Copyright Polygon
It's easy to look at Petit Planet and call it HoYoverse's legally distinct Animal Crossing, and, after spending a week with the closed beta ahead of its launch on Nov. 7, it's also kinda true. If you took Nintendo's life-sim and blended it with elements of Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, and Disney Dreamlight Valley, you'd have a pretty good idea of what's going on here. Everything in Petit Planet is something I've done many times before, and the only thing it's doing to stand out is leaning hard into its soft visual aesthetic. It works, for the most part. But I'm coming away from the beta wondering just how well HoYoverse understands what makes cozy games worthwhile. Petit Planet's broad structure is very similar to what you'd see in an Animal Crossing game. You arrive at a new location with nothing to your name but the clothes on your back and a suspiciously helpful animal willing to give you a tutorial and charge you money for upgrades. Since this is a HoYoverse game, I should clarify this is in-game money. I haven't encountered microtransactions or any gacha elements in the time I've spent with the beta. Anyway, your goal is building up the planet so people want to move there, and you do that by doing pretty much all the things you've done before in cozy games. You've got: Cooking Farming Decorating Catching critters and building a collection Doing friendly favors for neighbors Tending flowers Beachcombing Exploring away from home Selling stuff at the local merchant There's also a stamina system like in Harvest Moon and Disney Dreamlight Valley, where you can only perform actions for so long until you have to rest or eat food to recover your strength. A loose ecological theme is woven through all this. The universe responds to your acts of planetary and interpersonal care by producing a substance called Luca, which you use to water the big blue space tree that's the signifier of your planet's health. The healthier the tree becomes, the more your planet grows, and growth unlocks new features like various terrain types, crops to plant, and so on. The environmental undertones are welcome, but they don't really manifest in practical ways. The idea of caring for the environment is there, yeah, but at this stage it's just contextual, with no influence over what you do or how you do it. Petit Planet's progression cadence is a lot like Animal Crossing as well. You start with a modestly sized house and a handful of features you can use around the island, and then you gradually unlock additional stuff: a bigger house, more furniture, terraforming options, more furniture, more everything. However, it's open-ended and lets you do what you want, when you want it. Collectibles and currency earned through completing daily activities — think New Horizons and Pocket Camp's bite-sized objectives — help add some incentive to keep up with the little things as well, since you can use them to improve relationships with neighbors and purchase rarer items. Aesthetic is the main way Petit Planet distinguishes itself so far. It sits in a grey area between folksy, twee, and cottagecore, with vibrant colors that are soothing but never garish, and few corners or hard edges to be found. It's supremely chill to just exist in, and the emphasis on vibes over specific decorating themes gives you a lot of freedom to mix and match furniture items in your house and around the planet. That said, the actual act of decorating with these items is surprisingly restrictive. Petit Planet uses a grid-based system like most life sims, but it's rigid, more like building without cheats in The Sims 4. You can't drop an item too near another object outside, so if you want an arch near the river or a chair flush against your house, too bad. You also have no option to set an item in the middle of a grid square or off-center, which limits object placement way more than you might expect. It's a frustrating limitation. On the bright side, it seems like Petit Planet will avoid one annoyance common to other decorating games, namely that the bigger pieces of interactive furniture are actually interactive. It always annoys me in Animal Crossing that you can't actually swing on the swings, but after sitting on one in Petit Planet for a few seconds, your character gradually starts to swing in slow, lazy arcs with a peaceful smile on their face. It might not have quite the photo mode potential to rival something like Infinity Nikki, but it's close. It could get closer with a broader variety of customization options, though. Character customization is in a weird place, at least for this initial beta. Your avatar has no specific gender, and you can choose whatever starting outfit and hairstyle you want. But almost every piece of clothing I came across was very… fluffy. I ended up with maybe three gender-neutral or masculine-leaning outfits — four if you count the vegetable costume, I guess, since broccoli isn't gendered — and a lot of tights, dresses, and frilly skirts. Men traditionally make up a smaller portion of the player base for The Sims and Animal Crossing, so I get not overloading it with masculine clothes. However, this is also not the 1940s, so the preponderance of dresses and emphasis on a very specific kind of femininity make for an odd combination, especially in a game about self-expression. Women like pants too, HoYoverse. The handful of neighbors I've encountered so far fit specific archetypes, but they don't overlap. There aren't, for example, three sporty types and two goofballs who all say the same thing like you'd find in Animal Crossing. Instead, there's a hyper rabbit who loves catching sea critters and decorating cars and a galactic traveler on the hunt for some kind of treasure, among other, equally bespoke personalities. They play a more involved role in your daily planet activities, too, with specific goals to reach and new storytelling moments that unlock as you grow closer. In theory, this setup should keep neighborly relations from getting too stale, though I do have some reservations about the character writing. Localization in HoYoverse games varies wildly at times, a mix of stiff, lightly edited translations with more thoughtful and even poignant passages depending on the scenario. It's a little easier to overlook some of the less prosaic localization choices in something like Honkai Star Rail, since the focus is on the big narrative picture. But these daily interactions will be part of Petit Planet's soul, and there's already a glaring oddity with one character's script. Yunguo, your first neighbor, is meant to be a sheltered kid from a rural background, so she speaks with a few country-isms like droppin' the ends of words 'n such. That's fine. She also says "lickle" instead of "little," which is a completely different dialect and mildly irritating to read multiple times in a single exchange. HoYoverse needs to invest more time and resources in its localization, in other words, and I mean investing in people doing the work. This first Petit Planet beta includes a small handful of characters and tools with entirely AI-generated text. It's easy to ignore, for now, but also a baffling decision for a game that depends on qualities AI can't understand — charm and personality, among other things — to work.
