Game Review - Starsand Island

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Game Review: Starsand Island (Early Access) (by Seed Sparkle Lab

Platform: PC (Steam), Xbox, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2

Developer / Publisher: Seed Sparkle Lab

Release: Early Access from February 11, 2026

💠 First Impressions

*Starsand Island* presents itself as the next cozy life sim — a pastoral place to unwind, befriend townsfolk, farm and craft at your own pace. Critics have celebrated its charm and variety of activities, and many players find it engaging and visually appealing in its current Early Access state.

But after spending significant time with this game, I found something more contradictory than “relaxing pastoral life.” What initially feels open and inviting soon reveals a layer of systems that don’t quite mesh with that vision.

📉 Where Things Fall Apart

  • Illusion of freedom: Though presented as an open-world experience, unlock paths and progression are tightly gated behind required chains of tasks. Essential mechanics like most crafting and equipment revolve around progress that can only be reached in a specific order.
  • Cozy mechanics that punish curiosity: Crafting and farming — the core emotional hooks for most cozy sims — are tied to time windows and decay mechanics that make multitasking feel punishing rather than freeing. Your crops, animals, and quests all demand frequent attention or they regress, squeezing you into a daily treadmill rather than a sandbox.
  • Time pressure undermines relaxation: Days are limited to a 20-minute real-time loop, and mistakes — like choosing the “wrong” activity early — carry heavy costs as time runs out. This turns what should be leisurely into a strict efficiency optimization.
  • Sympathetic, broken NPC systems: Villagers and relationship mechanics largely hand out predictable gifts; deeper connection feels more like loot farming than genuine story or personality. Conversation depth and emotional resonance are missing to the degree that socializing never truly replaces mechanical loops.
  • Bugs and rough edges: Even on PC, there have been reports of inconsistent behavior, gameplay bugs and NPC anomalies. Players on other platforms report larger stability issues. These are typical of Early Access software, but they don’t help the feeling of systems that already struggle to feel smooth.

🍃 Reframing the “Slow Down” Response

A frequent reply on forums has been, “Just slow down — don’t do so much at once.” But this misses the real issue:

  • “Slow down” isn’t a design philosophy — it’s a coping strategy used when systems actively punish exploration and experimentation.
  • Players aren’t being invited to savor mechanics at their own pace; they’re being advised to avoid engaging with any system too deeply because it becomes overwhelming or unfriendly.
  • In a truly relaxing sim, doing more — exploring more mechanics, growing more crops, crafting more things — should feel rewarding. Here it often feels like a trap that shrinks your margin for error.

If a game’s mechanics make you avoid them just to enjoy the scenery, the problem isn’t *you* — it’s the design. A cozy game should let curiosity flourish, not condition players to retreat from depth.

⚖️ Verdict

Pros: Beautiful presentation and aesthetic, variety of activities and professions, deep crafting and building potential, promising early access support.

Cons: Mechanical design that clashes with its cozy premise, time pressure that feels punitive, progression that feels more like on-rails tasks, frontend bugs and system roughness.

Final Thought: *Starsand Island* shows potential and appeals to many players, but its current Early Access incarnation struggles to deliver the relaxing, open-ended life sim core its marketing promises. Until the systems are refined so that exploration and progression feel genuinely rewarding rather than obligatory or punishing, this title *feels more like a structured simulation squeezed into a cozy aesthetic.*

What surprised me most is that games like MMORPGs without forced sleep cycles or daily maintenance often feel calmer than so-called cozy sims. When systems don’t decay and progress waits patiently, I’m free to explore at my own pace without anxiety. Even a game like Once Human has more relaxed farming and ranching mechanics. In Starsand Island, the constant need to prevent systems from stalling or decaying turns relaxation into vigilance. Time doesn’t simply pass — it pressures.

In trying to make the game more "immersive" with passing out at after 20 minutes unless you reach a bed, it sacrifices literally everything else that makes roleplaying in Starsand Island a human experience. Probably no one is for example sitting themselves down at a table to enjoy breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. They are instead batch cooking low-effort meals for efficiency. This is a cozy life sim?

Formulaic tight timers are not a necessity for cozy games and neither is removing the immersive need for sleep. Thinking outside of the box is necessary for innovation and improvement.

This review reflects the state of *Starsand Island* as of February 22, 2026, during its Early Access period. Experiences may change as updates arrive.

Score Breakdown: +4/-19 and FAIL

+1 Nice anime-style graphics

+1 Positive vibe and friendly village life

-1 Early Access is mostly stable on PC but other platforms report game-stopping issues

-1 Tons of bugs even on PC where it's mostly stable. And some are so obvious it's not clear how it wasn't immediately discovered and fixed, or at least on a huge list of "known issues"
  • For example, NPCs say Rabbits help you farm by eating weeds. But this is completely untrue.
    • They don't "eat" weeds. They bring them back to the hutch as "Pasture Grass".
    • They remain hungry and lose happiness, and therefore cannot grow. You must give them Rabbit Feed and they eat that first thing in the morning.
    • There is a Ranching perk "Yield King" which states "When rabbits help out on the farm, they prioritize filling up their bellies" which sounds like this forces them to do what the NPCs say. But it doesn't seem to change their behavior at all.
  • Another example: Once you have a beehive, bees can literally cause your fruit trees to mature overnight and yield fruit the next day, when they are supposed to have a time to maturity of around 20 days. Crops can similarly be accelerated and it's not clear which plants on your farm will get chosen for acceleration so once you have bees, your crops even of the same type planted at the same time will mature at different speeds. This is:
    • Completely not anything like a real farm.
    • Makes various mechanics such as growth time and fertilizers anywhere from somewhat to mostly pointless.
-1 Relationships are currently a farce. NPCs are just loot machines handing out random goodies.
  • They occasionally give you gifts. Even random Tourists can give you something.
  • Meanwhile, players will basically be giving out low-effort plentiful things like Celeste Berries, Coconuts, and Grilled Mushrooms.
    • Because these reliably give you mid-tier reactions and there's no incentive to hand out anything more expensive or harder to make.
    • -1 Making something "thoughtful" costs time, resource, and acquiring resources in the first place, which could require farming or mining even before cooking/crafting. And that time-costly experimentation can get you punished with a lower-tier reaction or outright rejection. It's simply safer to hand out Celeste Berries, Coconuts, and/or Grilled Mushrooms which are easy to get in large quantities to hand out to everyone.
    • -1 And when you are occasionally given a cue that a gift might be superior, it turns out to just be meaningless flavor text so you learn to ignore it.
  • When you advance your relationship, they start to give you even more gifts.
  • -1 When you really advance your relationship you can go into their home... and open a chest of goodies each week.
    Looks like a free-roam open world game but it is on rails:
    • -1 The "Island Life" app on your phone lists a number of tasks that you must complete in the correct order to unlock certain features. In the early stages of the game you will probably end up completing them as a matter of course but it unreasonably unlocks certain elements and players who don't look ahead through the app might not understand why certain features or characters are not available.
      • For example, until you expand your housing plot, the Merchant Boat will not arrive, and Bus Stations won't appear.
      • There is a step that demands you adopt 2 pets, obtain 2 pet outfits, and use the in-game gacha machine 10 times. Don't like pets? Too bad. The game is on rails.
    • -1 The game recommends you start with the Crafter profession.
      • You basically can't do anything without this profession. It's not optional.
      • What are simple low-tech things in other games demand unreasonably high Crafter certification.
        • For example, the most basic automatic sprinkler ("Sprinkler I") which waters a tiny 2x2 farm tile area requires Solid State Batteries which can only be crafted with advanced ranks of Crafter. And this is after you progress through enough ranks of the Farming profession to be able to buy the blueprint.
      • In order to advance the Crafter profession you basically also have to advance the Explorer profession or you are outright locked out of the locations with the materials you need to harvest.
      • Everything you need to craft as you progress in the other professions requires more and more advanced ranks of the Crafter profession for the components.
      • Honestly this feels like a gatekeeping band-aid to prevent you from having too many sprinklers because that would save far too much time and allow you from having a big farm, which in many games typically becomes primary income.
        • So instead of massive player effort yielding appropriate reward, they choke the ability to make massive effort: Multiple unlocks, material grind, material sink, mass production, and each item covers a tiny area.
    • -1 The first festival (at the end of Summer) has timed quests that require you to have Crafter and Exploration at least somewhat advanced in order to gather and process certain materials.
      • Theoretically there are no (?) consequences for failure except not having more Beach Festival currency. But why present the player with last-minute helplessness if they chose their path and weren't aware the game was so on-rails that you needed Exploration and Crafting progression?
    -1 Days are timed: 20 minutes real time before you pass out.
    • This creates a huge time crunch considering what the game offers and you THINK you can do, especially based on the promotional videos.
    • For example, there are NPCs you can interact with and Community Center Bulletin Board requests you can take and deliver. But doing so would chew up around half your day just running around, more if you try to take your time to leisurely do them in this "cozy game".
      • And Bulletin Board requests aren't really "optional": Various steps in the Island Life app require you do varying amounts of them, and to obtain the critical currencies of Coin and Starsand, you are basically expected to do them or grind out the currency some other way.
      • Further, they become increasingly complex as you advance through the various professions so you become less likely to be able to accomplish them due to material requirements such as crops you haven't grown yet.
    • -1 On top of this, if you want to advance various professions. you obviously need to spend time on them. One of the worst is the staple of cozy life sims: Farming.
      • +1 On the surface, the setup looks good:
        • The promotional videos showed vast farms with a variety of crops. Real farm-sized farms, not just a hobby garden like in Palia. Sign me up!
        • Seasons have meaning, which means planning, and more immersion into the farming life. Growing different things each season instead of the same things over and over again? Brilliant.
        • Lots of crops and even some flowers. Lots to grow and enjoy and stockpile so I can make all sorts of food? Sold.
        • But all the accompanying systems are not well thought out.
      • Farming plots attract weeds and trellises attract bugs. Animals are supposed to help take care of these but that adds Ranching to your daily maintenance. And nothing helps you water your crops until much, much, later.
      • Unlike many games, you really don't have time to manage more than a small hobby garden.
        • Running around trying to water your plants twice a day (or the plots get dry either during the day or overnight) will not be manageable when your farm starts getting big. On top of eating up a sizable chunk of your day, meaning you won't be able to go mining for materials.
        • But without a sizable farm, you will start to not be able to fulfill Bulletin Board requests because you simply don't have a reserve of the crops required and growing them from scratch will probably take longer than the time limit allowed to you for those requests.
          • -1 Of course you can just wait for another request to come, but this is another way the system breaks down -- the more advanced you get, the less you can actually do, and doing them feels not worthwhile.
          • A completed request can give you maybe +25 to +50 Starsand. Or you can go to one of the regularly appearing Tourists at fixed sites to take a photo for them and get a bunch of Starsand too.
        • Without a farm and processed food, you will be living "paycheque-to-paycheque" looking for something to sell immediately (e.g., go fishing). But Coin costs for things start to climb very fast and even a single pack of seeds will cost more than three or four fish.
        • Processing food into slightly more profitable forms like Vegetable Juice is fast but making Jams and Pickles can take literally days for just a few units of vegetables.
          • Like sprinklers, this also feels like deliberately throttling player income by denying them the outcome of massive effort put into farming.
          • But this is highly unsatisfying for the player because there's land for a big farm and they put in the effort despite the sacrifices needed due to the short 20 minute days... and at every stage are thwarted.
          • And Vegetable Juice is fast not to limit income but because it's important for the Ranching supply chain where you need it to make Chicken/Duck Feed.
      • One "solution" to making Farming tolerable is to focus on the Crafter profession (even if you just want a nice farm) because once you get to the end of that profession you get robots to help you gather resources so manually entering the zone to mine doesn't become so urgent.
        • But again, this means the game really is on rails. You "need" to do this first to make some of the other professions not just tolerable but feasible. The open world freedom is an illusion.
        • And they still don't help you water your plants.
      • Even to advance the profession requires considerable random chance:
        • To become an Intermediate Farmer requires you to grow "Gmax" crops where a 3x3 arrangement of certain crops have a chance of merging into a single gigantic unit.
        • -1 This is completely random.
        • -1 But luckily there's fertilizer you can buy to increase your chances. This sort of "selling you the solution" feels more like a live-service paywall than a mechanic in a single-player game.
      • -1 And the ultimate goal/unlocks of Farming directly undermines what made Farming feel immersive with Seasons:
        • Never need to buy seeds again with "Immortal Seeds" that you can make on your own.
        • Ignore seasons completely with those same Immortal Seeds that won't ever die even if the off season.
        • (They still need watering and weeding though, but at least you can safely neglect your farm more. Like a good farmer would?)
      • In a COZY farming sim, sheer busy-ness and RNG does not translate into depth. It is just busywork reducing your available cozy time with maintenance.
    • Ranching also looks bleak.
      • +1 When I first saw you can even have deer and ride exotic farm animals I was sold. It would be great to have a bunch of animals and play and tend to them each day, right?
        • No. There's barely enough time as it. Do that and your farm and other things just go to heck.
        • -1 And every single land mount/vehicle is worse than the basic rollerblades you make when you start your Crafter certification. Literally every single one. The time to mount up on a vehicle or animal is so long compared to a single click to get on/get off your skates.
      • -1 It's clear there's supposed to be a supply chain where Weeds get processed into Rabbit Feed, Rabbit Poop gets processed into Duck/Chicken Feed, poultry eggs get processed into Sheep Feed.
        • Obviously the concept is an interconnected system (Ranching + Farming) and one helps prevent the other from decaying in order to help with scaling and maintenance.
        • But in reality it's hard to predict and you will likely have to supplement this by buying various types of Feed. And that's on top of manually weeding and pest control because you simply can't trust the animals to do their job especially when it's night and the weed just sprang up but all the animals have gone to sleep.
        • And supplementing the supply chain with animal feed of course costs money. Which comes from farming (not realistically scalable), fishing (time consuming), or Bulletin Board requests (time consuming and quickly becoming unfeasible due to the complexity of the requests).
        • The supply chain in unclear, so it ends up just creating more micromanagement and expense for the player.
      • Maintenance of the animals requires time. There are time-saving devices such as the Cleaning Pod (when they work reliably).
        • -1 But these are locked not just behind additional advanced Ranching and Crafting certification and layers of RNG and not available when you need them:
          • You need to be an Intermediate Rancher.
          • This means passing the Junior Rancher test where you have to wait for Giant Eggs to be laid.
          • You also have to pass the Intermediate Rancher test where you have to breed a certain type of rabbit. It's completely random whether you'll get one so it could be several breeding cycles before you finally get one.
          • Even to get a male/female pair of rabbits can be challenging as the Ranch Shop sells just plain brown "rabbits" and you don't know the gender until you buy them.
      • -1 Some "time saving" devices like the Feeding Trough in fact create new problems. In the case of the Feeding Trough, the animals shed and poop and lay eggs at the trough so you have to manually pick them up.
        • Previously they would do their business in their hutch or coop and you could just one-click collect the lot instead of manually clicking every unit that's lying on the ground. It's literally a new problem.
        • But luckily they sell you the solution with a Ranching perk that automatically vacuums them up into your inventory. Which certainly makes it look like the perks are relevant.
    • Now imagine trying to have both Farming AND Ranching.
      • Better start scaling down your idea of a farm and how many animals you have. Maybe delete some of that farm, put some of the animals into storage limbo? Does that feel like a cozy choice?
    • -1 Even final-stage Crafting profession Robots don't really help. The Gathering Robots:
      • Do not appear to use your perks like getting seeds from harvesting crops.
      • Cannot be made to ignore what you don't want harvested, such as crops in a 3x3 Gmax formation: These have a chance to merge into the gigantic Gmax only when all of them mature, so if the Robot harvests those that matured a bit earlier, the whole Gmax attempt will have to wait for another growing cycle.
      • Don't help you with watering plants -- that's separately gated by mass production of costly sprinklers.
    • So it's not just the time crunch, but badly thought out systems that should never have gotten past Closed Beta Tests.
    -1 / FAIL  The tight days undermine being human and sane.
    • Assembling and cooking a different meal each day? Sitting down at a restaurant to eat a meal? Luxuries when you're on a 20 minute timer and it's far easier to just snack on low-effort mass produced food like the berries you can pick from bushes scattered throughout the world or batch grilling grilling mushrooms found on the ground.
    • What was the point of growing crops? Isn't it to have a wide enough variety of crops to make some of the scores of recipes instead of eating the same thing over and over? And sit down and relax to have your breakfast, lunch, and dinner? You know? Like a regular human being? Maybe with one of your NPC friends?
    • What about taking time out to just be with your Ranch critters and pet them or go riding just for fun? Without the threat of your Farm or Ranch slowly decaying while you do so?
    • When it's a time-luxury to do a sane human thing like cooking and sitting down to enjoy a meal... what type of life is this "life sim" simulating? Or is it just meant to be "cozy"? And what does that really mean when this structure is a "cozy game"?
    -1 Band-aid systems to cover up poor systems
    • For example, ammunition costs 5 Rock to make 2 Simple Ammo, and in the early game you could be using literally dozens to kill a boss creature. Later on it's Arrows which cost 1 Iron Ingot per 3 Arrows. Meanwhile you need those resources for other things than a pitiful amount of arrows.
    • This is probably why they allow you to find crafted ammunition and even Arrows while mining. Yes, when mining ores, you might find some Arrows. Why? Because it's tedious to mine resources just to waste on ammo?
    • It's literally easier to just ignore the boss and run around the arena mining the resources you need, then get out. You not only save ammunition but you save precious time when you only have 20 minutes per day.
    A tight 20-minute time window is simply too short for game that advertises living a "relaxed pastoral life". Simply sitting down on a chair will cost you 3 precious seconds for that "mistake", another 3 seconds to get out of the chair, and you can't talk to NPCs while sitting down even if they are next to you on the same bench.
    Going into town to make Bulletin Board request deliveries -- or just to talk to people -- becomes an all-day event while your crops dry out.

    Currently, certain things do pause time, such as when you open your Inventory, when you browse a Worktable looking for what you want to craft in a not-sorted-in-alphabetical-order list, and when you are in dialog with someone.
    But they are planning to have multiplayer, which means none of those time-freezes can be allowed.

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