Game Review: Sugardew Island

By Manuel

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, XBox One, XBox Series, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC (Steam)

We're huge fans of farming games here at A-to-J, and my particular experience goes all the way back to the SNES version of Harvest Moon. Thanks to the success of games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there have been several games released to fill in all corners of the farming niche. Sugardew Island is a game that came to life via a successful Kickstarter, and recently released on just about every major platform. We're going to be taking a look at it on the Nintendo Switch here, since these types of games just seem to hit different there. On that note, let's dive in!

Sugardew Island tells the tale of an island that was once home to animals, humans, and spirits. The humans did what humans do and eventually broke the delicate balance that allowed the island to thrive. Their path of destruction brought them to the great Harmony Tree, and it was at that point where the island itself fought back. Thorns grew over the island, and eventually they drove away both the people and the animals. You take on the role of a traveler who is shipwrecked on the island and saved by Tomte, a wandering trader who tells you all about the island's history. You get to name your character, and change their appearance via a handful of options. The options available to you are very sparse, and pretty much all learn towards female characters, but they get the job done. Anyhow, it's your character's job to make the best out of their current predicament, and that means farming to survive. That's not so simple though, as you still have to deal with the Harmony Tree's Guardian. The Guardian doesn't seem all that friendly at first, but they task you with collecting Harmony that will allow the animals to return to the island. I guess this also means humans will eventually be allowed to return too, but I guess that's not important. With that, your journey on Sugardew Island is now underway. Simple as it may seem, that's pretty much all you get as far as story goes. Then again, plot isn't always the focus in games like this, so let's just move on for now.

Describing the gameplay loop in Sugardew Island is pretty easy, since it all revolves around grinding. Thankfully, there are parts of the game that help out with the grind a bit. Breaking a farming game norm, there is no clock for you to work against, and the day/night cycle only goes into effect when you open your shop. Goals are pretty simple too, as they pretty much all center on collecting Sugardew to buy more stuff, and Harmony to complete the Harmony Quests. Completing those quests cause the island's thorns to disappear, and allow the animals that inhabited them to return. Sugardew can be gained in a variety of ways, though the only way to get Harmony is by selling goods at your shop. These goods can literally be anything, but the finished crops bring the biggest return. There are no seasons, so you're free to grow whatever crops you want as long as you have the seeds. Seeds can be bought from Tomte, or be gifted to you from the animals that repopulate the island as you complete Harmony Quests. These animals will randomly drop seeds as long as you leave and re-enter the screen they're on, so they'll eventually be no need to ever buy seeds from Tomte again. Once planted, crops have to be watered and take several in-game days to grow. This is the standard farming fare, but you can actually bypass both of these limitations by using fertilizers that you can craft from weeds you can collect daily. The only real limit you have to the amount of work you can do in a single day is your stamina bar, but you can overcome even this by crafting energy bars to refill it. Besides all that, there are also levels to raise in shopkeeping and farming. You can also upgrade just about everything in-game via completed quests and spent Sugardew and crafting materials. The game does become easier the more you play, but the core loop never truly changes.

Having just gone over farming in-depth (Trust ne, that was just about everything!), I guess it's time to turn our attention to the other big part of Sugardew Island: running your own shop. This aspect of the game was what actually drew me to Sugardew Island in the first place, and the developers seemed to have placed a lot of emphasis on it as well. Setting up your shop is very simple, and that actually leads to a big problem that we'll get to in just a bit. You're able to stock up to four items at the store's base level, but you can eventually upgrade the shop to have more shelf space. Once you place your items, you stand being the register and open for business. Once open, island spirits will wander in to make purchases. Each purchase will either be a sure sell, or some sort of negotiation. Negotiations mean that you can convince a forest spirit to spend more money on an item, talk them into paying the base price, or simply give it to them for a discount. Those three options have varying levels of success, with the final one securing the sale at a loss. If you fail in negotiations, the forest spirit will put the item into a basket by the door and leave. Only one transaction can occur at a time, and you're not able to leave your spot at the register to do things like restock the shelves or go into your inventory. The store closes once you're out of product, out of stamina, or if you simply chose to shut it down early yourself. You can then clean up whatever inventory was left behind, and get ready for bed, since the day will have then turned to night. And that's literally it. The one thing that sold me on the game is as shallow as can be.

I'm not lying when I say that I've described just about everything the game has to offer in the previous two paragraphs. There are things like animals that you can house and harvest goods from, but these operate very similar to crops, and require quite a bit of grinding to unlock. Admittedly the developers are very open about the fact that the game has grind-heavy gameplay loop, but I don't think most people will realize how intense things are until they're well into the game. There's nothing to dive you forward, and it doesn't take long for things to get stale. I'm very easy to please, and can get stuck in repetitive gameplay loops without a single complaint, but this game really wore me down after only a few hours. There's just no charm or life to this game. There aren't even other inhabitants for you to get to know. Yes, there four elemental spirits that you can fulfill quests for that lead to dates, but they honestly feel like a hastily thrown together afterthought. It doesn't help that the game seems to promise more than it delivers. Each of the Harmony Quests imply that they're unlocking an "island", but said island is just a single screen for the seed-giving animals to frolic in. Also, the story never really progresses past the opening scenes and dialogue. Sometimes the Harmony Tree Guardian will have something snarky to say, but that's about all you're going to get as far as plot goes. Tomte doesn't even do anything else but buy and sell goods from his singular spot. Your reward for completing all of the quests isn't even anything noteworthy either. You reward for hours and hours of grinding is a chair on the beach that you can sit on. That's it. I'm not even joking.

I'm actually being pretty easy on the game so far, even though I didn't really like any part of it. Even though I have lots of negatives to point out, there's one giant one that pretty much stands far and above the rest. No matter how you cut it, playing Sugardew Island is an experience I never want to go through again. I'm not just talking about the grinding either, as I was able to mostly deal with that, my issue is how broken the game is on the Nintendo Switch. I played for about 15 or so hours, but only about 10 of those amounted to actual progress made. The game crashed no less than six times (I lost count.), and completely froze three times. One of the crashes, I think the second, corrupted my main save file and forced me to revert to an earlier one. I almost gave up then and there, but I soldiered on hoping that there would be something redeeming by the end. Unfortunately there wasn't, and the developers still haven't released an update fixing these glaring issues. I don't know how to be nice about it, but this is one of the worst games I've played in recent memory. The shop mechanic is paper thin and a waste of time, the farming feels like it was lifted from a budget-priced mobile game, and everything else might as well be ignored. Then there's the fact that it's also broken as all hell. I can only assume that this game runs better on other platforms, but I checked out some other reviews, and noticed that just about everyone also reported crashes and freezes while playing the game. Why the developers didn't just take a few extra months to clean up at least the game-breaking issues is beyond me, but it makes for a game that is literally impossible to play on one of the platforms it launched on.

I honestly feel like I should just end the review there, but I guess I'll just wrap up the rest of it quickly. Visually speaking, Sugardew Island looks like a game that wouldn't be out of place on the 3DS. One of the reasons why I was surprised by its poor performance on the Switch is due to the fact that game looks like it could very well be a port from mobile devices. I'm not sure if there's some base farming game engine this is running on under the hood, but it also uses some stock assets that I recognize from other games. This doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, though in this case it reeks of overall laziness. I've played countless farming games that had boring and repetitive gameplay loops, but they at least had the decency to not crash on me every hour or so. Getting back on topic, this isn't a particularly good-looking game on any platform, though I'd be lying if I said it didn't have a moment or two where it looked cute. Cute can only go so far though, and the word that best describes the visuals would have to be "uninspired". The graphics bring to mind the "bad" Harvest Moon games that came out on the 3DS, and that's ironic since the developers cite the DS Harvest Moon games as inspiration. Maybe no one told them that the main series is now called Story of Seasons, and the Natsume Harvest Moon games are all trash these days. Or maybe they really did set out to create a game in their image. If so, they succeeded. Oh, and don't let the opening animated cutscene fool you, there's nothing else like that in the game.

If I had a hard time going over graphics and visuals, I'm going to have an even harder one going over sound and music. Right off the bat, Sugardew Island seems to have an issue with volume. I cranked everything up as high as it would go, and still could barely hear the game half the time. This was me playing docked by the way, since everything was practically mute in Handheld Mode. I know it wasn't just my Switch either, as things like the Switch's menu sounds would be very loud whenever I closed the game, or when it inevitably crashed. Even though I couldn't hear much of the soundtrack, I can at least say that it wasn't particularly bad. I'm not sure if it came from a stock music library or not, but it's at least a decent collection of music all things considered. I did find the lack of any sort of voice acting quite jarring, as these types of games usually include something to indicate characters speaking. Gibberish in place of words, or even different typing sounds would've been much appreciated, but we get none of that here. I guess I really shouldn't be surprised at the lack of effort put in, but this game seems to be surprising me at every corner.

I actually had a different, much nicer, version of this review ready to go assuming that the developers would push out a day one patch of some sort, but the game is still broken several days post-launch. This is not only shocking, but almost makes me wonder if they ever plan on fixing the game at all. They're a small team, they had a successful Kickstarter, and they technically delivered the game they said they would. It would be unfortunate if they just cashed out and ran, but that could very well be what they're planning on doing. Having said all that, the level of promotion the publishers are giving this game is shocking. I've seen plenty of cozy game influencers receiving codes to give away, while they bash the game in their own reviews. It's literally shovelware that they're giving a giant push. Going back to that Kickstarter, I feel bad for anyone who gave the developers money at that early stage of development. Not only did they back a broken mess of a game, but it released at a lower price point than they paid. At the time of this writing Sugardew Island priced at $16.99, and most backers paid €22, which works out to be about $24. I wouldn't advise anyone to spend even a dollar on this game in its current state, most especially over twenty.

I think it goes without saying that I suggest everyone skip Sugardew Island. The developers seem nice and all, but they also seem to not care that the game is a buggy and broken mess. It's literally unplayable on the Nintendo Switch, and only a bit better on other platforms. Even if the game-breaking issues are fixed, you still have a grind-y game that feels like a mobile game pushed onto consoles. I can't really think of anything nice to say, though I also don't want to be any harsher than I've already been. Skip this one, and go play Stardew Valley again. I hear that it's had a few big updates recently, and it's also cheaper. If you do choose to pick up Sugardew Island, don't say I didn't warn you. See you in the next one.

Check Out Sugardew Island on Nintendo Switch:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/sugardew-island-switch/

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Story: C
Gameplay: D (It's literally unplayable on the Nintendo Switch!)
Graphics: C
Music/Sound: C
Value: C-

Overall: D

Pros:
+ The idea of farming and running a shop to sell your goods is a good one at its core.
+ There are times when the game's colorful and cute graphics let you forget all the negatives the game has.
+ Some players are sure to appreciate the grind-heavy nature of the game.

Cons:
- There simply isn't anything special about this game. It feels like a mobile title brought to consoles.
- Everything about the game involves grinding. There's very little "cozy" here, even though the developers throw that term around a lot.
- The entire shop mechanic is the most barebones part of the game, and its biggest letdown.
- Runs horribly across the board, and is practically unplayable on the Nintendo Switch.
- Not only are the visuals and gameplay mechanics uninspired, it uses stock assets too.
- The sound is pretty bad too, and there are tons of missing sound effects and the like throughout.
- Charging more than Stardew Valley when your game is a broken mess is just ridiculous.
- Even though the game is in a poor state at launch, the developers haven't bothered to release any sort of patches to fix the many game-breaking issues. If you absolutely must buy this game, at least wait until it is properly patched.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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I didn't even mention whatever bug this was...