Video Game / Coral Island

Coral Island is a Farm Life Sim by Indonesian developer Stairway Games. The game is set on the Southeast Asian-inspired Coral Island.

The game was successfully funded on Kickstarter, where it managed to raise $1.6 million in funding, far more than its $70,000 goal.

The game released in Early Access on October 11th, 2022, and the 1.0 release arrived on November 14th, 2023. While it will be initially coming out for PC, the developers plan to port it to the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Playstation as well. It can be found here.

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This game provides examples of:

• Ability Required to Proceed: Some obstacles like massive tree stumps or large boulders and logs can only be removed with appropriately upgraded equipment, making some areas inaccessible until you're able to acquire the necessary crafting materials.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Completing a museum collection generally awards a goofy costume related to that collection's theme.
  • Increasing the town rank will, among other things, expand the inventory of the clothing boutique.
• An Interior Decorator Is You: The player is able to purchase various decorative items for their house, and arrange them however they like. ​
• Alliterative Family: All the giants' names start with G. Gong, Groo, Grog, Giu, Gort...
• Artificial Limbs: Randy's left arm is mechanical, although the story behind that's presently unknown.
• Artistic License – Physics: Of the five tiers of tool materials, the lowest one is steel, followed by bronze, silver, gold and osmium. Bronze, silver and gold are all far softer and weaker than steel, making them eminently unsuited for use in tools. Osmium is very hard and tough, but also very rare and quite brittle, plus it's the densest naturally occurring element on Earth (twice as dense as lead), which makes it just as questionable for these applications. It also isn't purple. But hey, this is a game with magic, giants and mermaids, so no one cares.
  • Furthermore, Bronze is a human-made alloy created by mixing copper and tin, it's not a naturally occurring material found in the wild. The development of bronze as a new element in metallurgy is what kick-started and gave its name to the bronze age.
• Bigger on the Inside: Applies to all buildings on the island to various degrees, with some having at least five times more floor space inside than what could feasibly be expected from the outside.
  • After you donate a certain number of items to the museum, they start a crowdfunding campaign to expand its space. Apparently one of the stretch goals was finding out how to defy the laws of physics, because the interior of the museum expands to a ridiculous degree while the building it's in doesn't visibly change at all.
  • The same thing happens when you upgrade your house, barn or coop. The house even gains an additional floor at level 3, but on the outside it's still the same cozy bungalow it started out as.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Reaching rank A unlocks several expensive cosmetic items for purchase, chief among them the Golden Chickin Costume that allows you to look ridiculous with panache for the staggering sum of 1,000,000 coins. By that point you'll likely have enough cash on hand to afford the thing, but that's still far more money than your entire farm will be worth, for something that provides no benefit whatsoever.
• Character Customization: Players are free to customize the Farmer's name, appearance and honorific.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The game has no manual save function and autosaves only when you go to bed. Depending on your game speed setting, having to quit out during the day for any reason can easily lose you half an hour of progress or more.
• Chest Monster: In the mines there's a monster that looks like the stone treasure chests you find lying around, until you get close.
• The Chosen One: The player character is the one selected by the Goddess of Flowers to heal the island's ecosystem. It never really elaborated why the player character was chosen, however. Other than because they're the hero of the game.
• Coat, Hat, Mask: The hero of the TV show Masked Detective wears an outfit like this.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The cooking system is expansive and quite complex, but the buffs the meals provide are barely noticeable (generally +10% to some skill gain for a few in-game hours), and the meals themselves sell for less than the ingredients used to make them, to the point that sometimes a single ingredient is worth more on its own.
• Cool Sword: Your starting weapon is called a Blunt Sword, yet it's still a decent-looking steel longsword that does its job well enough. More advanced swords tend to be increasingly elaborate in their design, but their stats are more or less the same, making the choice largely cosmetic. Their Charged Attack is a Cool, but Inefficient Spin Attack.
• Critical Hit: Have a 5% chance of either dealing triple damage to the target or killing it outright. A special ring can be equipped that adds another 5% to your crit chance, effectively doubling it.
• Cycle of Hurting: Monsters in the mines have a stun bar that, once filled, makes them unable to act for a few seconds. Weapons with fast combos like swords can usually fill the bar before the monster can get a hit in, opening them up for a deadly follow-up combo before they can retaliate.
• Drop the Hammer: Hammers are the Mighty Glacier among the game's weapons, dealing the highest damage per hit at the cost of having the slowest attack rate. Their Charged Attack is a more powerful overhead Ground Pound that can One-Hit Kill many weaker enemies.
• Dying Town: Starlet Town is in this state when your Player Character arrives, having been demoted from rank A to F over the years until only a picturesque but economically dead shell remained. Restoring the town to its former glory provides the game's Excuse Plot.
• Elemental Motifs: Each of the sections of the cave, and the giant you rescue at the end of each, is themed around one of the classic four elements.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Giant Chieftain is only called by his title.
• Everyone Is Bi: All 22 romance options in the game can be pursued regardless of the player character's gender.
• Evil, Inc.: Pufferfish, that wants to muscle in and rob the island of its small town charm. Their MO is to target dying towns and offer the citizens to revitalize the area with oil money in return for drilling rights and turning the settlement into a soulless corporate dystopia.
• Expy:
  • Miranjani is obviously heavily inspired by Ariel, being a mermaid princess who's fascinated by human stuff, and faces friction with her parents because of it.
  • Likewise, the merfolk's oracle sure does remind one of Ursula, and even does the opposite of the main thing Ursula did she eventually gives the player the option of turning into a merfolk when underwater instead of using diving gear.
  • The Band of Smiles is a group of adventurers very similar to the sort of Warriors Guild commonly associated with the The Elder Scrolls franchise. Additionally, they're usually abbreviated as B.O.S., giving them the same acronym as the Brotherhood of Steel, another quasi-military organization from a different Bethesda game series.
  • The shows you watch on TV feature a few direct parodies, such as Gordon Ramsay the judge in "Game of Cones" or Conan O'Brien (who's shown interviewing a clear Expy of Cloud Strife).
• Fishing Minigame: A major part of the gameplay, and a good source of income in the early game that's great for getting your farming business off the ground quickly. It loses importance later on, but you'll still spend a lot of time with it if you want to unlock everything the Goddess Altar has to offer. There are dozens of fish species to catch, and their availability depends on many factors like the season, the weather, the time of day, and in which body of water you cast your line.
  • The release of 1.0 however, nerfed the ability to quickly upgrade your fishing capabilities by purchasing better rods. Now you'll need to provide Sunny with seaweed extracts in order to upgrade it, which makes it dependant on your progress through the underwater sections of the game, whereas in the past you could just pay your way into the top tier rods.
• Fish People: The ocean around Coral Island is home to a naga kingdom. You'll interact with them quite a bit during the ocean-focused story branch, and some of their characters can even be romanced.
• Friend to Bugs: Eleanor, she is into bug-collecting and most of her loved gifts are bugs.
• Gaia's Vengeance: As you rise through the town ranks, nature itself begins to invade Pufferfish's office in the form of vines burrowing through the walls and floors. At rank A the building looks like a cutesy homage to what's left of Jurassic Park after InGen pulled out of Isla Nublar.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • If you help the merfolk out enough, you'll be given a sidequest where you turn into one of them while underwater, but the game continues to play the rebreather sound effect although you're no longer wearing one.
  • Your spouse will occasionally invite you to a shared activity like picnic or stargazing when talked to (and they'll complain if you don't take them up on the offer), but there's no actual way to participate in any of it.
• Gameplay Automation: Late-game research unlocks gadgets that allow you to automate almost everything on your farm that normally needs to be done manually, like sowing, fertilizing and watering your crops, or feeding and petting your animals. The only thing you can't automate is selling your products, but this is by far the least time-consuming action of them all. Considering how late you get access to these machines, there's likely not much left to do in the game except farming, meaning automating it almost entirely has the unfortunate side effect of making the game rather boring.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: The game is lousy with collectibles. 60 fossils, 53 insects, 72 fish, 45 ocean critters, 83 artifacts, as well as 35 gems need to be collected to refill the town's museum exhibits, with all categories spanning all four seasons and multiple subsets with oftentimes obscure spawn conditions.
• Green Aesop: The primary antagonists of the game are a corporation that want to drill the island for oil, while restoring the ecosystem is the player's main goal.
• Grid Inventory: You start out with 20 slots and can upgrade to a maximum of 40, but you'll still be juggling items around all the time.
• Guide Dang It!: The game generally isn't too forthcoming with gameplay hints and tutorials past the bare minimum.
  • Once you hit ten hearts with any townie, you receive a letter that tells you to purchase a diamond ring if you wish to propose. What it doesn't tell you is that in order to do so successfully, you first need to go through that character's entire event chain, the triggers and locations of which are hinted at absolutely nowhere. Without a guide you can spend months in-game running around the neighborhood until you finally arrive at the right time and place for the next event to trigger.
  • What fish and bugs you can catch depends on specific combinations of the location, the season, the time of day, and the weather, but even if all these factors align, whether or not a rare bug for instance actually feels like spawning that day still comes down to random chance, making it extremely frustrating to complete some of the collections. Some fish only spawn during a single week in the entire year, sometimes in locations that aren't marked on the map even with the appropriate Sturdy Computer upgrades installed. Good luck finding out they even exist, let alone be there in time to catch one. That the in-game codex only shows what you've already caught doesn't help matters at all.
  • Artifacts and fossils are acquired from coffers and fossil nodes, respectively. Both item groups have half a dozen different versions, each with its own invisible loot table, so figuring out what coffer or node you need to farm to complete your collection is damn near impossible without a guide. This is compounded by some of the collectibles having drop rates as low as 1%, meaning even if you do have the right spawn item on hand, you might still think you're doing something wrong because what you're looking for just won't show up.
  • There's no way to see how much any given crop or item is worth until you've sold it at least once, and even afterwards you can't see the sale price in the item description outside of a shop menu, making it quite frustrating to manage your warehouse inventory without an online price list on hand.
  • One of the achievements requires you to sell a golden animal product, something that can only be produced by a cow or chicken that won its respective contest at the Animal Festival in spring. This is mentioned absolutely nowhere, and these two contests are the only ones out of about two dozen that have an effect beyond the festival that hosts them.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Dialogue with Princess Miranjani indicates she'd like to have an adventurous life free or stifling royal expectations.
• Inspiration Nod:
  • The player can wear an item called the "O.G. Farmer Hat", which is the same as the hat worn by the player's avatar in the early Harvest Moon titles. It even has his spit-curl hair in the front.
  • The secret shop in the empty cabin is run by a monkey named Concerned Monkey, an obvious reference to Concerned Ape, creator of Stardew Valley.
• Interspecies Romance: It has been confirmed that the player will be able to romance three merfolk (Semeru, leader of the guards, Miranjani, the princess, and Denali from the promotional material), although how that will work is still unrevealed. Finishing the ocean questline turns the Farmer into a mermaid themselves (though fully able to act like a normal human on land), so this will probably be a requirement. This is meant to come in an update sometime after release.
• Invisible to Adults: The Giants can only be seen by the protagonist because the Flower Goddess needs her Chosen One to be able to see the supernatural. Otherwise, they can only be seen by kids and animals.
• Jack of All Stats: Swords are the most balanced weapon class available, with their damage, attack rate and range all lying between those of hammers and spears.
• Lives in a Van: Ben lives in a van that is parked on the north end of the island, and he turns it into a pop-up shop during the weekend.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields count as weapons in this game and provide a native defense bonus at the cost of much lower damage output. Since you can only equip one weapon, wielding a shield and an actual melee weapon in tandem isn't possible.
• Meaningful Name: The head of the Pufferfish office, and the closest thing the game has for a main villain, is named Karen. Which has become slang for an entitled, short-tempered, usually older white woman. Ironically, she's an Affably Evil suit who makes her moves discreetly and underhandedly and not explosive or confrontational as befitting a "Karen".
• No Full Name Given: The island's inhabitants are overwhelming known by their given name only. They do have family names that are occasionally hinted at in dialogue, but these are never used while socializing and don't show up anywhere on their character sheets.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Giants aren't really that giant. Except for the chieftain they're all shorter than the player's avatar, and he might only be so because of the large headdress he wears. When they decide to go to town and observe humans, they have to have two of them do the Totem Pole Trench gag to be tall enough to pass for an adult human!
• Only Known By Her Nickname: Eva is short for Everest but everyone just calls her "Eva".
• Our Mermaids Are Different: They're fairly standard in terms of appearance, being attractive humans from the waist-up and scaled fish from the waist-down. They're said to work with the Giants and the Goddess of Flowers to keep the balance of the island.
• No Indoor Voice: Sunny. Compared to the other townsfolk, his dialogue is written in Caps Lock, giving the impression that he is shouting or speaking loudly. A scene showing a parent-teacher conference indicates it's because he's hard of hearing.
• Purple Is Powerful: The most powerful tool material, osmium, is an intense shade of purple.
• Random Number God: Outside of the farming and dating aspects, almost everything in the gameplay is governed in large parts by random chance. Anything loot-related has it particularly bad, which can result in a whole lot of forced grinding if, for example, the various coffers you pull from the ocean keep coughing up everything but the final artifact you need to complete your collection.
• Refining Resources: An integral part of the gameplay. Ores need to be smelted into metal bars, trash is processed into scrap, glass and compost, and almost all crops and animal products can be turned into various artisan products that are several times more valuable.
• Relationship Values:
  • There are about 70 human(oid) characters on Coral Island, almost all of which have an affinity meter that shows their disposition towards you with a number of hearts. Most max out at eight hearts of friendship, with the remaining two only unlocking once things are getting more serious. You improve your relationships mostly by talking, distributing gifts, and occasionally performing a little Fetch Quest.
  • Farm animals have their own affinity meters that dictate the quality of their products - a happy cow gives better milk than a cranky one. Happy animals are also better at the various minigames during the Animal Festival in summer.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: All of them really, thanks to the game's cutesy art style. If the sight of a happily grinning cow waddling around your pasture can't pull you out of a bad mood, nothing will.
• Romance Sidequest: You can befriend, date and eventually marry any one of the eligible bachelors or bachelorettes on the island, although marriage requires a sufficiently big house first so your spouse can move in with you. You can even have kids regardless of gender distribution.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Once the Farmer successfully restores Starlet Town's A rank, Pufferfish realize the town is now too well-off for their strategy to work anymore, so they pull out and shutter their office within days. That said office is pretty much uninhabitable at this point thanks to mysterious vines breaking through the concrete everywhere certainly didn't do them any favors, either.
• Show Within a Show: There's several in addition to the usual things for these farm/life sim games, like the weather report. Such as Game of Cones, which is basically a family-friendly Hell's Kitchen, even down to its host being a shameless Expy of Gordon Ramsey.
• Socketed Equipment: You can add magical enhancements to your farming tools, depending how many times you've leveled them up, and how many giants you've saved from the mines.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: You don't have to worry about running out of air while diving, even if you stay down there practically all day (though your character will automatically surface when it gets too late in the evening).
• Theme Naming: The spotlighted merfolk characters are named, ironically, after mountains.
• Tropical Island Adventure: The player moves to a tropical island where there's lots of people to befriend, a greedy corporation to stop, monster-filled caves to explore, and supernatural beings to enlist.
• Underground Monkey: Almost all monsters have multiple palette-swapped subtypes, one for each of the four elemental mines in the Forest Caverns. They do get a bit stronger as you progress through the mines, but their behavior and attacks stay the same regardless.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Seems to be how Pufferfish operates. They're not eviscerating island communities for profit, they're revitalizing the deteriorating homes of bountiful natural resources, or words to that effect. Certainly, they've already done that to one island in the archipelago alone without incurring much public backlash.
• Virtual Pet: The player can adopt a pet from the town's community center. On top of more mundane options like a cat or rabbit, the player can choose to have a pet monkey or fox.
• World-Healing Wave: Every time you successfully clear an underwater area of trash and activate the nearby mechanism, it unleashes one of these that clears away the oil spills and black tentacles blocking the path forward, leaving the surrounding coral reefs pristine and Scenery Porn-ographic.

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