Dinkum

Animal Crossing meets Stardew Valley except its on an island in Australia. What more could you want to be honest.

Move out of the city with a sweet old woman named Fletch to try and start your own little town on a tropical island, and invite new residents to expand your town during the course of the game. It’s a fun little gameplay loop and my partner and I have been vibing with this game for a little while now.

You start off at the docks of your island and your first task is to find somewhere to set up as home. You get to choose where you put the base tent (which becomes your town hall), as well as your home tent, which you can upgrade later into a proper house. You’ll also need a place for visitors to stay so that John, Theodore, Raine, Clover, and a whole host of other fun characters can meet you and chill out on your island too. I mean when the options for where to live is a dreary city or a beautiful village on a tropical island, I think anyone who’s ever played Stardew Valley or any other similar life sim game knows what the right choice is.

But of course you have to show them that it’s worth staying first. Make friends with them, show them that their shops and services are welcome in the town, and eventually they’ll decide to apply for a deed. Once they have a deed, Fletch can start working on processing it, and you can build them a house in your town. Don’t worry about where you put it, Fletch can help you with relocating houses too!

Lilla and I are only so far through the game, and I don’t even know if we’ve met every character yet, or how many more there are. We also haven’t encountered much overarching plot like you’d find in Portia, but then again this is a cozy life sim, not a big grand adventure. I also don’t know if the world is designed or procedurally generated since I’ve only created one save file.

That being said, I do have one gripe with this game, and thats the controls. At first it feels like it would play similar to Stardew Valley, but in reality, what happens is that whenever you click or interact with something, the square in front of you is always the one that is acted on, not where you clicked. That means that when it comes to placing paths or watering crops, you have to kind of fumble the facing angle of your character to move the square to where you need it to be. Fishing is also dependent on your characters facing angle instead of your camera angle, all in all the game takes a bit of getting used to finagaling the controlls.

I also cannot really talk about what the progression system is like on a single player playthrough. Fletch gives you a journal which acts as an achievement book and gives you a currency who’s name I forget every time but Lilla knows what I mean when I say “merit points” or some similar adjective, and you can exchange those points for licenses which are required to buy or craft certain tools. For example you cannot buy a pickaxe from John until you have a mining license. When Lilla and I played through the early game, we kinda divided up which licenses we got so that we could do different jobs to start with. I went with mining and she went with logging. I don’t know what the early game is like when you’re playing solo.

Also some tips for getting started with coop. To play coop, each player needs to have their own island (as that’s how characters are created) and they need to progress the main quest line until at the minimum they can sleep through the first night, but more preferrably until they can craft nails and crates (as your crafting recipe progress is tied to your character not your world.) When you arrive in the host’s world, you can get a sleeping bag from the pile in the base tent, which isn’t explained in game and I had to look up first time. Your inventory and money is tied to your character, but you can transfer money into item form by treating the money box in your inventory as an inventory slot (left/right clicking it pulls out all/half of your money into an item stack.) Yes this does lead to obvious save data dupe bugs. No we have not been exploiting them.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062520 £14.99