishing elements that surprise fans, Howe says, like its open world aspect. There are biomes and island features like ruins to explore, which contain underground puzzle and logic rooms. And instead of paying down a debt to a sketchy racoon landlord, the main mechanic is leveling up your friendships with the Hello Kitty herself, Chococat, Cinnamoroll and other Sanrio characters.
“It was really important for us to intentionally merge the open world aspects with the cozy life sim aspects and continue to walk that line in spite of the Animal Crossing comparisons,” Howe said.
Another way it’s different than Animal Crossing New Horizons: You shouldn’t tweak your console’s clock to trick your game into thinking it’s earlier or later, which fans called “time traveling.”
“Don’t do it. You did it in Animal Crossing. Don’t do it in this game,” laughs Howe. That’s not a promise of punishment — if you time travel, you’ll miss out on real-time events, potentially locking you out of new content. Yes, the same content that Sunblink adds every few weeks.
Sunblink/Sanrio
That includes in-game events linked to holidays, like Valentine’s Day, which all players will experience at the same time. Now that the game is coming to other platforms beyond Apple devices, Sunblink faces the extra challenge to update multiple platforms at once. It’ll do this by rolling out the Apple Arcade version updates on the same cadence while bundling several in bigger updates for consoles and PC.
Howe says Sunblink listens to its fans and has added features or made tweaks based on what they’ve suggested. Sometimes this has meant introducing features that are similar to those in Animal Crossing, and other times it’s removing offending features. For instance, the game has no inventory caps: “That was the number one thing that was a huge frustration for me personally in Animal Crossing and for a lot for others,” Howe said.
Another added feature is the TikTok-friendly capacity to edit your character’s home cabin on the island. If friends are watching, they can send emoji and give other live feedback while you’re decorating. “If one of your high level motivations is self-expression, and if you want it to be a social experience, the more you can enable collaborative self-expression the better,” Howe said.
All of this non-combative, friendship and nurture-focused play is coming to consoles and PC for an undisclosed price, but Sunblink has carried over another feature from Apple Arcade: no microtransactions. Instead, there’s a mix of free and paid updates, which Sunblink believes will resonate better with the fan base. “It’s definitely all about making sure that it feels like it’s worth the value that you’re providing,” Howe said.
Cozy game fans will have another option when Hello Kitty Island Adventure comes to multiple platforms next year, and Howe emphasized that players will dictate how long the game keeps going.
“We see this as the start, not the end. This is a live game. We’ve got at least two years of roadmap ahead of us,” Howe said. “As long as people are enjoying it and loving it and playing it, we intend to keep on maintaining it.”