Readers, welcome… to my review of Amber Isle! Developed by Ambertail Games and published in partnership with Team17 Digital, Amber Isle is a dinosaur-themed shop management social simulation game where you interact with up to 48 prehistoric animal islanders called Paleofolk.
While I thought its Animal Crossing influences would be right up my alley, it ultimately left me feeling dissatisfied with a buggy playthrough.
Can You Restore Amber Isle?
Amber Isle’s story is quite compelling. You fall from a hot air balloon while embarking on your Paleoventure and crash land in a shop on the island. Local Mayor Clawsworth isn’t pleased with you dropping in, but his townsfolk are more than keen to have a master crafter in their presence after you show off your talents. They cajole him into letting you take over the shop and sell your bespoke goods to entice other Paleofolk to move to the isle and restore it to its former glory. Although you have to pay your way to it.
We have the red tape of bureaucracy in the form of Adi, your friendly adviser sent to Amber Isle by the soulless OrbCorp to oversee its restoration. They have good intentions, but there is clearly history between OrbCorp and Mayor Clawsworth, which you uncover as you play.
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First Impressions
I was impressed with the various customisation options available for your own dinosaur, or Paleofolk (Paleoperson for singular?). Features required a little trial and error to work out, especially when I was looking for options for certain patterns and colours. But ultimately, I got there in the end.
If you’re not feeling too creative, the developers have included a bunch of preset dinosaurs you can choose from as well, or even use as a base. I encountered an odd bug with one of the presets with buggy eyes, but I believe that’s been patched.
The game is pretty straightforward. Complete quests, harvest, craft, customise your shop, and sell items to get Amber gems to rebuild the island.
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The game was initially super fun and spoke to my completionist self as I tried my best to knock all of the quests out. Coupled with the chill lofi soundtrack, it was easy to traverse through the cute landscape as I harvested and crafted hours away.
Game tip: I would recommend ignoring upgrading broken items found around the island. Focus on crafting to earn Amber to complete the main story quests.
Harvest, Craft, Sell, Repeat
The game’s day is broken up into three parts: morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Players have to sleep to officially end the day. At first, I thought I could cheat the system and harvest and craft all night, but discovered materials only spawned in a new day. I couldn’t travel to other locations when it got too late. So I (reluctantly) went to sleep.
There’s a little bedroom at the back of the shop to rest for the next day. Though, it didn’t seem to affect my character at all.
It’s here where I found things started to get grindy. Clawsworth gives you new monetary tasks to eventually own the shop, with amounts increasing each time. While achievable, it does take a lot of harvesting, crafting, and shopkeeping to get there. You also earn Inspiration from sales and completing quests, which help you unlock new recipes and different areas. The large amount of Inspiration required to unlock new areas also added to the grindyness of the game.
The game also fails to explain that to increase reputation with residents, all I needed to do was Hang Out with them and harvest items — this made the game much longer. I expect it didn’t require the 30 hours I sunk into it, but rather a clearer explanation of game mechanics.
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Shopkeeping, Shopkeeping, More Shopkeeping
Each day has certain “trends” for popular items. I recommend following these to stock your shop appropriately, but I’m not sure how much it helped since items were sold regardless, though it may make selling goods faster. While the shop is open, you can dust and sweep up after your dino customers to earn more tips. It makes the time go by while waiting for customers to make a purchase. One thing I noticed was there were placeholders for five other cleaning items, but I only ever saw two. Not sure if that was just a design!
Customers will attempt to bargain, sell you items, ask for recommendations, or pick up custom orders you’ve fulfilled. Players can’t open their shop past the evening until they get a night licence – something I wish I worked out sooner!
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Game tip: You can’t craft when the shop is open, even if you have the right materials. Prepare for your custom orders ahead of opening your shop so you don’t miss out on these sales!
You spend a lot of time running around the map collecting a variety of ingredients scattered across different regions. Luckily, you’re able to sprint and you never get tired — but unlocking fast travel was a godsend later on. I really enjoyed the variety of the different regions and it was exciting to unlock each one.
The Shopkeeping Continues
The overall experience of shopping was quite repetitive and it was here that I experienced most of the bugs. Bargaining with customers was simple, but boring after a while. I experienced a bug where I couldn’t accept offers from customers and they ended up annoyed at me. Tipping animations occur after each customer, this slowed things down a lot. I also wasn’t exactly sure how it worked. With a certain customer, I always seemed to lose tips — I would’ve preferred they got rid of it altogether.
I experienced a frequent bug when trying to shopkeep at night, where no customers would come in and I couldn’t end shopkeeping. I had to restart the game several times due to this bug, which left me tired and frustrated after trying to curry favour with the residents.
It was also difficult when customers asked for recommendations of items based on size or what it was made of. You couldn’t access your directory while shopkeeping to see item details to help. I was also confused with that question as there wasn’t really an explanation on sizing. I went with logic, but it turns out I was wrong. A set of cutlery isn’t small, while a toilet was only considered medium, not large. But a necklace was also medium? I didn’t get the logic but eventually, I started memorising what items fell under which category, their sizes, and what certain ones were made of so I could nail the recommendations.
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Disappointing Decorations
You’re able to decorate and customise your shop; items placed in front of windows have increased value, so I thought it would be possible to add windows into my shop or more lights. I was wrong. You are stuck with what you’re given, which is disappointing. You also can’t preview what shop items would look like – or if you could, I wasn’t able to do it. There was no option to sell stuff you no longer wanted, which I felt was a waste of Amber. I wanted to keep my shop updated and cute, but not at the expense of owning my store.
There’s a significant lack of instructions to this game. It also took me a fair while to work out that different sized items had to be on corresponding plinths. I kept wondering why items I made didn’t appear and realised I had to click to different sizing to find them.
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Customers also became frustrated with the layout of my store, but there was never more info about what particular thing they found annoying, and I didn’t know how to find out. They just left, making me lose my selling streak.
Amber Isle On Steam Deck
While not Steam Deck verified, Amber Isle does work fine on the Steam Deck. There’s an option to enlarge smaller text if required too, but I wasn’t sure how to zoom out when stuck in a certain view when exploring the island.
Given the amount of harvesting and crafting you have to do, I thought it was perfect for my work commute. However, having to edit and manage my shop felt really clunky playing with thumbsticks and moving around. I expect the same issues when the game ports over to Switch.
Bugs, Bugs, And More Bugs
I’ve already mentioned quite a few bugs in Amber Isle, which affected my playthrough of the game. Another that made the game less enjoyable was not having cutscenes trigger when you achieve certain MSQs. I was stuck doing the same things until I ultimately got frustrated and quit the game, but noticed when I logged back in, a cut scene would trigger.
This happened when I was trying to get my Night Permit for shopkeeping, and also when trying to boost my reputation with the island residents. This definitely added to the grindy feel of the game, and by this point, the quests had gotten so similar that I barely felt like my day to day actions mattered.
Additionally, my saves wouldn’t always load from exactly where I had left the game. There is no option to hard save either, so I was disappointed when I had to re-harvest items again or complete quests I had done previously.
To sum it all up, there are too many bugs in this game.
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Hotfix?
The developers put up a post on X earlier this week flagging that the review build of the game was outdated and they had pushed out the wrong version.
We went to Team17 to clarify what is being fixed and received an entirely new list of bug fixes:
- HOTFIX – [Achievement] The Ancient Sword is not spawning
- HOTFIX – [Shop] Returning to Main Menu during a shop loop causes a softlock upon loading the same save
- HOTFIX – [GAMEPAD] The player is able to move the camera under the map geometry
- HOTFIX – The UI appears to be a placeholder before unlocking any gate from the Island
So, will the game be bug free at launch? They haven’t addressed half of the issues I’ve been having so I’d say it’s unlikely.
Should You Buy Amber Isle?
I had high hopes for Amber Isle but the amount of bugs I encountered took away from the overall experience. Despite being the type of person who enjoys menial-tasked games, its simplicity and lack of instruction direction was ultimately its downfall.
Amber Isle is available from October 11th for $36.50 on PC via Steam. Due to performance issues, the Nintendo Switch version has been delayed to November 21st.
Quest Daily scores Amber Isle:
6/10
A copy of Amber Isle was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
