Apple Arcade hit Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is coming to new platforms in 2025. The Animal Crossing-like life sim will launch on Nintendo Switch and PC in early 2025. It’ll be a timed console exclusive for Nintendo before coming to PlayStation 4 and PS5 shortly after.
Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is Apple Arcade’s most popular game, Arcade Senior Director Alex Rofman told me in an interview earlier this year. The iOS game takes the basic concept of Animal Crossing and adds in popular Sanrio characters. That experience has only been available to Apple Arcade subscribers for the past year, but it’ll soon make its way to more platforms.
I spoke to developers from Sunblink at Summer Game Fest, where I demoed an early Nintendo Switch build of the port. It was still very much a work in progress, with long load times and a sub-30 frame rate. However, developers on hand assured me that the version I was playing was completely unoptimized. Remember that Apple Arcade has timed exclusivity deals with certain releases, which means that work on the port only began fairly recently.
The team also confirms that the PC version will feature mouse and keyboard support on day one. The team at Sunblink expects the PC and PlayStation versions to run at 60 frames per second (fps), while the Switch version will run at a locked 30 fps.
While it’s still early, Sunblink says that the new versions will come with all the content currently available in the mobile game and feature synchronized events like holidays. Bigger updates will be mobile-first for now, with those changes coming to other platforms after. The console and PC versions won’t interact with the Apple Arcade release either, as cross-saves will not be supported.
Sunblink still has some major plans in the works for the game, too. The team is currently working on a large 2.0 update that will bring another explorable island to the game. The developer I spoke to also teased that the update would come with an unidentified fan-requested feature that’s standard in life simulators. The ports will include that update, as they’ll launch after it goes live for mobile players. That should hopefully make it a more robust alternative to Animal Crossing once it launches on new platforms.
Hello Kitty: Island Adventure launches in early 2025 for Nintendo Switch and PC, with PS4 and PS5 versions planned later.
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