Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure [Review]
Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure is a wonderful farming game that mixes in a bit of creature collecting. It was developed and published by Snow Castle Games. Ikonei Island is a unique game that will take a minute to truly enjoy, but I promise it is worth the wait. Starting the game may not be promising, as it starts with an unbearable voice explaining the story of the four kids you will be playing throughout the game. I can’t stand nasal voices, even if they make sense for the character. I had to skip the beginning cutscene because I just couldn’t handle listening to it.
Once you manage to get through the cutscene, you are stranded on a beach and able to choose between the four main characters. From this point, the game is completely co-op, with up to four players. I managed to get a team of three, and we used the fourth character that no one wanted to be as an extra inventory space since the characters keep their inventory regardless of whether you swap between them. The beginning of the game definitely could use a bit of direction, since we got confused and lost very early on. There wasn’t anyone telling us what to do, and we just had to work on the missions and collect things until we were able to get enough items to unlock a larger area.
When I say this game starts slow I mean it. It was hard to get into and we were getting frustrated. But, you need to just get through it because once the game gets going it is amazing. I’d say it picks up and becomes great once you find the ax-headed bird. As I briefly mentioned, the game has a bit of creature collecting. You can befriend the unique and cute critters in the world by feeding them when they are ready (You can’t feed them before they get an icon above their head or they will just eat everything and still hate you). Once befriending a creature you can summon it from anywhere and “bond” with it! But bonding doesn’t mean what you think it does. When bonding with your pet you become your pet! And it is awesome! The first pet you get is just a bee and can’t do much but pollinate flowers and crops to get more. This is still helpful but the ax-headed bird has an ax head and you can go around chopping down both trees and enemies.
When bonding with your pets they get tired and hungry so you do need to take care of them by making sure they sit in water to be cleaned or give them attention. It is easy to take care of the pets and doing so raises their friendship level with you. This is helpful because once your pet likes you enough it will “evolve” like a Pokemon into a bigger and stronger version of itself! It will also change color and often look cooler than it did before. This is necessary because you need the animals to progress through the map by chopping down dead trees that block the path. The bigger the tree the more powerful your bird needs to be to get through it. Upgrading your pet also seems to make them a bit bold as my bird wouldn’t help me in combat until evolving.
This game is a very fun game for messing around with your friends. I was running around collecting supplies with my pets while one of my teammates went off to fight enemies and the other stayed back to upgrade our main base. We were all doing different things but none of us were progressing because we just didn’t need to. The game was fun enough just running around! I will say I got a bit of a scare when collecting supplies when I went back to the base and saw my chest had disappeared. I was scrambling and panicking thinking it had completely disappeared. Luckily it had only gone momentarily invisible and quickly traveling away and back had it reappeared. But, after having a heart attack, I had moved my chest of every item I had ever collected into the house hoping that it would be safer. I didn’t have an issue with it after that but it is a scary glitch. There also is a bit of a glitch that when you exit a house you can fall through the floor. Usually, it respawns you quickly and goes unnoticeable but there were a few times we would have to fast-travel to fix it.
Now, I mentioned fast traveling earlier, a very nice quality of life feature is that you can fast travel from anywhere. You can only travel to your home or any frog statue you’ve fixed up throughout the world but there are so many of them that there’s one in each area. It’s also nice that you don’t need to be at a fast travel point to do so. That’s not the only quality-of-life feature though, you can also craft from anywhere and you don’t need any sort of crafting bench like you often do in games with crafting. If you know how to craft an item you can just do it from your inventory whenever and wherever you would like! It’s nice that Ikonei Island doesn’t limit you like other similar games.
While this game has a large learning curve and a few terrifying glitches, I adore this game. I love it, I love being able to become my pets and fight as them or with them or just running around as them in general. It’s especially fun with a group of people so I highly recommend getting your friends together to experience this game. You have to give this game a chance, you just have to get through that irritating early game but I promise it will get going as soon as you’re out of the tutorial area. Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure is an 8/10 co-op adventure and is currently available on PlayStation 4 and 5, Switch, Xbox One, Series S and X, and Steam.
