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Coral Island early access review: a pretty Stardew-like that makes farming a little easierWorking hard or hardly working, am I right?
Working hard or hardly working, am I right?
That’s not to say Coral Island isn’t good. It’s all in very beautiful bouncy 3D, for one thing, and I found the island setting (which impacts the flora, fauna, and architecture in general) made everything feel less like work. Combined with a thread of environmentalism weaving through the game, and the fact that Coral Island is slightly easier than Stardew Valley, and you feel like you’re doing more progress in less time. If you loved the vibe of ConcernedApe’s smash hit, but found the need to hand-write your own almanac a bit intimidating, this is the game for you.
Coral Island - Welcome Home Full Trailer | Early Access Date AnnouncementWatch on YouTube
Coral Island - Welcome Home Full Trailer | Early Access Date Announcement
I’m not sure I ever managed to get a farm I was proud of in Stardew Valley; I never got my regular income high enough; I never had enough energy to do properly useful dungeon runs; I never had enough resources to make the things I needed; and so on. In Coral Island I already feel competent. I’ve invested heavily in growing hot peppers. I’m regularly making more than I spend. Every day I feel like I’ve achieved something, rather than just keeping the farm going. That’s not to say you can’t drill into the complexities of seed growth cycles, optimise where and what time you go fishing, and set up production lines of picking seaweed. But you don’t have to do any of that to make progress. Coral Island has changes that tip things a little in your favour.
They’re not massive weights on the scales, but they make a difference. You fairly quickly gain levels in the activities you do,Skyrimstyle, and can unlock percentage chance abilities like your crops growing faster, that soil will stay watered overnight, or that you’ll get double resources from harvesting. Coral Island has a magical fast travel system that expands as you do more, creating a feedback loop where you can make more progress every day. And when you’re exploring in the mine dungeons, fending off spiders and blobs with sword swings doesn’t consume energy, so you can go deeper and mine more ore.
It’s possible that last one is a bug, though. Despite feeling pretty content heavy, Coral Island is launching into early access, and there are some tells ranging from “eh” to “that’s annoying”. Sometimes your character won’t be able to turn unless you stop walking and sort of reset. Special chests that I’ve found have, so far, been empty, and some item drops have a placeholder image. My four hens have never laid an egg, so are basically just pets that add to the farm vibe. The keys to hotswitch between rows of your inventory in the HUD sometimes just don’t work, so you have to go into the menus and manually move them around. I’ve also been unable to move the anchor point when I go diving, which means I have to trek across a vast swathe of seabed every time.
I give Coral Island a lot of credit for making that work, as well as the details that change between seasons, how I got to know different characters, and how gorgeous everything looks when it rains. You’ll run into missing pieces here and there, and there are bugs enough to squash, but it feels pretty mature on the vine for an early access game. I have other annoyances about e.g. how difficult it is to get glass, but if you’re burned out on Stardew Valley, or never even really got that fire going, Coral Island could be exactly the trash covered paradise you need.
