My Coral Island review summary: Coral Island has an amazing gem of a game buried in farm sim “must-haves” from those who came before.
Coral Island is a smart, colorful farming sim on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. I played it on PlayStation 5 and found the experience pristine, with no glitches or crashes to speak of. Coral Island is still receiving much love and updates from the dev team behind it, Stairway Games. TLDR; Coral Island is worth buying, even if it has it gets long in the tooth. Keep reading to hear my full thoughts.
Hours played: 140 hours
Rolled credits: No
Coziness rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Coral Island starts like many great farming sims start: with a city slicker inheriting a rundown ranch from their grandparent. I was sold on this game immediately when my friend pitched it to me as “the bisexual panic simulator.” And indeed, the game is filled with beautiful creatures across the gender spectrum. I fell for the nerdy astronomer who changes his hair color with the season. But plenty of others turned my head as I got to know them (sorry, Wakuu).
Coral Island has some of the most beautiful hand-drawn art in a cozy game. The character portraits are filled with personality, diversity, and realness: people have stretch marks, pudgy bellies, armpit hair, and scars. Everyone feels grounded and relatable, even in this pastoral paradise. It’s an undeniable perk of the game; a feature for which I can’t sing enough praises.
They also came up with a shining gem of a new idea for the genre: a whole underwater ocean environment that mimics the typical “mines” structure. You move area to area clearing debris and getting resources, and slowly unlock more pathways as you explore. Plus, there are merpeople and underwater dragons and polluted tree roots and a secret Atlantis!
You can even date mermaids, gain a tail, get tattoos, start an underwater farm, help the princess grow legs and visit shore, learn how to speak fish, and explore underwater caves.
Coral Island has such rich potential to be a 10/10 game. They took a well-worn genre, made a ton of quality-of-life updates, and added a serene oceanic environment for some uniqueness.
Unfortunately, the game shoehorns a lot of farming sim cliches into the mix, which stalls progression and drags out uninteresting to-do lists. It feels like tasks for the sake of tasking, instead of genuinely addicting mechanics. There’s a set of mines, which honestly takes away from the ocean traversal (feels redundant); there’s another mine in the Savannah biome later; there’s the Lake Shrine bundles, gathered items that unlock parts of the game and heal the island as you fulfil them; there are more bundles unlockable in the ocean biome; there’s a town ranking system that doesn’t add much to the story.
If Coral Island went all in on healing nature through ocean traversal, I would be overjoyed. But the elements that make the game so special are lost in the clutter of what feels like “modern farming sim must-haves.” The pieces don’t fit together cohesively, it’s just expanded content for the sake of expanded content. And it’s a bit dull.
I like farming sims that are a bit sandboxy—they give you your objectives and then get out of the way. But Coral Island isn’t that. Quests are locked until you progress the story so much; conveniences are withheld until you meet lengthy conditions; and five different areas of “developed” get in each other’s way constantly (town rank, shrine bundles, ocean biome, and the mines/caverns).
Instead of offering a wealth of things to do, the game gatekeeps parts of itself, hiding them behind interlocking requests, rewards, requirements, and relationships. Everytime I got excited about a story thread, I hit a dead end—most notably while trying to solve the mystery of the stone Guardians in the mines when the savanna area was slapped behind jarring and burdensome conditions mid-questline.
The other problem I kept bumping up against was the map. Winding, expansive, and full of dead ends, Starlet Town just isn’t fun to explore naturally. If I’m not getting around with ease, then I’m not talking to people; and if I am not talking to people, I’m not getting as many cut scenes. Sure, (some of) the warp points open up relatively fast, but you can easily delay or miss a large chunk of the game if that’s the best way to get around.
I have a(n)—admittedly odd—way of playing farming sims. I get my chores out of the way and make a full loop of the town. Every. Day. I talk to people and enter buildings. I participate in cutscenes as early as I can get them. I wander, and spend my time puzzle-piecing chores around my social calendar. Because of this, I am particularly picky about map layouts. This will not be an issue for everyone. But it was an issue for me.
Coral Island found its voice with stunning hand-drawn art and an exciting ocean maze that guided the main tendrils of the story. If they would have stuck with that—gone deeper, not broader—it would have been a perfect game.
Coral Island Image Gallery
Games Like Coral Island:
- Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is the Perfect Farming RPG
- Wylde Flowers is a Witchy Farming Sim with Heart
- Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is a Classic for a Reason
- Roots of Pacha: Experience a Stone Age Stardew
- Fields of Mistria is the Best Farming Sim I’ve Played in Ages
Stay cozy, gamers!