Amber Isle Review

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Fast Facts

Have you ever wanted to run your own odd jobs business while trying to restore a deserted island and help it’s people? Well, Amber Isle might be for you.

An Obvious Story

After customising you’re character, you end up being sent out on a journey, but that’s cut short as you get caught in a storm, and end up landing on Amber Isle. From there, you meet Maple, a delivery girl on this near-abandoned island, and Mayor Marshall Clawsworth, a man who seems annoyed at you’re every move. Later on, you meet Adi, a representative of Orbcorp, an organisation that wants the island to improve its standing, and who shows up later once you’ve made some initial improvements.

The story is kinda obvious in where it’s going, honestly, and it’s not subtle at all with it’s hints, which makes a little bland for me, but I would argue that’s not the point of Amber Isle, I did enjoy talking talking the people on the island quite a bit, and I would say it’s more intresting than the game’s story itself, particually the 3 main crew, with Adi the being the intern that doesn’t know any better, Maple is the local enthusiatic islander, Mayor Clawsworth is a very grumpy man, but wants what’s best for the island at the end of the day. You meet some nice charicters, and again, I find them much more intresting than the games narritive personally, as the writing tends to exaggerate them almost the point of being a parody, as well as giving them unique traits, like Kipper talking in 3^rd person, or Benji being Australian in his way of speaking, or Nellie screaming her words at the top of her lungs a lot of the time.

Good Gameplay, Quirky Structure

The Game lets you run a shop on Amber Isle, combining various elements, which makes sense given the game’s scope and story. However, it ends up feeling a bit weird due to its ambitious nature. The main gameplay feature is that you run a shop, where you need to be able to sell items, buy items, barter for them when necessary, and forgive customers when they accidentally break your items. I would describe the gameplay here as very typical for a game like this. You can demand Amber, your currency in this game; however, I never did this because I had a fear it would affect my social ranks, which help you negotiate better deals and unlock perks when you hang out with characters.

Hanging out with characters is okay in this game. You ask them to hang out, they follow you for a bit, you can talk to them if you see them in the open, and you can give them gifts. I thought it would be a nice way to learn more about them, since you’re spending the time to acknowledge them, but what we do get is fine, I just personally wish there was a bit more to them, leading me to one of the bigger issues I have with this game, the photo mode, which just kinda exist as a better way to take screenshots, and use filters, borders and frames. I wish there were poses or a free camera, or something added to make this mode more fun, since photo modes in a game like this can really make a difference, especially since I find this game’s look and art style appealing.

The World of Amber Isle is a vast one, though traversing through it can be stressful at times. The game day and night cycle works in a way where everywhere you come back, you give up a period of time, which is fair and does make for some interesting dynamics when splitting time between selling items, which also takes time, and gathering resources, which is helpful when you need to get orders out, but also can be a little annoying instead of using a traditional day night cycle since you need to have everything and if you need one and I want to get it in the dead of night, you can’t do it since you have to sleep.

It also starts out small, with you unlocking areas based on story progression and using Inspiration, but it takes a lot of inspiration to unlock these areas and it’s also the item you use to learn new recipes for the shop, so it can be annoying trying to build up inspiration for these areas, since you don’t get a lot of it early on, and it can be hard to split your resources between wanting to improve you’re shop and wanting to progress the story, although I did get a glitch that gave me 5 digits of Amber and Inspiration early on into the game while serving a customer, and that did help me to be fair.

Bonding Galore

Outside of the main narrative, you can bond with charicters you unlock, though for some like Chester and Nellie are linked to progression of you’re farming tools, a normal axe for cutting logs and trees, pickaxe for mining rocks, scythe for farming crops and shovel for digging up dirt, and one charaicter’s side quests even being linked to fill out the whole musuciam. You can move characters to locations on the isle whenever by going to the post office and looking at what characters are available to move in, and if you have enough Amber and the space to do you, you can, though it can be a bit difficult to find a place for everyone. Bonding with characters also gives you things like better luck bartering at the shop, and the ability for customers to be more generous with their prices when taking orders.

Final Thoughts

I found myself very conflicted about what I feel about Amber Isle, as the ambition is there for a great game, but I found my experience to be more mediocre to good. I think there is some good in the concept, the way characters speak, getting to hang out with the characters in this game is a joy, and I’m not annoyed by the main gameplay of running the shop. However, it feels like this game needed something more with its basic-ish story, slightly frustrating exploration game, and generally lacking features that would help my enjoyment of this game quite a bit. £25 isn’t too bad a price for this, but I would personally look elsewhere, or wait for a price before considering this.

3 out of 5

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