Hokko Life [Xbox]
Developed by Wonderscope, Hokko Life is a wholesome community sim game, similar to titles such as Animal Crossing. To begin with, you’ll customise your character (though from a fairly limited selection), before setting off on a train journey - but oops - you fell asleep and have ended up in a little village called Hokko, where you’ll meet Oma and Moss. Oma runs the local inn, and they’ll welcome you in to stay in a vacant room; and Moss runs the store across from the inn, where you can purchase anything you might need.
Once you’ve settled, you’ll get to choose a house to renovate and call home, before you get to work on sprucing up the rest of the village too. You’ll complete tasks for various villagers, and can gain access to further objectives over time. There’s a farming area you’ll eventually unlock, where Aubrey will get you set up, allowing you to purchase seeds to plant crops in order to make money, or to gain resources for crafting. You can also take a trip to a nearby island in order to dig for treasure, using a metal detector to locate hidden goodies in the ground. And there’s a town you can visit to pick up seasonal items as well as items that other players have created. Mayor Merits can be achieved by completing various tasks around the village, and these will unlock rewards upon completion, such as a stamina upgrade.
It’s difficult not to draw comparisons to Animal Crossing due to their similarities, though this highlights certain aspects that feel as though they’ve come up short, but similarly highlighting the things that are done really well. The customisation is fantastically intuitive, with a much more free-flowing design mechanic than AC - which was all pixel based - and an accompanying character to assist and sell you additional crafting pieces that you’ll likely require. You’ve got a lot of freedom to make different designs to express your personality, or have cute little references to other things such as Studio Ghibli patterns - you can also share your designs for other players to download, giving you plenty of options even if you’re not on the overly-creative side. This isn’t just limited to clothing, either, you can custom build furniture too, which makes for an even more in-depth and intriguing building mechanic that truly allows you to have a unique world - if you so choose.
The visuals are gorgeous, with a cute, colourful world that has a lot of creativity within. It doesn’t feel quite as polished as Animal Crossing, though coming from a self-described “super tiny studio” - with this being their first game, this can easily be forgiven. There are fish to catch, bugs to collect, and resources to gather such as wood and stone, and plenty to keep you busy - you can even go dig in a mine! The game’s soundtrack is pleasant, with a variety of tunes that are reminiscent of both the games that inspire it, as well as classic SEGA vibes.
The pacing is somewhat slow, exacerbated by the constant to-and-fro of speaking to task givers and heading off to find someone else or collect an item, but this can be both a pro and con depending on what you’re looking for in a game. It is very much a relaxed title, moving gently through the seasons and with plenty of customisation for you to tweak your village to look exactly how you want, though the bitty nature of completing tasks - and having to go to sleep in order to advance to the next day to force new tasks to appear awkwardly stunts the gameplay at times. Villagers feel a little bland too, especially in comparison to Animal Crossing - they are devoid of personality, despite being outwardly cute.
Overall, Hokko Life is a budget friendly game for people looking for something akin to Animal Crossing, coming in at £15.99 on Xbox. If you’re looking for something chilled out to play, and are intrigued by the variety of stuff you can create, then this might be a good option - particularly if you’ve got kids that are interested too, as the step-by-step pacing makes this a nice gentle title to get them involved (without breaking the bank).
In the end, we decided to give Hokko Life the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.
Are you interested in Hokko Life? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Team17 for the Hokko Life Xbox review code!
