Hokko Life Early Access Review: Potential Giant Killer

Outside of Strangeland, Hokko Life has been my most anticipated game. Setting the tone early on, this IS Animal Crossing for PC. You can coat it with whatever spiel you want, but it’s a borderline carbon copy. Only, it’s potentially better.

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If you were affected by the global pandemic and stuck indoors for some time (who wasn’t?), there’s a high probability that you were binging through games and of those various titles, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was at the top. I know I was. If you were/are a fan, you’ll love Hokko Life.

From Team17 and Wonderscope, this lifestyle simulator oozes so many similarities, only a lot of them improve upon the Nintendo Switch model with convenience, customisations, and playability. The latter one is currently in progress as it’s an Early Access title.

Hokko Life Early Access Review Summary

Your character arrives in town only to find out that the next train out of here isn’t going to be anytime soon. The local innkeeper and store owner suggest you kip at the inn for free until you can make a dash for it. Only this is far from Innsmouth, and it’s not long until you settle down, with owning your own home on the agenda.

Cue your fetch quests for the locals, albeit only a handful. Can you get me this? How about designing X? At your disposal are all the classic tools, though you have to learn the recipe for a couple and sell a few things to buy the next in the store.

These tools include the shovel, pickaxe, axe and net. They’re all self-explanatory, but unlike their counterparts, they’re much easier to use. Stand within close proximation of a butterfly, and you’ll most likely capture it. Digging a hole and planting flowers or a tree is significantly more accurate and doesn’t require much precision.

Fishing may as well be the same as Animal Crossing with the fish shadows underwater then casting your line in front of them, but to reel them in, it’s a brief QTE of bashing the button/keys and moving left or right should the pesky fish flee.

No Sign Of Any Nooks

Sally is your resident inventor and will teach you new recipes to build materials and set a couple of quests. Her workshop is a game unto itself as you can create new furnishings by resizing, rotating and seeing guides to ensure that whatever it is you build will work. Oma gives you pointers at the inn when you’re unsure of what to do, and Moss buys all your crap and sells you more crap.

You may find yourself repeatedly sleeping until an item appears on the shelves. There’s not much on offer, but the 3D models are great and offer up a lot of variety and not just rehashed items, only in a different colour. My first purchase was a loo roll. Interesting fact, eh?

Soon the town in Hokko Life captures your heart, and there’s talk of buying your own inexpensive home. Unlike charlatan Tom Nook, houses are relatively inexpensive, but you need to provide the materials. If you can’t make a plank of wood or construct goods from mined rock, you’re stuffed.

However, once you build and design your own stuff, you can customise and reposition objects with such flexibility. It’s easy to craft multiple items all in one go without having to sit through the same animation each time, and selling you goods is even easier in Hokko Life.

Have A Lie-In

Now, here’s the big fat hairy butt: there’s a lot of sleeping and nothing to do. What? Wasn’t I declaring all the good stuff above? Yes, but there will be so much wandering about with nothing to do, it gets boring until you’re able to accumulate enough money and complete the early quests that unlock the design properties. 

You’re told that visitors will come to the inn for lunch and will want to meet up with them. While the game isn’t real-time, time will pass if you stand still, so you need to time everything, and that’s where your futon becomes the Hokko Life experience.

Sleep for two or six hours, or to reset, sleep until the next day. You’ll come down to the lobby, and there won’t be anyone there. Back to the clearing and to cut down the trees, and they still haven’t grown, so back to bed and sleep it off.

Hokko Life can be an early grind. Wake up, cut down the trees, make some planks, and then sell them with the fish and butterflies caught. Squirrel it away, then sleep until it grows back and repeat. I’d ask Oma for some support, but she’d say things out of my scope, such as redesigning town, but there were no options to do so at the time.

The local inhabitants would hover on the outskirts of town, and unlike Animal Crossing, you open up a new screen, leaving the one behind you. This was particularly annoying when one of the residents, Ren, would stand on the line between the current and next screen – each time I went to speak to him, I’d appear in the next area.

Hokko Life has incredible potential, and once it picks up – i.e. more crafts, residents to speak with, I’d be cocky enough to say it’s better than Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and an essential purchase if you’re a fan of the title, but don’t have a Switch/want a bit more customisation and flexibility.

Customising every part of your character, the furniture and home, including its positioning without having to deal with a loan shark, is immensely appealing, and I’d happily bail on all my other games to indulge in this.

Hokko Life Early Access Review Summary

Visually, it’s brilliant. It has the same warmth, and security blanket feel of the other title – even some of the jingles are uncannily like Nintendo’s finest. Besides Ren being out of reach on occasion (I got my revenge and evicted him – immediately!), and sometimes walking directly through furnishings, this is a very polished Early Access title. It’s not without the odd niggles, but that should be expected at this phase. In short: Hokko Life meets expectations, and I foresee myself glued to this for months to come.