| Sugardew Island | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Sugardew Island is a cozy farming sim developed and published by rokaplay where you are tasked with restoring peace and balance to the thorn-choked island. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Sugardew Island Review Overview
What is Sugardew Island?
Sugardew Island is a cozy farming game developed and published by indie studio rokaplay where you run your own farm goods shop, selling your homegrown produce and goods to the Forest Folk. Grow a variety of crops, care for your animals, collect resources, and slowly breathe life and restore balance back into the island by fulfilling Harmony Tree quests and helping out the local inhabitants. No pressure, no frills—Sugardew Island aims to deliver a fulfilling and cozy gameplay experience.
Sugardew Island features:
⚫︎ No Time Limit—Your World, Your Time
⚫︎ Cute Cartoon Graphics
⚫︎ Fluffy Animals To Take Care Of
⚫︎ Cozy Farming
⚫︎ A Variety Of Crops To Grow
⚫︎ Four Special Forest Spirits To Meet
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
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 Steam |
 PlayStation |
 Switch |
 Xbox |
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| $16.99 | Coming Soon | ||||||
Sugardew Island Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 No Time Limit Or Ticking Time Cute Cartoon Graphics |
Game-breaking Bugs Tiny Energy Bar Clunky Controls |
Sugardew Island Overall Score - 48/100
Sugardew Island is another cozy farming sim that jumps into the boom of the farming simulator genre, and it essentially wants to deliver the idea of cozy—no time limit, no grueling consequences for your choices, and the freedom to play as you want. However, the experience is heavily dampened by glaring bugs and glitches, clunky controls, and strange stamina mechanics that can easily turn the cozy game into something much more frustrating.
Sugardew Island Story - 6/10
Story-wise, it’s typical for these types of farming sims. You end up on Sugardew Island after a terrible storm wrecks your ship, and you are saved by Tomte, the travelling merchant. There, he tells you about the history of the island and implores you to help restore balance and peace to the land by collecting Harmony and interacting with the locals and warming the cold heart of the Harmony Tree’s guardian, the Hare. The fate of the island rests on you!---that kind of thing. Its pacing is just right, not too fast that you’ll lose out on the story but not too slow that will leave you hanging for more.
Sugardew Island Gameplay - 4/10
The core gameplay loop is pretty straightforward, centered around growing crops and rearing livestock for produce and animal byproducts, which are then sold at the end of every day or used for fulfilling requests. Time only passes when you wish to do so and there is essentially no time limit, which makes the routine much easier to manage. However, the clunky and weird controls that are not in any way intuitive, a tiny energy bar that leaves you out of stamina after barely doing anything, and glaring game-breaking bugs make it extra tedious and frustrating to continue on playing.
Sugardew Island Visuals - 6/10
While the graphics are nothing special, they’re reminiscent of the cartoon-y style of Harvest Moon, to which the developers themselves have cited as a great inspiration. It’s cute and invokes a sense of nostalgia somewhat even if it is a modern game on a modern engine. Character designs are done rather well, especially for the special Forest Spirits that you can form direct friendships (or romances) with. The environment, albeit small, is also detailed and pleasing to the eyes. However, it is worthy to note that the game tends to lag and drop frames quite a bit, although it could be because of hardware limitations.
Sugardew Island Audio - 4/10
Unfortunately, the music was barely heard even at max volume settings, which led to most of the playthrough feeling empty save for the loud rushing of the waterfall in your farm. Even during the times you could hear it, it did fit the overall setting and blended in quite nicely; it was just not anything particularly memorable.
Sugardew Island Value for Money - 4/10
For $17 and at least 15+ hours of gameplay, one would think that it’s a pretty good deal—but the overall clunkiness and significant amount of bugs present in the game make it not worth your money in its current state. Players wanting to buy the title may need to wait a little longer for game-improving updates before it becomes worth its price tag.
Sugardew Island Review: Just Another Buggy Farming Sim
Farming sims—the pinnacle of the cozy game genre, and one of the most populated ones at that. Ever since the boom of popularity of the classic 2016 title Stardew Valley, "cozy" farming sims have been popping out left and right. Unfortunately, I haven’t been lucky enough to deep dive into another farming sim since my nearly 100-hour-long fixation with Stardew—until now. Sugardew Island sounded just right up my alley, and I was ready to see if I would be spending another 100 hours toiling away with my crops and animals.
Time Passes Only When You Want To
One thing I loved about the game is that there is no ticking clock or time countdown as you go about your day—you essentially have the freedom to do anything you want. Personally, it was a gripe for me with Stardew as someone who prefers to think up what to do on the spot, hence I was always pausing the game every time I had to take a breather to plan out my day. In Sugardew Island, you can stand around and think up your day’s schedule without any time consequence. Time only passes when you open up shop, and nighttime rolls out when you close up shop for the day, and even after closing the store, you can still go around and do extra activities provided that you still have energy left over.
Cute Graphics Reminiscent Of Harvest Moon
Another likeable aspect is the cartoon-y art style employed by the game which really gives out the Harvest Moon vibes, and it’s a very welcome style to go for. I’ve delved into Harvest Moon in my youth, and despite being a modern game on a modern engine, the visual style still invokes some sort of nostalgia for me. The character designs and the environment details are a nice touch as well
I’d also like to mention just how adorable the cows and the chickens are! Granted that the cows look eerily similar to the Harvest Moon cows, but they’re both adorable to look at and pleasing to the eyes, especially while they’re tottering around on their tiny legs.
Glaring Bugs Take Away From The Experience
Despite those positive notes, the game’s weakness lies in everything else. For starters, the game still has its share of both minor glitches and game-breaking bugs. Taking for example, Tomte’s shop menu comes out buggy sometimes, with the item description not matching the actual selected product. However, it could be easily fixed by exiting out of the shop menu, waiting a few seconds to let Tomte finish his dialogue, then selecting the Buy option again. A little convoluted, but nothing annoying. I went on my merry way and…suddenly, the game crashed out of nowhere. It was a surprising crash as I wasn’t even doing anything at that time, but…things happen, I suppose. I believed that was the end of it.
Nope, there was more. There was a point where I turned in my quest to the Harmony Tree after fulfilling all level 1 quests for the individual animal islands, and it triggered a cutscene with the Hare. After the cutscene, it bugged out my character from the screen and left me unable to move. Moving the joystick or entering other menus didn’t seem to work at all, and instead I had to restart the whole day from the beginning.
Because of the possibility of crashing or bugging out again, I went into my house to save every time I did something notable like watering a whole lot of crops or selling goods. But alas, another strange bug appeared—I lost the egg my chicken laid for me after saving and returning to the coop. Once again, I had to restart the same day—for the third time in a row. Everything should be fine now, right? Nope, the game still had another surprise for me.
You start off with a basic old set of tools that you can upgrade for a certain amount of Sugardew after unlocking the ability to improve a specific tool. You can easily clear the first level of Piggy Island to unlock the upgrade for the watering can and the gardening hoe, which then costs around 2500 Sugardew, according to the workbench when I checked. Quite a high amount to aim for in the beginning, but having an improved watering can would help my daily routine by tenfold—and so, I began to scrape up the 2500 Sugardews through selling and fulfilling requests. By Day 10 or so, I was ready to upgrade it on my workbench…only to find out the option wasn’t there. Why would it disappear? It clearly says that I fulfilled the quest on the Harmony Tree, and it doesn’t make sense for tool upgrades to be locked behind a time limit. Frustrated, I called it a day for now.
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Sugardew Island is not stated to be in Early Access, yet the game-breaking bugs make it feel like it should still be in a pre-release phase for more testing and feedback.
Tiny Energy Bar, And Almost Everything Takes Energy
It’s great that the game doesn’t give you a time limit to plan out your day, but something else constricts you from freely doing what you want—the energy or stamina bar. It looks quite large at first glance, but once you actually start doing activities like plowing a new field, smashing rocks, or watering crops, you would see that it quickly depletes. That’s usually not a problem, but you can easily go through half your energy bar just from watering your crops. There is fertilizer that keeps your plants watered until they’re ready for harvesting, but you either cough up Sugardew to buy it for 50 a pop from Tomte, or harvest pesky weeds to turn them into fertilizer—which also, by the way, takes up quite a bit of energy to do.
Clearing rocks and chopping trees also takes up energy, of course, but it takes an absurd amount, and there are several large trees and large rocks that take up even more time and stamina from you. With a limited amount of energy to go through every day, sometimes you might not be able to open the store because you’re too tired and energy bars are too expensive to purchase.
And get this—why in the world does opening up the store and selling goods at my own shop take up energy? When a cute Forest Folk customer heads up to my cash register with five turnips in hand, ringing up their order and selling it to them takes away a tiny percentage of your energy bar…which quickly snowballs. By the time I finish selling around 20 sheaves of wheat, 10 turnips, and 10 cucumbers, about a fourth or third of my energy bar is down. What for?! While I do acknowledge that retailing and shopkeeping is a tiring job, I’m playing Sugardew Island for the coziness, not for its realism.
There is some kind of level-up mechanic, but I’m not entirely sure if it increases my energy bar, nor is there any indication or note in the in-game handbook that it does. Either way, I’m not really feeling it.
Clunky Controls
Another weakness the current build of the game has is that its controls are laggy and not intuitive at all. There’s a slight but obvious input lag from the time you move or press Y and the action that’s being done, which makes the overall feel of it quite finicky. Even with the focus button to better aim your tools, the blue tile indicator still goes all over the place.
Moving items from your inventory to the chest or the shop display counter and vice versa is also strange, where you’d need to select the object from your inventory, place it in the chest or counter, then go back to your inventory to do it for…everything else you want to move. There is no time limit, yes, but going back and forth with weird controls kind of takes away from the cozy aspect.
Is Sugardew Island Worth It?
Hop Onto Other Farming Sims For Now
While the cozy farming sim aspect’s foundation is readily there and is a good starting point, the game’s other issues, such as pesky bugs and a debilitating energy bar make the overall gameplay experience anything but cozy. At its current state, Sugardew Island is not at its best and perhaps you’ll be better off with the plethora of other cozy farming simulators out there on the market for now, or wait for the game to be discounted should you want to give it a whirl. Hopefully, the developers would iron out these creases in the near future for an overall better experience for players.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
PlayStation |
Switch |
Xbox |
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| $16.99 | Coming Soon | ||||||
Sugardew Island FAQ
Does Sugardew Island have romance?
Yes, you can forge romances with either of the four Forest Spirits, namely Ignis, Sylvana, Riva, and Zephiro.
Is Sugardew Island multiplayer?
No, Sugardew Island is strictly a singleplayer experience.
Game8 Reviews
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Sugardew Island Product Information
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| Title | Sugardew Island |
|---|---|
| Release Date | March 7, 2025 |
| Developer | rokaplay |
| Publisher | rokaplay, Silver Lining |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Indie, Simulation, Farming |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Sugardew Island Official Website |
