Starsand Island - PC Preview

Starsand Island by developer and publisher Seed Sparkle Lab—Steam preview written by Izzy with a copy provided by the publisher. 

#StarsandIsland
 
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes  

I was fifteen minutes into Starsand Island when I turned to my partner and said “I hope you didn’t make plans for us this weekend because I’m already obsessed.”

I was about three hours in when I turned to him and said “My quest disappeared again”, and “the menu prompts aren’t working”, and “the item I need to purchase for the quest progression isn’t showing up in the shop”.

However, most of those issues were patched less than two days before the game officially launched into early access, making the bulk of what I intended to say irrelevant, and meaning I could happily return to being obsessed! I should also note that by then, I had already sunk about forty hours into it in five days, so clearly I was undeterred by even the most egregious issues surrounding game progression. I’ve since sunk in at least another forty for good measure.

Welcome to Starsand Island, a cozy life sim developed and published by Seed Sparkle Lab, which went into early access on February 11th, 2026 following a very successful Kickstarter campaign. Set in a coastal town from the player’s childhood, your character returns there to escape the grind of city life.

Eschewing a traditional linear storyline, the game instead opts to allow players to engage with as much or as little of the currently available narrative content as they want by providing five different career paths (crafter, farmer, explorer, angler, and rancher) to follow, and a mentor to help along the way. These mentors provide the bulk of the game’s quests in the form of tasks to certify the player from novice to expert in each individual career. The first noticeable thing about Starsand Island in terms of gameplay is how well-paced the day cycles feel. While there is no shortage of things to do, the player doesn’t feel rushed to accomplish or prioritize any one task, especially given the lengthy opening hours of the town’s various businesses, which players can frequent for anything from pet adoptions to pre-fab housing layouts. The island is quite large, and the game offers players a wide variety of vehicles and mounts to make getting around and exploring every nook and cranny for resources and hidden treasure a breeze.

The uncommonly generous townsfolk inhabiting the island also help to alleviate some of the burden of resource gathering by gifting the player items via daily interactions, mail and quest completion. The game also offers up different progression menus such as the Island Liife, Workpedia, Starnote, and Islandpedia apps, allowing players to both claim rewards and unlock perks to facilitate every day tasks. 

                           
Starsand Island also has a fairly extensive build mode for players like me who prefer to customize their own home rather than opting for one of the offered pre-fabricated layouts. The problem is that it, uh, doesn’t work. 

While the variety of customization options is truly impressive for a cozy game, the building interface seems to have a mind of its own, routinely reverting single squares of painted wall to the original concrete, toggling between options not selected by the player, and deciding, seemingly at random, that certain items are part of the structural integrity of the farmland. Which is why if you very closely inspect my farm, you’ll notice a duo of floating teacups that couldn’t be removed from a table, and were therefore cleverly concealed within the leaves of miniature palm trees. 

 
This humble split-level home took roughly six hours to build and decorate, and most of that was spent swearing.

While the town’s NPCs (which include a handful of romanceable characters) don’t currently have much to offer in terms of content beyond generic, and the repeated dialogue. The game’s roadmap points to updates being made on that front within the coming months, which would be a welcome addition to make Starsand Island feel more engaging beyond the career paths. In the meantime, you can continue to build both platonic and romantic relationships with the characters with gift giving, fulfilling requests from the town’s request board, and completing tasks for your mentors.

While it will undoubtedly be nice to have a more layered relationship building system in the future, the core gameplay loop of Starsand Island is so addictive and rewarding that the lack of it doesn’t make the town feel any less lived-in or make the player feel any less part of it for the moment.

While Starsand Island doesn’t really offer anything new to the cozy game genre, it has an inexplicable way of making things feel new, which is no small feat in a market saturated with copy/paste cozy farming/logging/mining/questing sandbox life sims. From Gachapon machines at the town’s arcade, to the beautiful mining hub of the Moonlit forest, there are countless ways to fill your days. Players whose enjoyment is derived from crafting and exploration will definitely find a home in Starsand Island but those who look for engaging character relationships and smooth performance may wish to wait a little longer before diving in. I have no doubt that if Seed Sparkle lab can deliver on the future promised content updates and the refining of the current gameplay mechanics, Starsand Island will earn its place in the top-tiers of cozy games.