Early Access Review: Starsand Island

2 days ago 3

Published Feb 10, 2026, 9:00 AM EST

Ethan Krieger (He/Him) is an editor at DualShockers that got started in the writing industry by covering professional basketball for a sports network. Despite being a diehard sports fan (mainly formula one, basketball, American football, and golf), video games have always been his #1 interest.

Historically, I've not personally been a chronic cozy game player. A few have hooked me throughout the years, but mostly titles like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. Outside of those examples, and while I have a lot of respect for the genre and fully understand its appeal, I can't think of many other titles that have caught me for more than a test drive.

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Still, I can't lie. The buzz around Starsand Island, the latest entry into the cozy game catalog of life sims, was enough for me to take a closer look. At the time of writing, I've put a solid 15 or so hours into the experience in Early Access. And holy cow, am I still not even close to seeing everything that the game wants to show me.

I'm confident, however, that I will actually stick with this game and keep letting it reveal itself to me, because I simply do not want to put it down. If it weren't for things like jobs and other real-world responsibilities getting in the way, it would be easy for me to be well over the 100-hour mark with this one already.

As an Early Access title, this is impressive. Starsand Island really does just feel like one of those potentially special cozy games. Let's get into a bit more of why.

Life is a Vibe

Immediately after a fairly detailed character creation menu, Starsand Island Early Access drops you right into your new little cottage, which you can immediately customize, repaint, and modify to your liking. The music is instantly lovely and catchy, and the game's Ghibli-ish art style is a great sight to take in.

Solara, your old childhood buddy (who essentially serves as the Isabelle from Animal Crossing character), is already welcoming you back to the countryside after you've grown weary of the hustling/busting city life. It's absolutely a bit of a cliché, familiar-feeling setup, but honestly, it's pretty timeless as well.

Starsand Island really does just feel like one of those potentially special cozy games.

After coming to terms with the basics of the game, you're essentially set free to do whatever you want. There are quests to follow, dozens of smaller objectives housed within a few different menus, people to meet, errands to run, places to explore, and so much more. If you didn't know any better, you might see all of this and think that this peaceful country life really seems just as jam-packed with responsibilities as the city. You would, however, be wrong in one crucial way.

Starsand Island, while immediately loaded with things to do, also lets you do things whenever you want to. Aside from an occasional citizen request you can pick up from a local bulletin board, nothing is timed, and you're able to do (or not do) anything you please. For me, this low stress, peaceful, personal pacing felt amazing. Anything can wait till tomorrow, so go ahead and make sure you're enjoying today in the meantime.

I've become a bit of a grinder in recent years, always cramming as much work as I can into a week before jumping into a new project and doing it all over again. Starsand Island reminded me that it's okay to slow down and take some time for myself. As you explore the island, you'll keep uncovering more and more things you can do. The game really is an onion, featuring layer after layer of new content constantly. There's so much here that it would feel overwhelming in most other games. In Starsand, it just feels like more freedom.

Starsand Island, while immediately loaded with things to do, also lets you do things whenever you want to.

I could go on and on about how refreshing I found the pace of Starsand Island. The world is a stressful place, and these types of video games that allow you to disconnect and dive into another life momentarily are sometimes so cathartic, healing, and rejuvenating in ways you can't really describe to someone until they experience it themselves. Starsand Island has been one of those for me so far.

Time does pass fairly quickly in the game (it's not on real world time like Animal Crossing), and you'll need to go to bed before 2am so you don't pass out randomly and lose stamina for the next day's duties, but it's still low stress either way. It's then "rise and shine" once again bright and early at 6am to get back to business.

So Much Room for Activities

So, what will you actually be doing on the island? Well, you have a frankly absurd number of options. At its core, Starsand Island is formed around your ability to take on five different types of jobs: crafting, farming, fishing, ranching, and exploring. The game steers you towards crafting first, since it plays a part in all the other jobs too, but after that, you have free rein to choose what you learn next.

Mentor characters around town will send you on quests to learn the ropes of whatever profession you want to take up next, and completing enough will earn you a higher level of certificate in your current profession. Keep leveling up your certs, and you'll keep unlocking better blueprints to craft better gear, new items to furnish your house with, better rewards, NPC affection levels ranking up, and more.

What's truly impressive to me is that every one of these professions is much deeper than I expected going into the game. Ranching starts with raising rabbits, which requires you build them a hutch, feed them, groom them, rename them if you please, and bond with them to raise their affection. You can expect every type of profession to get way more layered and detailed than you would've predicted, but everything is rolled out in a way that it just feels like systems building on top of each other instead of ever overwhelming you with duties.

There's also an entire second area of the game called Moonlit Forest, which serves as the dungeon experience of Starsand Island. Here, you'll find tons of necessary and important materials, like iron, copper, and tin. You'll also find treasure chests to unlock, enemies to fight, and an occasional light platforming section or two. These areas also have some light puzzling as you'll guide ghostly critters to open new doorways to new areas, or power on/repair bridges to cross previously impossible gaps.

And that's just everything you can do that's essentially job-related. Starsand Island doesn't even stop there, however. You can buy lottery scratch off tickets. You can cook food to be used as stamina/skill buffs. You can play variations of Tetris and Snake in an arcade to win rewards. You can go fishing or bug hunting just for fun. You can gather resources to unlock fast travel stations around the map.

So, what will you actually be doing on the island? Well, you have a frankly absurd number of options.

Or, you can start diving in full force to the building/customizing side of Starsand Island. I'll be honest, I'm not a huge builder myself (it's my least favorite part of Fortnite, for example), but Starsand does feature an absolutely robust suite of creation tools for those that want to strap on a construction helmet and get to work. For me, I opted instead to purchase pre-made house upgrades from a shop in town so I could improve my dwelling with minimal effort, but the choice on how you handle this will be up to you.

We also haven't even touched on how fun it is to get around the island compared to other similar games. You have tons of options here, from skateboards and rollerblades, to motorcycles and sports cars, jet-skis and speed boats, and even ostriches and llamas. Honestly, it's a bit difficult to get into all the options available to you in Starsand Island, because I don't want to keep you here for hours reading when you could just be playing it all instead.

Starsand Island is also a life sim that's tied heavily into a social aspect. There are dozens of characters and critters to meet on the island as you explore around, pick up your odd jobs, or run errands. Every character and animal has an affection meter, which goes up the more you talk, give gifts, and assist them with their needs around town. For the animals, this also means stopping to pet and feed them from your backpack's inventory.

Animals can be won over enough to come and live as your pet (or you can purchase a pet from the local shop), and humans can eventually be asked to move in if things are getting that serious. Once again here, the freedom of choice is up to you. There aren't really any narrative clues or directions that lock you into certain NPC relationships. Who you spend your time with depends on how you personally feel about them.

Everyone you meet is also listed in a menu on your phone (which holds all your useful apps, menus, quest logs, encyclopedias, etc.). Here, you can keep track of their current Affection Rank, but also keep tabs on their likes, dislikes, and personalities so that you can start to sort out who you actually like, and how to get them to like you back.

Again, there's no pressure here. I'd sometimes give someone a gift they didn't totally love, but there would be no negative progress in their affection regardless. Since nothing is on a timer and there's no end date to the game to lock you out of things eventually, you're completely freed up to experiment and learn more about the characters naturally as you go. This also gives you time to really sort out if you like a character or not instead of prodding you too quickly to jump into something you aren't ready for.

Not only that, but NPCs will often times give you little gifts in return, and you'll also unlock new dialogue with each of them as you go as well. Typically, in games with social link-like elements, it can often feel like you're doing all the work in a relationship. It's nice that in Starsand Island, it feels like people really do start to want you around too.

What Needs Ironed Out

As much as I'm thoroughly enjoying Starsand Island in this Early Access state, I do think it's important to point out some things that might need some additional polish as we roll towards an eventual full release. For one, I did notice a handful of typos, or sections of text with dev/code prompts still added in that were supposed to be edited out. I was also playing in English, and I'd occasionally have an NPC conversing with me in Chinese, which meant I didn't know what they were saying to me.

I'm never sure with early PC titles if this is a personal PC issue or the game itself, but I did have a fairly steep amount of screen tearing, dropped frames, wacky pop-in, and other performance-related issues of the sort. Starsand doesn't seem like the most performance-intensive game out there, so I'd imagine there's still a solid amount of optimization that needs to take place here.

Combat in Moonlit Forest is extremely basic, and I wouldn't really categorize the boss encounters as fun or interesting. Though there is a lot of dialogue with characters in the world, no one's story has really, truly gripped me to this point. Quests are mostly fetch-y in nature, or rely on a lot of mining, gathering, crafting, and refining to carry out.

I also had a few annoying issues where button prompts on the screen wouldn't do what they were supposed to. For example, I was trying to expand my backpack space, which requires you to press the View button on Xbox while in the backpack menu. Instead, the game kept launching my map, which is what the View button is supposed to do when you aren't in a menu. Other times, I'd have two options with two button prompts to choose from, except both prompts would mistakenly tell me to press A for completely different outcomes. Whoops.

It's also currently single-player only, so if you're hoping to share an island with your real-life buddies, it's not possible at the moment. Certain quest requirements can begin to feel like genuine grinds by the end too, likely with the hopes to keep you in the game for longer periods of time.

And yet, all of this aside, I can't stop playing Starsand Island, and I'm more than happy to jump back in and keep experiencing the cozy vibe of this game world. I'm hooked, and for what it might lack in some current polish and optimization, it more than makes up for in options, charm, and a gameplay loop that is simply just working for me right now.

You should go in with understanding that this is still very much in Early Access, and the game will surely only continue to be improved upon and refined from here. At the same time, there is still plenty to do and experience in Starsand Island that I think more than validates jumping into the game as it stands right now.

While we don't score Early Access reviews, I'd definitely recommend Starsand Island to fans of this type of cozy experience. I'm expecting to continue playing many more hours myself.