Petit Planet is not the first to mimic Animal Crossing to some eyebrow-raising degrees, nor will it be the last. Developer HoYoverse doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the similarities – a character even balks at the idea of its new planet-owning lead falling into debt for merely having a home – though they don’t deny that upgrades will come at a price. In my short time of about five hours with a preview of the closed beta, Petit Planet offered a charming, “The Little Prince”-themed take on Animal Crossing: New Horizons with an emphasis on clear progression and multiplayer. While these are two things some seemed to crave and were left empty in ACNH, the Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail studio may offer an answer – with potential caveats.
For all I enjoyed about Petit Planet, I started disappointed with its opening on a lackluster character creator. The skin tone range is limited and the hairstyle options are a bummer, though more hair and eye styles and colors for each are available for in-game currency later on. I acknowledge this isn’t the final version of Petit Planet, so I’m hoping that’ll be the case for a game touting customization that limits its global players to four skintones, with only one looking darker than a light brush with the sun.
The overall setup of Petit Planet is that you’re joining three anthropomorphic animal members of a company called Loomi Co in developing a fledgling planet and exploring the surrounding galaxy. You get to choose between two with different environments and different starting planets to begin with. I chose the one described as “hot and dry” with golden prairies. As you complete tasks assigned by Mobai, the fill-in for Isabelle and Tom Nook, you’re given special water for an equally special tree that serves as the heart and, in a way, control center of your planet. With new levels and upgrades, the playable area takes shape with a multi-level field, larger river, and a beach and ocean. I liked that, after a point, I could take a look at the sorts of upgrades ahead, like a mountain area and new kinds of trees.
The first hour held a death grip on my playtime with confined tutorials and limited space for any sort of exploration or creativity, but it loosened up considerably after that, while still introducing new mechanics. The next three or four hours is where upgrades start getting locked behind daily progression. Not the mobile-game clock countdown kind, but real days similar to ACNH. Since Petit Planet access is tied to logging into a HoYoverse server, you can’t force your way forward by changing your device’s clock. That being said, I didn’t run out of interesting things to do while needing to wait.
