Petit Planet gives desert island social sims an appealing sci-fantasy paint job, but doesn't bring many new ideas to the table.
This isn't a complaint, but I can't help but feel like every new game I pick up at the moment is Animal Crossing.
I am unashamedly one of those people who thinks the gaming landscape of the 2020s peaked early when New Horizons gently shepherded us all through lockdown, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that – now that we're well past the midpoint of the decade, I hate to remind you – a bunch of studios have come to the same conclusion, and either spun up their own take on the idea, or repurposed an existing IP to include more Animal Crossing-like elements.
Petit Planet – which just launched its second beta test – is, quite unashamedly, HoYoverse's spin on the Animal Crossing formula.
When the concept first leaked a couple of years ago this comparison was drawn instantly, and in typical HoYo fashion the studio has done nothing to distance itself from the inevitable name-drop whenever Petit Planet is mentioned.
It makes sense when you consider that the developer's flagship game, Genshin Impact, is well-known for being heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild, and having that parallel drawn frequently in its early days clearly hasn't hurt it much.
The thing is though, I would argue that Genshin does in fact offer its own distinct spin on BOTW.
For one thing, last time I checked, the Zelda games weren't party-based action RPGs, even if the fantasy open-world exploration clearly borrows quite liberally from Nintendo's genre-defining masterpiece.
Indeed, attempting to reduce Genshin to a BOTW clone in the year 2026 will most likely just make you look hopelessly behind the times.
But without wishing to set myself up to have to eat my words, I'm not sure what Petit Planet brings to the table that a quarter of a century's worth of Animal Crossing titles didn't already.
I'm not saying that Petit Planet shouldn't exist – as a lifelong connoisseur of games within the life/social/farming sim trifecta, I know that large-scale homages are even more common in this genre than they are elsewhere in the industry, which as a whole isn't exactly shy about cribbing from existing concepts.
The classic trio of The Sims, Animal Crossing, and Harvest Moon have intermingled in countless ways over the decades, influencing both one another and a whole slew of spiritual successors, many of which are now well-regarded in their own right.
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