One of the current Next Fest‘s most pleasant and colorful games – out of the many that are offering a neat little demo – is Amber Isle, which looks like Animal Crossing, except with dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals as villagers instead. It behaves and is designed exactly like you’d expect.
The anticipated end result of Stardew Valley‘s success over the last eight years and Animal Crossing‘s rising popularity was always going to be a new wave of cartoony farming and shop sims that took us to small country villages. Such predictions weren’t wrong, and we’ve enjoyed more riffs on the formula than we can count in the last few years, some good and some bland.
Amber Isle comes into the picture during what feels like the tail-end of this current era of cozy life sims, as players are slowly but steadily rejecting new titles which don’t bring much new to the table. In the case of this specific game, cute chonky dinos and other prehistoric animals living the peaceful town life might be enough to entice most fans of the genre, but its (seemingly) more focused approach to the gameplay loop might also help differentiate it from the competition.
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