Early access review of Coral Island: somewhat Stardew-like, but with a little more ease of farming

Coral Island calls itself a “reimagining of farming games,” but if we’re being honest, it’s not really a whole new take on the Stardew Valley formula.

The game’s main island and your overgrown farmland there are remarkably similar to Stardew Valley’s layout, and any DewHead (that’s what we call ourselves) will recognise the tasks you complete, which include growing crops, caring for animals, making friends with locals, exploring a mine five levels at a time, and pacifying local spirits by offering them bundles of various crops.

Not that Coral Island isn’t worthwhile, mind you. For starters, everything is rendered in stunning, lively 3D, and everything feels less like labour because of the island environment, which affects the overall architecture, vegetation, and animals. 

You feel like you’re making more progress in less time when you consider that Coral Island is a little simpler than Stardew Valley and that there is an environmental theme running throughout the game. This game is perfect if you like the atmosphere of ConcernedApe’s famous song but were a little intimidated by the idea of having to compose your own almanack by hand.

You show up to take over an underutilised agricultural plot, bedungareed and ready to begin. You may go about every day and work on your to-do list, which begins with fundamentals (meet 20 people! Plant five seeds! Eventually, you can get as creative as you like. Perhaps you should capture more bugs. 

Perhaps you’d want to go fishing. Perhaps you want to go down the mines and battle blobs. Things like picking up feed from the rancher, ore from the blacksmith, and seasonal seeds from the neighbourhood shop could be on your calendar. Two factors prevent you from turning into an unstoppable Terminator-style turnip-growing machine: first, most actions deplete your limited energy bar; and second, if you remain up beyond midnight, you will faint on your own.

I don’t think I ever acquired a farm in Stardew Valley that I was proud of; I don’t think I ever had a consistent enough income; I never had the energy to run dungeons in a way that was actually helpful; I never had the materials to create the goods I needed; and so on. I feel like I’m capable here at Coral Island. I’ve made a big investment in my hot pepper garden. I consistently make more money than I spend. 

I feel like I’ve accomplished something every day instead of just maintaining the land. That’s not to say you can’t build up production lines for seaweed harvesting, optimise the location and timing of your fishing trips, or go deeply into the intricate workings of seed growth cycles. But in order to advance, none of it is necessary. Coral Island has made some adjustments that somewhat benefit you.

They are not enormous weights on the balance, but they do have an impact. Like in Skyrim, you level up your activities pretty rapidly and can unlock % chance powers such as having your crops grow quicker, having your soil stay wet overnight, or receiving twice the resources when you harvest.

Coral Island features an enchanted quick travel system that grows larger the more you use it, generating a positive feedback loop that allows you to advance daily. 

Additionally, using sword swings to repel spiders and other blobs during exploration of the mining dungeons saves energy, allowing you to mine more ore and venture deeper.

The final one, though, could be a glitch. Coral Island is going into early access, and although it seems quite content-heavy, there are certain indicators that range from “eh” to “that’s annoying”. On sometimes, you may need to stop walking and restart in order for your character to be able to turn. 

I haven’t located any special boxes that aren’t empty yet, and some item drops have placeholder images. Basically, my four chickens are merely pets that contribute to the farm feel; they have never produced an egg.

Occasionally, the keys that are supposed to hotswitch between rows of your inventory on the HUD just stop working, forcing you to navigate through the menus and manually rearrange them. 

Additionally, I’ve found that when I dive, I can’t modify the anchor point, so each time I have to go across a sizable portion of the seafloor.

I may have given too much away, but one recent development is the seabed’s cleaning. You are urged to go down there and clean it up since a hazardous oil leak has left it in that condition. In actuality, it’s similar to a submerged version of dungeon crawling in the mines: you go to new locations by demolishing trash units until you come across a unique golden machine key that demolishes large portions of oil, granting you entry to the subsequent place. 

Coral Island makes you desire garbage, so the way it’s incorporated into the game’s bigger ecology is incredibly ingenious. Among the game’s most valuable resources is trash.

Fishing on Coral Island from a bridge

For example, one of the easiest methods to obtain fertiliser is to recycle waste. It’s also a fast way to obtain scrap, which can be utilised to create a variety of helpful items. To obtain more, you’ll probably have to search through trash cans throughout town. 

For some, the clear ecological focus of Coral Island—that the town’s rating rises in proportion to the amount of locally grown fruit it offers and the cleanliness of its seabed—will be sufficient incentive. However, Coral Island incorporates it into the gameplay, so you’ll kind of wind up caring for the ecosystem, if not out of compassion, then at least indirectly.