Animal Crossing wasn't Hello Kitty Island Adventure's only inspiration - Breath of the Wild played a part too

Upcoming cozy adventure game Hello Kitty Island Adventure took inspiration from not only Animal Crossing but also The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

It's immediately obvious from Hello Kitty Island Adventure's trailer that cozy games, like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, influenced developer Sunblink - but there was also a slightly unexpected source of inspiration for the team. As revealed during a press event for the upcoming Apple Arcade title, Chief Product Officer at the studio, Chelsea Howe, revealed that Breath of the Wild also inspired the team to create its game's open world.

"When we were first innovating on the idea for this game, we wanted to combine the open-world adventure gameplay that you'd find in something like Breath of the Wild, with the cozy life sim genre of games like Animal Crossing," Howe says. "We wanted to create something that was broad enough to invite gamers into the world of Hello Kitty, even if they weren't super familiar with those characters, and to bring Sanrio fans and Hello Kitty and Friends fans into slightly more traditional gameplay."

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Sunblink CEO Julian Farrior also said that Hello Kitty Island Adventure is a "triple A quality game" with lots of recognizable cozy life-sim elements. "There's a lot in [the game] that I think will be new to the genre that we're excited to bring," Farrior explains, so it already feels like the Sanrio-focused title will offer more than just your typical life sim gameplay. We also now know that we'll be getting 40 - 50 hours worth of gameplay at launch, with more content planned after release.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is set to launch exclusively via Apple Arcade on July 28, 2023.

Find out what you can play in the meantime with our games like Animal Crossing list.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.