Hands on with HoYoverse’s Petit Planet “Coziness Test Experience” so far

The life simulation genre of games has been dominated in recent years by a couple pretty major hitters, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Stardew Valley. Not too long ago, HoYoverse announced their new foray into the genre with their upcoming game Petit Planet.

Fans of the genre would immediately notice a lot of the things they’ve come to love about life-sim games, but this time with that HoYoverse quality embedded in it. Recently, the first Petit Planet Coziness Test Experience went live and I was lucky enough to participate, so let me tell you a little about my time with it.

Even just upon booting the game for the first time, you already feel the cozy game vibes. The soft and warm colors, the music, and the visuals all combine into a nice warm blanket in front of a fire on a cold winter day. It’s not exactly a “chibi” style, but it’s adjacent I’d say. I had a feeling that HoYoverse of all companies would be able to nail the style they were going for given their previous work on games like Zenless Zone Zero and Honkai: Star Rail.

The game opens with a neat little storybook-style descriptor of the planets you’ll inhabit. It goes over things like planetary resources, the “Neighbors” you’ll meet and form bonds with, and more. Then of course you’ll be designing your character and choosing where you’ll start off. The options may look a little lacking in the initial creator but you can unlock plenty of other options later, so I wasn’t really bothered by it. Each day you’ll have access to a new set of clothes rotating out in the Loomi Store, so I’m still finding myself checking it out each day I play to see what I can get for my character.

Every day I logged in I would make a little bit of progress and unlock some new features, such as farming, housing upgrades, and arguably one of the most neat features: the ability to travel to other “islets”. These islets are how you’ll get resources that might not be currently available on your planet and also how you’ll meet and acquire new Neighbors to join you. Each of them have seemingly been unique with their design, making each islet feel like a new discovery. It’s always neat to see the color palettes chosen and the associated neighbors you can discover there.

Petit Planet’s got one of those things that just makes you feel like you wanna keep playing and working on your planet and turning it into whatever you want. From unlocking different paths to crafting all sorts of furniture to decorate outside and inside, there’s literally always something drawing my attention to how I can improve my planet. I’m sure we all have that part of the life sim game session where we spend 4 hours drawing paths on the ground to map out our town/city/island/etc, and Petit Planet’s no exception to this rule. It doesn’t help that I’m always sidetracked catching new bugs or embodying the phrase “If I’ve gone missin’, I’ve gone fishin’”. This also leads me to filling out my museum and looking at the cool wildlife.

Petit Planet’s genuinely a fantastic time so far, and as it updates towards full release I can only imagine how much more there’s gonna be to do. The multiplayer’s solid, albeit a little restrictive as far as interaction goes, but I imagine that’ll get addressed later on. I’ve had so much fun just playing it and losing track of time.

HoYoverse stepping into the life simulation genre is great especially with their track record of polish. As long as the beta test is going, I’m gonna keep logging in and working on my planet, because this gameplay loop is so addicting and the visuals/audio are about as complimentary as it gets. For anybody that didn’t make it into this first coziness test, hopefully there’s another one down the line!