Among the many Next Fest games that offered nice little demos, Amber Isle was one of the most enjoyable and colorful games at the current Next Fest. The game looks similar to Animal Crossing, except the villagers are dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. It behaves and is designed exactly as you’d expect.
Over the past eight years, the expectation has been that a wave of Hay Day and shop sims would take us to the small village, as a result of the success of Stardew Valley and the surge in popularity of Animal Crossing. And it wasn’t wrong, as we’ve been treated to countless adaptations of the formula over the past few years, some good, some mediocre.
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Amber Isle arrives at the tail end of the current era of cozy life sims, as players slowly but steadily turn away from new games that don’t bring much to the table. In this case, adorable dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals living a peaceful town life might be enough to appeal to most fans of the genre, but its (seemingly) more focused approach to the gameplay loop may also help to differentiate it from its competitors.
The game is being developed by Ambertail Games, a Northern Irish studio focused on making “fun, joyful and inclusive” games. Judging from the Next Fest demo alone, it’s already a pretty polished (and good-looking) indie game that’s full of charm and family fun. In fact, despite not being certified by Valve yet, it plays really well on Steam Deck – which is to be expected given its pre-release state.
The demo is set at the very beginning of the game, and includes the character creation process (with many limitations). Not long after our “Paleofolk” sets out on his adventure, an accident crash-lands them on the titular Amber Island, where a mostly abandoned village is searching for the perfect shopkeeper.
The player’s Paleofolk is adept at crafting (accomplished through simple resource gathering and regular menus) and willing to learn from the villagers despite the obviously unexpected circumstances, so they are soon assigned to restore the run-down shop to a respectable state. This includes making the shop look nice, collecting and crafting items to sell, bargaining, and even buying cool stuff from unexpected visitors.
The story is a bit lengthy at first, with several characters coming and going to walk you through the basic steps of opening a shop and making the most of your soon-to-be-burgeoning business. I personally wish the game’s first hour or so took a freer, more experimentation-focused approach, especially given how simple and familiar most of the mechanics are, but Ambertail Games is clearly welcoming all kinds of players, not just those who’ve already spent hundreds of hours in other digital villages.
Most of the time, you’ll spend your (brief) time slowly exploring new areas of the island, gathering resources, tidying things up, and restoring the town to its former glory in preparation for shopping time, which feels like the culmination of daily activities. However, you’ll soon find that turning a profit and actually expanding your business requires more than just having the right merchandise and setting prices, as the store gets dirty, some customers are looking for specific items or prices, and certain outside opportunities are simply too good to pass up.
Overall, I played a fairly generous demo and felt that Amber Isle sacrificed some of the more sandbox-like aspects of similar games in order to focus on the shop experience, at least that’s how I feel so far. Compared to the freestyle approach in Animal Crossing, Amber Isle focuses more on building connections with each villager and learning from them, which reminds me of the fresh modes of Cozy Forest and other small games.
Mind you, Amber Isle still seems to offer plenty of freedom when it comes to running and decorating your own shop. I look forward to more playable content opening up as the village becomes more lively and more routes and hidden areas open up in the wilderness, but Ambertail Games’ approach of making players care about yet another cozy life sim may pay off thanks to a significantly more restrained structure and, of course, the very adorable Paleofolks with unique names and personalities.
Amber Isle was previewed on PC and Steam Deck via its publicly released Next Fest demo. It is currently scheduled to be released on PC and Nintendo Switch. No release date or window has been provided yet.
