Coral Island Preview

With a plethora of farm simulation RPGs available to play and many more on the horizon, you might dismiss Coral Island as yet another Stardew Valley clone. Many features are undeniably similar between the two games, but Coral Island does offer a larger town, some entirely new gameplay mechanics, and tons of characters to meet. The game had an extremely successful backing on Kickstarter, quickly reaching every stretch goal and generating loads of hype. The island theme and extensive list of features make Coral Island a highly anticipated release in the farm sim genre. During my time with the Early Access preview, I was able to experience a full year of in-game time, with the majority of core features already present.

You start off as a newcomer to the titular island and are given a worn-down farm covered with debris. A few initial quests get you started, without forcing you to go through an explicit tutorial. These objectives range from planting and harvesting crops to speaking with key characters. As someone who has put an unhealthy amount of time into Stardew Valley, everything was immediately familiar and my mind began skipping ahead to long-term goals. In which order should I clear quests to progress the fastest? What’s the optimal strategy for making money? How can I increase my movement speed to maximise NPC interactions per day? Eventually, I decided to just casually explore the world of Coral Island as intended.

Once you establish your farming routine, you’ll quickly discover there are tons of other things to do than simply manage crops. You can choose to spend time customising your farmhouse, completing quests, or exploring the island — the list goes on. Random events and cutscenes break up your day, and certain objectives like donating items to the museum keep you on the hunt for collectibles. Starting out, I tried my best to focus on crops and generating income, since everything is pricey. Obtaining certain quality of life items like a larger backpack and more efficient tools are a must, but you need to have some cash on hand to do so. Quests are a great way to claim chunks of coins for completing fairly simple tasks. Coral Island seems balanced overall and I didn’t run into any roadblocks in player progression.

There are two interesting minigames — fishing and catching insects. Both are fairly simple, but it’s fun to roam around looking for new fishing spots or insects crawling about. Fishing is fairly straightforward, as your goal is to avoid tension in your fishing rod while filling up a meter by holding down the left mouse button. As for insects, they’ll spot you at a certain distance and you need to use a net to snag them before a short timer runs out and they escape. The gameplay mechanics here are simple, but addictive for those who love to collect rare items. Fighting enemies seems to still be in development, as I was unable to obtain a weapon. Slimes will actually ambush you pretty early on in the mines and farming tools seem to be useless against them.

My initial experience with Coral Island showed it’s on track for a smooth Early Access release with a substantial amount of content. The UI, character interactions, farming mechanics, questlines, crafting, fishing, catching insects, mining, farm customisations, and more are all available and fleshed out. A few minor bugs were present as you’d expect, but nothing remotely close to game breaking. For features still in development, the game clearly marks these as so on the island map and prevents you from entering relevant buildings. Coral Island also opts for tropical-themed 3D graphics, and 2D character art during dialogue sequences. Though you can’t interact with most of the environment, the island does have a lot of detail, especially inside buildings.

There are several specific design choices that Coral Island could have easily done just a little differently than Stardew Valley though. When you group them all together it forms a substantial list. For example, there’s a TV in your farmhouse that tells you the weather, a crop shipping bin in front of your house placed next to your mailbox, the same set of farming tools, an eerily familiar default farm layout, a geode drop chance from mining stone, town festivals, a corporate antagonist, an end-of-day summary, and so on. That said, Stardew is over five years old now and fans may be looking for something fresh. Coral Island can fulfil that need and does a great job of realising those core gameplay loops that farm sim fanatics know and love. For newcomers, it looks to be a solid farm sim with enough content where everyone will find something appealing.