Petit Island Review

What a great adventure game, I loved being on this island, trying to recreate your grandpa’s memories and meeting his old friends. It has no missable achievements and I think completion takes around 6h or so when using a guide to find the last few fish/insects.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: ~6h with using a guide to find the last few fish and insects
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote this guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: At this moment the achievement for 100% completing the game seems bugged, I hope they can fix this one soon

What an amazing adventure game Petit Island is! You play as Lily, who recreates her grandpa’s memories of the island he grew up on while also meeting his old friends. The Island is stunning and so colorful. There are so many details like graffiti on the walls, as well as telephone booths (Used as manual save points) and so so many animals. And to have a difference between the animal NPCs and the animal animals, the animals are fruit- and veggie-based animals, so you have leak birds and tomato crabs. They are just so cute and you will see them everywhere! And if that isn’t cute enough, very early on in the game you will unlock mounts, and not normal mounts but your first free mount is a Bananallama! So so cute and such a welcome thing to have so early on.

The story in Petit Island is very cool, as described above, you are recreating your grandpa’s memories, you’ll do this in 10 chapters with a few quests in each chapter and a bunch of sidequests available throughout the game. The game will tell you where to go, but also pin the location to your map, so you’re never lost. It took me a bit of time to get to know the island and map the layout in my head, so it was a welcome addition to have the quests pinpointed on your map.

I only found 2 things I didn’t like so much. The first one is the button layout. I played on an Xbox controller and even with 10h+ in the game, I was still opening the wrong menus, trying to jump with the wrong button, and most of all, having trouble closing the menus. When opening the wrong menu is to instantly press the same button to close it down, and otherwise press B or select, but the right button to close menus is start and my brain just doesn’t want to remember that. Gladly this never got in the way of my enjoyment of the game, it was just weird to notice that even after so many hours, I was still pressing the wrong buttons for the wrong menus. Gladly there is a list with the right buttons at the top of the screen. And the second thing I didn’t like so much was that if you want to switch tools you have to open the inventory to select that tool. It would have been nice to have a way to circle through them without opening a menu that breaks the immersion a bit.

None of the achievements are missable, which is always great as I prefer to dive into a game without a guide. Most achievements you will unlock for completing the main quests and the side quests. The only thing worth noting is that you should ALWAYS keep 1 of each type of fish and insect because there are achievements to having them all in your inventory. And at this moment there seems to be problems with the achievement to 100% the game. For me one sidequests isn’t registered as complete which makes that I can’t 100% the game, but another friend’s save file says 100% but also doesn’t have the trophy, so something is going on there.

I give Petit Island 4.5 out of 5 stars.

This review for Petit Island was written on 18 November 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 24 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.