Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town DLC splashes the Sanrio cozy sim with fresh color

The new City Town biome is a colorful and fun place to explore, and Usahana is a vibrant new friend to have around for it all.

Since 2023, Hello Kitty Island Adventure has been Sunblink’s take on the cozy genre, featuring Hello Kitty and numerous other denizens of the Sanrio universe in a wide variety of cozy crafting, exploration, and adventure. A few years down the road, Sunblink has been busy between updates putting together the next big thing for this game, a vibrant and mysterious metropolis-centered second DLC expansion called City Town. With new characters to befriend and quests and mysteries to discover, City Town is a charming new chapter for Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

How to prepare for the Hello Kitty Island Adventure City Town DLC

City Town can be considered a mid-game DLC for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. You don’t need to have an enormous amount of resources to go there, but you will need to get through the tutorial, some equipment quests, and the advancement of some friendship levels. I suggest raising Hello Kitty, My Melody, Badtz-maru, Chococat, Tuxedosam, Cinnamaroll, Keroppi, and Kuromi to Friendship Level 7. That should give you just about everything you need to have a good time in City Town without being stuck having to leave and do activities elsewhere.

You’ll also need to have a boat and a few functions to reach City Town. That means completing the Keep it Reel quest to unlock Fishing, the Deep Diving quest to unlock the Snorkel, and the A Zipline Adventure quest. Finally, you should unlock the Ship Shape quest with Badtz-maru, which unlocks a follow-up quest, Into the Fog, once completed.

Into the Fog is the gateway quest that takes you to City Town and lets you access everything in the DLC thereafter, so make sure you have these pieces in place if you’re planning to jump into the expansion.

A mysterious city and a funny new friend

City Town is a cool new biome on which the entirety of this DLC is centered. During a trip on the ocean, you and your friends discover an uncharted island. You also find the titular city on the island’s coast with docks ready for your ship. The city is empty, save for some unique creatures and Nuls (the little blobs that help you with quests and cozy life) lurking about, and the whole place is as colorful as it is curious. It wasn’t long before I was introduced to new character Usahana, the sole denizen of City Town. The City and island aren’t on any map, and Usahana’s account of it suggests the very existence of the place is tied to the imagination.

After a few early quests that get you introduced to City Town, you’ll be set loose. It’s important to note that much of the quests and advancement in the DLC are tied to becoming friends with Usahana, which unlocks DLC quests. So, make sure you’re giving her daily gifts and being kind to her so you can unlock more of what City Town has to offer. That said, there are also all sorts of challenges and seek-and-find bits around City Town, and the town itself has a beautiful vibe to it that always left me feeling warm as I was wandering through it. Traveling through the rainbow arches of the dock into the city at night is delightful.

Once I advanced friendship with Usahana far enough, she began inviting other Sanrio friends to open shops in City Town and bring it more to life. That includes the Imagination Cafe where you can craft new sweets and arrange a cool cafe vibe, Piano Plushie Pals for crafting plushies with My Sweet Piano, Pekkle’s Music Shop for purchasing music discs, Keroppi’s Orchard for growing fruit that can be used in Imagination Cafe recipes, the Tourist Shop where you can buy unique souvenirs from Hangyodon, and Kuromi’s Boutique where you can make your own custom avatar color palettes. There’s also a theater to explore with Hangyodon. Overall, City Town boasts around 90 new quests, 35 friendship levels, and an estimated 30-plus hours of content, and I found the experience to be nicely varied and nudging me towards different activities regularly.

I’ve been on a creative kick, so I really enjoyed Kuromi’s Boutique and Imagination Cafe. For Kuromi’s Boutique, you have to bring a lot of flowers of various colors from the Greenhouse to create the color palette you want, but it was rewarding to make something that was uniquely mine and wear it around the rest of this adventure. Imagination Cafe, meanwhile, lets you craft a bubbly little establishment to your heart’s content with various props you’ve collected. Like your and other inhabitants’ vacation homes, it’s a fun and functional new space to play around in and redesign to your heart’s content.

What’s inside the fog of City Town?

Hello Kitty Island Adventure’s City Town DLC is all sorts of different good things. It’s fun, visually heartwarming, it’s inspiring, and it’s just so dang wholesome as always. I loved turning City Town from what I might call “a good start” into a bustling, colorful biome of fun, food, and fashion. Making new outfits with Tuxedosam, coloring them in my unique style with Kuromi, crafting sweets and rearranging my café for friends, and learning more about Usahana’s hopes and dreams for City Town reminded me of exactly why I loved Hello Kitty Island Adventure so much in 2023. City Town is more to love, and there’s lot of it. You’ll have to do some work in the base game to make sure you’re ready, but once you’re there, it’s a gift that keeps giving.

These impressions are based on a PC digital version of the game supplied by the publisher. Hello Kitty Island Adventure and the City Town DLC are out now on Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC for $24.99 USD (included with Apple Arcade).

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