Starsand Island Preview: A The Sims-like farming sim challenger with anime vibes

Seed Labs' Starsand Island is a game that focuses on managing a farm at its core, but there's a lot more to it than that. To the point that the game might even challenge The Sims in terms of what you can do. There are various in-game events, social relationships, and even building and decorating your own house. And all of this is presented in a colourful anime style with lots of text boxes and icons. The release is coming to PC and "consoles" at the end of 2025.

Gamereactor attended a presentation held on Discord, where the creators were present to answer questions. At the same time, we saw a fairly comprehensive look at the authentic gameplay and various features. We didn't get to play it ourselves, so we can't say anything about the feel and technical smoothness yet. In addition, the internet connection was somewhat choppy during the presentation, so we don't dare give a final opinion on the game's resolution and frame rate either.

Colourful and cheerfulness seem to be the main theme of Starsand Island. There is a lot to do, but everything has its own positive and relaxed atmosphere. The challenges the farmer faces remain fresh as the in-game seasons pass by, as different plants can only be grown during certain seasons. An interesting addition seemed to be giant plants, which looked particularly impressive. It has not yet been clarified how the handling of these human-sized pumpkins and melons differ from the usual ones. And since it is a farm, the player can choose to take care of cattle and other animals, such as chickens.

In addition to managing a traditional farm, the presentation revealed that the player can build their own house. The tool seemed versatile, although quite detailed. So, for now, the question remains how everything will work with a traditional game controller. Otherwise, there are all kinds of icons, explanatory text boxes, and speech bubbles. Therefore, you should be prepared to learn the different functions used in the game for a while.

In addition to managing your own farm, you can also go fishing, and on the side, you may also catch some real treasures. You can trade with other people and enter into different relationships, either professional or romantic, with a total of six different romance options noted in the presentation.

The focus of the game is on moulding your own environment, but you can also modify your own appearance with numerous choices. Although the tasks you have to do are very practical and physical, this does not mean that you don't have to be unfashionable while playing. There were already a wide range of different clothing items and outfits shown off, so if you are interested in how your character dresses, you can spend time on that too.

The world of Starsand Island is promised to be seamless, which speaks of ambition and at least a somewhat large open world. Therefore, the question arises of how you will move from place to place. Walking is one solution, but for longer distances there are various transportation options available on land and water. So, I could imagine that this will encourage you to explore the environment more, and hopefully the developers have hidden all kinds of things to discover in the terrain.

To me its seems that the foundation for a farm simulation was laid first, and after that all areas of the game have been purposefully expanded. If the whole thing comes together, the end result could be very interesting. There seems to be things to tinker with and experiment with in every area of ​​life that you could imagine related to life and farming, and according to the creators, the story campaign can be completed in 17 hours (an unusually accurate estimate), but if you want to experience and do everything, it is worth setting aside about 200 hours.

Starsand Island clearly knows what it wants to be. The biggest questions so far are the smoothness of the user interface and whether the whole thing will hold together well despite the amount of different things to do. However, it seems certain that when starting out, you should be prepared to read a lot of different text boxes and click a lot of icons. Starsand Island clearly has ambition and substance, so now we just have to wait until the end of 2025 to see how it's fully realised.