Amber Isle is a game where you get to play as a dinosaur running a cute shop in a rundown village waiting to be rebuilt. As you play, you get to meet fun dinosaurs, unlock new places to explore, unlock new items to craft, and upgrade your shop and village.
Amber Isle is a great mix of shopkeep games like Moonlighter and cozy games like Animal Crossing. You get to make various items to display in your shop and build relationships with the villagers that you meet.
The Good
There are a lot of fun aspects to Amber Isle. One of my favorites is being able to explore and unlock new areas to attract more paleo folk and get new materials for crafting recipes. There are a lot of places to explore and there are a variety of ways to unlock them. This aspect is the main thing that kept me playing because I wanted to unlock everything.
Another exciting feature of Amber Isle is being able to customize everything. At the start of the game, you customize your own paleo folk to play as. Once you’re in the game, you can customize everything from your shop to the meadows where you explore to find materials.
This is reminiscent of Animal Crossing: New Horizons where you could decorate and customize every inch of the island and home. As you decorate, it also allows the village rating to go up and attracts new paleo folk. This specific feature is something that I have missed a lot in games.
Another feature I enjoyed about Amber Isle are the paleo folks’ personalities. All of them have their own personalities, likes and dislikes, goals, and quirks. This made me want to get to know all of them and explore each character further.
The final thing I enjoyed about Amber Isle was running the shop. Running the shop isn’t an idle thing, it’s interactive and there’s a lot to do. If you don’t have any customers to tend to, you can work on cleaning which gives you more amber at the end of the day.
There are also different scenarios that pop up. Sometimes paleo folk will come up to negotiate the price of an item for sale. Sometimes they try to sell you items that you bid on. Finally, there are instances when items for sale break.
The Bad
There wasn’t much that disappointed me about Amber Isle. The biggest thing is being able to find paleo folk to talk to outside of the shop in order to increase your relationship with them.
Pelo folk are supposed to show up on the map whenever you’re out exploring and gathering materials, but it’s rare to see anyone outside the shop. Even when you do find them outside the shop, it took me a little bit to realize I could talk to them since no button popped up to indicate that I could interact with them.
The only other thing I didn’t enjoy about Amber Isle was the camera angle. It’s really weird and almost plays in a top down way which made it difficult for me to control at first.
There is a way to change the camera angle, but it resets every time you enter a new area. It also lagged a lot whenever I tried to change it, so I didn’t think it was worth trying to figure out.
Final Thoughts
I think the game is worth the money. There’s a lot to do in it and it’ll keep you busy for hours on end.
I also believe it’s the perfect game for anyone missing Animal Crossing. It’s not the exact same, but the characters and art style are reminiscent of it. Some of the gameplay also reminds me of it like the decorating.