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Next year, Sanrio’s lovable cast of characters will go beyond your iPhone and iPad. Hello Kitty Island Adventure, the cozy game with community vibes that debuted in July 2023 on Apple Arcade, is finally expanding in 2025 to Nintendo Switch and PC as a timed exclusive before coming to PS4 and PS5 .

Notably missing is the Xbox. But even releasing the game outside of Apple Arcade is a welcome change for Sanrio fans outside of Apple’s ecosystem. Hello Kitty Island Adventure is the kind of cool, low-stakes experience roaming around a peaceful island, completing fun tasks that fit well with Sanrio’s lovable cast.

Fans continue to play the game, with more than 40,000 people in its official discord, said Chelsea Howe, chief product officer at Sunblink. She attributes its popularity to the characters and uniqueness of the game – which lets you create your own Sanrio-style character, adventure through dynamically varying areas, decorate your home, craft and create.

“I think we always get an initial surprise [at the game.] If he’s a Sanrio fan, he’s never seen a game like this,” Howe said. “They’ve never seen an opportunity where they can really get to know the characters and connect with the characters, experience the backstories of the characters. ”

But Sunblink also keeps fans happy with regular content expansion. Hello Kitty Island Adventure launched with over 30 hours of player content, and Sunblink Studios has kept fans engaged by adding content at a regular cadence – updates every three weeks, new features in a major update every six weeks – this has grown the game to around 80 hours now.

At first glance, Hello Kitty Island Adventure looks a lot like the cozy king of the game that preceded it, Animal Crossing New Horizons. The games have a similar island setting and community feel. But Hello Kitty Island Adventure has distinctive elements that surprise fans, Howe says, like the open-world aspect. There are biomes and island elements like ruins to explore that contain underground puzzles and logic rooms. And instead of paying off a debt to a wandering raccoon owner, the main mechanic levels your friendships with Hello Kitty herself, Chococat, Cinnamoroll and other Sanrio characters.

“It was really important for us to intentionally merge the open-world aspects with the cozy life simulation aspects and continue to walk that line despite the Animal Crossing comparisons,” Howe said.

Another way Animal Crossing New Horizons is different: You don’t have to change your console’s clock to trick your game into thinking it’s earlier or later, which fans have dubbed “time travel.”

“Don’t do it. You did it in Animal Crossing. Don’t do that in this game,” laughs Howe. This isn’t a promise of punishment – if you time travel, you’ll miss out on real-time events, potentially blocking you from accessing new content. Yes, the same content that Sunblink adds every few weeks.

This includes in-game events related to holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, that all players will experience at the same time. Now that the game is coming to other platforms outside of Apple devices, Sunblink faces the added challenge of updating multiple platforms at once. It will do this by releasing updates to the Apple Arcade version at the same cadence, while consolidating several into larger updates for consoles and PC.

Howe says Sunblink listens to its fans and has added features or made tweaks based on what they suggested. Sometimes this meant introducing features similar to those in Animal Crossing, and other times removing offending features. For example, the game has no inventory limits: “That was the number one thing that was a huge disappointment for me personally in Animal Crossing and for many others,” Howe said.

Another added feature is the TikTok-friendly capacity to edit your character’s home cabin on the island. If your friends are watching, they can send emojis and give other live feedback as you decorate. “If one of your high-level motivations is self-expression, and if you want it to be a social experience, the more you can enable collaborative self-expression, the better,” Howe said.

This whole non-combat game focused on friendship and nurturing is coming to consoles and PC for an undisclosed price, but Sunblink has carried over another feature from Apple Arcade: no microtransactions. Instead, there’s a mix of free and paid updates that Sunblink believes will resonate better with fans. “It’s definitely about making sure it’s worth the value you’re providing,” Howe said.

Fans of the convenient games will have another opportunity when Hello Kitty Island Adventure comes to multiple platforms next year, and Howe stressed that players will dictate how long the game lasts.

“We see this as a beginning, not an end. This is a live game. We have at least two years of road map ahead of us,” Howe said. “As long as people enjoy it, love it and play it, we intend to continue to support it.”