Coral Island (2023)

Early impressions:

• For a farming sim, the town is huge. I would've personally preferred a smaller town where I could easily find any building/character, but it's starting to grow on me as it gives the game a more realistic feel.

• This is the first farming sim I've played where the town has a modern look and feel to it. I love rural aesthetics, but it's a nice change.

• The game is very laid-back. I'm free to do whatever I feel like (and there are a lot of different things to do), and I'm not constantly feeling like I'm missing out or lagging behind, which is great.

• I love the visuals. It's cartoony but not too much - still more realistic than most farming sims out there. And I just love fixed/isometric camera.

• All the characters are beautifully designed, in my opinion. I find most of the bachelorettes to be very cute. And I wish Bree was single.

Playtime: 58,5 hours

Played: 2025

Intro

This is a farm life sim. You arrive in a village and get your own farm. Then you build up your farm, skills, tools, relationships and the village itself. There's also a mine full of enemies where you can get ore for tool upgrades. Coral Island's main twist is that you also have to clean up the ocean and run a farm underwater.

The Good

• Fast travel! Every farm sim should have it!
• You can craft anywhere, it doesn't matter where the parts are! Yay!
• Casual gameplay.
• You get sprinklers fairly quickly (on land at least).
• Decent characters, especially the giants are quite cute.
• Some nice interactions and cutscenes.
• Really nice character drawings.
• Improving the environment feels nice.

The Bad

• The environment becomes polluted again, making your efforts feel futile.
• Cutscenes require a very specific time and location to trigger, often in places you don't normally visit.
• The option to increase text speed is called "typewriter effect". I only discovered you can have text appear instantly after ~50 hours.
• Starting from nothing at the underwater farm feels awful.
• Lots of quests don't give community points when it really feels they should.
• No elevator at floor 35 in the four different mines. Why?!
• Combat is just hitting things.
• The mines are ugly and boring.
• No indication (like an icon) that an item can be harvested.
• Festivals can block your access or prevent fast travel.
• Most skill upgrades are boring, like +15% selling price.
• The player character has such a big bobblehead it looks like they're from a different game.

The Ugly

• Coral Island is incredibly grindy. You need an incredible amount especially of gold to get all the upgrades and cosmetic items. Even after 58 hours i feel i'm not even halfway there.
• Land and underwater farm upgrades are completely separate. Seriously, i think i may not even be at a third of unlocking things.
• There are a dozen different machines to process goods and each can only hold very few items so you constantly have to take out and add items, which becomes a really annoying chore.
• The game doesn't feel very cosy. Especially some of the gigantic interiors of buildings are awful.
• There are very limited decorative options, especially for outside.
• Chests can only hold 40 items. Every good (plant, flower, milk) has 5 levels of quality. You end up with a farm filled with ugly chests and machines.
• Stores are constantly closed. Really annoying after to deal with after playing Fields of Mistria (in which stores are always available).
• You have to get tons of different items for various altars to unlock various game elements.

The Truly Terrible

• No manual saving. No autosave. No save & quit. You can only save by going to bed.
• Mandatory bedtime. Sleeping after 00.00 means waking up with half stamina. At 2.00 you faint, have to pay the clinic and wake up with half stamina. I'm an adult, can i please choose when i go to bed myself? Thanks.

Conclusion

Coral Island isn't a bad game but the devs obviously tried to pad game length to make up for the relative lack of actual content (character interactions). The gold grind is especially awful. The game also has many of the common flaws of farm sims, improving in only a few aspects and actually being worse in others. The game is fun for the first 30 hours or so and then you feel how they hit the brakes and progress becomes much slower. It really is a shame, there are some good ideas here but the overall design is just lacking.

After this week, I'm going to have a lot more free time (as it'll be summer break) to finally get back to some JRPGs. In the meantime, this has been great to play for an hour or so in the evenings over the past week.

I just hit summer last night (and lost a ton of spring crops that weren't ready to harvest before end of spring, ughhh). I love how the characters all change outfits for the season.

One of my favorite things about this has been the NPC interactions that you'll sometimes walk into. At first I thought they were going to trigger quests, but they're legit just you walking by and witnessing a conversation between some NPCs as a little cutscene. Definitely adds life to the characters and game overall.

I'm also really enjoying the diving. It is a little tedious to just be hacking away at trash to clear the areas, but the underwater map is really pretty and I feel good saving the coral, haha.

Money is still a struggle at this point. Crops obv take several days to grow, and the foraging stuff is better for crafting or holding onto for energy than making money. Everything is so expensive. I've upgraded my bag twice (at 1000 and 3500 coral or whatever the currency is supposed to be) and only did like one other thing that cost 2k (upgrading crop value at the lab) and that took all of spring to manage. I did kinda just derp around a little bit, and energy is a consistent issue. But it feels very similar to Wylde Flowers in that sense, as that took the better part of the year to really get money coming in. But there are clothes I wanna buy and they're all so expensive. :c Been in these overalls for a month.

I finally picked this up to play on my Steam Deck the other day. Having a great time so far. Lots of diversity and inclusiveness, ton of goals to meet (the museum, friendship levels, town rating, merit points, leveling up your various skills like farming, foraging, etc.), and plenty to do.

It's yet another sim game with a sped up clock, but you can adjust between 50%-100% in the settings. I haven't timed how long 50% actually gives you, but I'm definitely keeping it there. I tend to run out of energy before I'm ready to end a day anyway, so looking forward to steadily building stamina and being able to refill that without just eating random flowers and mushrooms that I'd prefer to keep for crafting.

I'm on like the 11th or 12th day. The cherry blossom festival was really cute.

J'adore les graphismes, ils sont vraiment bien fait, j'apprécie beaucoup le fait que chaque maison possède un style différent et chaque détail est important. Le jeu montre beaucoup d'inclusivité qu'il soit culturel ou physique, il est rare de voir une femme avec des vergetures par exemple. L'histoire est typique du "J'arrive pour être fermier et je sauve mon village" mais je retrouve des dynamiques que je ne connaissais pas comme la plongée qui est intéressante. Je n'ai que 10 heures de jeu mais ça se voit qu'on pourra facilement monter à la centaine d'heure tranquillement, il y a beaucoup de chose à faire. Et je pense que le jeu a encore à montrer et que les développeurs vont rajouter des trucs au fur et à mesure.

Il y a beaucoup d'événements sociaux et il n'est pas contraignant de communiquer avec les habitants. Ils sont peut être nombreux par rapport à ce que j'ai l'habitude mais ils sont tous très différents et je trouve ça incroyable qu'ils aient réussi à créer autant de personnages tous différents et uniques.

Alors pour pas 5 étoiles ? Parce qu'il y encore des ajustements à faire comme pour les touches, il arrive souvent que des actions ou des dialogues soient mélangés, il m'arrive trop souvent de devoir me replacer plusieurs fois avant d'avoir l'action que je veux réaliser. Quand il arrive quelque chose dans la nuit ou qu'une lettre nous demande de venir, il est difficile de trouver le lier indiqué, il manque des indices souvent. et je trouve dommage que la vue reste statique malgré la 3D.

Mais ça reste un jeu que je vais apprécier pendant longtemps. Je le conseille vivement