Yesterday, a cute new farming sim released in early-access to rave reviews, and some people got a bit mad. That ‘some people’ will change depending on who you ask, but it’s clear that someone, somewhere, didn’t like what they were seeing with Starsand Island.
If you ask some eagle-eyed fans, they may say that the devs didn’t think they were getting enough positive attention. So they got a bunch of AI bots together and made a lot of faked reviews.
If you ask the devs, they’ll say that someone is trying to sabotage their efforts by framing them as review-manipulators.
And if you were to somehow find and ask the person running the AI bots, they’re either mad at Starsand Island’s dev team, or mad they got caught. No matter what, somebody’s mad today.
PCGamer cites content creator Josh’s Gaming Garden as patient-zero for noticing oddities with Starsand Island’s reviews. He brought his suspicions to the public via a post on X, sharing screenshots of steam profiles behind many of Starsand Island’s reviews.
All accounts in question had very similar account activity, logging around 4 hours played in the exact same games, all with identical last-played dates. So for example, the four accounts in the post linked above had all played 4 hours of Project Zomboid, dated to precisely the 21st of January.
The rabbit hole goes deeper. A follow-up post showed “about 100” accounts with exactly 1 review made (all for Starsand Island, of course), and exactly 14 games owned. No points for guessing how similar those game libraries looked.
Starsand Island Devs Respond To Unusual Review Activity
Naturally, the devs at Seed Sparkle Lab are offering a plea of ‘innocent’ to their players. They posted a lengthy statement to their Discord server, disavowing the reviews and suspecting that someone is trying to attack their project.
“At first, we believed this meant our game was being recognised and appreciated,” the devs explained. “However, we soon noticed something unusual on Steam: some comments were posted after a very short playtime, were released at nearly the same time (appeared to be AI-generated).”
“What makes it even more puzzling is that this approach is not cheap, since leaving a review requires purchasing the game.”
The statement continues: “Making an indie game is not easy. We simply want to focus on building a good product and giving the players who truly like our game a better experience. So, to whoever may be behind this, we kindly ask you to stop. Please let us focus on making our game in peace. We pose no threat to anyone.”
The playerbase of Starsand Island remains divided on this issue, and it’s hard to blame them. This isn’t even a he-said-she-said at this point, it’s one group’s voice blaming an ‘other’ that may or may not even exist.
“Pretty sure this is the equivalent of posting something offensive,” one fan writes, “and then claiming you were hacked. They are more than likely behind this because who else would do this?”
“For all we know,” says another, “this could be a situation that they’re actively working with Steam on to investigate. Their response could be generic or seen lackluster based on what they might be allowed to share.”
For the moment, Starsand Island is closing in on 2000 total reviews, at a rate of 90% positive. It’s hard to tell the true scale of this wave of bot attacks, or if there are more coming – but if they only number in the hundreds, it’s entirely possible that the game would still have majority-positive reviews anyway.
Steam has been known to purge fake reviews before, and since these seem like a fairly obvious case, we’ll see Starsand Island’s real score soon enough.
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