Amber Isle Review

Amber Isle is a prehistoric social simulation game developed by Ambertail Games and published by Team17, the first game to come out of this developer. I’ve played quite a few games all about starting a new life in a desolate town, slowly turning it into a bustling paradise where everyone is your friend. I’ve usually enjoyed these types of games for their laidback and relaxing gameplay, so what does this prehistoric adventure have in store?

The town of Amber Isle has seen better days and is on the verge of complete abandonment with only a few residents left. In a last-ditch effort to save the town, a shop is opened and you are put in charge of running it! Now you’re on a journey to bring the town back to life, make friends, and show that grumpy ol’ Mayor Clawsworth that you have what it takes to put Amber Isle on the map (that does not call it an aspiring deathtrap).

I think the characters of Amber Isle are pretty good for the most part. There are a ton of Paelofolk with unique designs, personalities, preferences, and even their own chain of quests to undertake. Although they don’t have the most dialogue outside of cutscenes, they can be humorous and likeable. However, the smaller ones are pretty hard to spot at times, which makes finding them a little harder than it should be even when you see them on the minimap.

Actually, speaking of the map, let’s talk about Amber Isle itself. It’s a small, yet diverse island with various biomes to explore. Each area has different resources to gather and secrets to find. Although most of it is locked off behind either gates or by objects that need to be cut down, it’s fun and satisfying to run around, collecting materials to bring back to your shop. However, there’s more to these areas than just gathering. You’ll also be able to customise the various biomes to make them more livable for residents so that they’ll move in by placing down objects. This is actually pretty nice, with a variety of options to create the best-looking areas. You will have to do this as anyone moving into town will need a home in their preferred biome, and to make it livable you have to hit certain thresholds, so if you’re lazy, you could just spam placing objects without worrying about making it look nice. I should also mention that these areas are where you gather your resources, so I was being very selective about where I put homes and objects so I would have easy access to them.

But now, let’s take it all back home to your shop. With the resources you gathered out in the somewhat untamed wilderness, you can craft them into items and place them in your shop, either as decorations or as products for sale. Making your shop look the best it can be is a little tough though. You can’t put items on walls or on top of other objects. I tried to show off my collection of max friendship statues, but I could only put them on the floor. The game also isn’t too helpful when it comes to showing how to design the layout of your shop, as your customers will leave if it isn’t properly set up. Maybe I was missing something but I couldn’t figure it out.

Anyways, once you’ve set your prices and placed everything you want, it’s time to open up. Your customers will either buy your products outright or try to haggle to get the item at a better price. Some customers will even ask for recommendations or put in crafting requests in exchange for higher payouts. You’ll also need to keep your shop clean as customers will dirty the floor and shelves. It’s actually a little hectic as you’re trying to juggle between taking care of the shop and dealing with customers. It’s pretty fun, but it feels a little overwhelming at times.

Once your day is done, you might want to relax and hang out with some of the residents of the Isle. Making friends is rather important, as the more you level up their friendship, the more bonuses you unlock, such as more inventory space, new patterns, and even statues of them. You raise your friendship by selling them items at good prices, talking to them, or hanging out by taking them on your gathering runs. Actually, that last method tends to be my go-to when I want to max out their friendship because I’m both potentially making a profit and spending time with my friends. It’s a win-win situation!

This all seems pretty fun, but there’s only so much time in the day. Certain activities like crafting, gathering, and opening the shop will cause time to pass, which makes planning out your day rather important as certain NPCs will only be available at certain times. I do rather like this sort of time system, as it puts less pressure on you to do everything you can in a given time but still makes you think about what you want to do with your day. You can do a lot in a single day, but you will have to sleep eventually.

And that’s pretty much everything you’ll be doing in the game, but how does it hold up in terms of performance? Well, it ran very smoothly with rarely any hiccups in framerate. However, I did run into a lot of issues. The camera is actually pretty bad. It’s at a fixed angle and can collide with the terrain, so keeping it low may cause issues. It also sometimes clips into the terrain, completely blocking my view. It can seriously be a hindrance if you aren’t keeping it in mind and if you are, it will somehow break for no reason. I ran into a fair amount of glitches as well; audio, visual, and ones that affected gameplay. Sometimes I hear the friendship level-up sound when I wake up, or NPCs jittering on the environment, take a screenshot every time I enter Photo Mode (which captures the moment the menu fades away), or a customer sells me the item I just bought from them again. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it is annoying to deal with.

I did, however, manage to break the game in a completely different way. Yeah, as it turns out, Seed Sowers are ridiculously overpriced for how early you can obtain them and cheap to craft (you only need two pieces of dirt) so I made a serious profit off them. Heck, you don’t need to even put it on your store’s shelves. Just put a bunch of them in the selling box outside and that 500,000 debt you’re given can be paid off in only a couple of days. Now, this is very likely an oversight that will get patched out, but I have to admit that it was insanely amusing.

Overall, my time in Amber Isle was pretty good. Running the shop is a fun but frantic time, and turning the Isle into a real paradise was great. However, it’s lacking in several areas, such as a bad camera system and the freedom to really make something special. I definitely recommend it, but I hope a few patches could resolve some issues.