Aka doesn’t waste an opportunity to tell you that its eponymous red panda is trying to move on from a war-torn past. This throughline is one of the few narrative beats that come up, and other than that, Aka really is all about having the freedom to explore and interact as you see fit. While there isn’t necessarily a shortage of things to do across the game’s four islands, few of these activities feel at all satisfying. The result is a nonlinear experience that might be too leisurely and empty for its own good.

Upon arriving on the first island, Aka is invited by a neighbor to live in the home underneath theirs, and this space serves as your home base, including a bed, a bathtub, a fire, and a storage chest. In keeping with the game’s day-night cycle, you can return home and use your bed to advance to the next day, which is useful for letting your crops grow. While farming is one of the primary activities that Aka can partake in, crafting, mini-games, and interacting with NPCs represent other ways of killing time. The real issue is that nothing you do feels very meaningful or rewarding; quests literally have no rewards to them. Moreover, certain quests just repeat themselves, like the cleaning out of dead tree stumps and rock formations that make up separate tasks for each island you visit. Seeing a quest completion pop up and receiving no tangible benefit to it makes it hard to maintain any real drive for exploring Aka’s world more thoroughly.

In a way, it feels like Aka is trying to pull off what Animal Crossing has done so successfully: living, working, and collecting being their own rewards. But it has little of the charm and none of the polish of Nintendo’s latest powerhouse franchise. Objects on the ground can be hard to discern against muddy background textures. At one point, a bridge I needed to cross was clearly glitching out as its individual pieces were flailing around the screen as if caught in a tornado. During the game’s frequent loading screens, the music cuts out and then restarts entirely. Even just booting up the game into its intro cutscene led to screen hangs that made me think my Switch had frozen up.

Even just controlling your character and doing simple menuing isn’t the walk in the park the game itself is trying to espouse. Trying to hoe an area for your farm and water your crops is an exercise in frustration given the camera perspective and Aka’s tendency to keep taking steps and moving after you’ve stopped pushing the control stick. Picking up items, dropping them on the ground, and even selecting things from your inventory simply isn’t smooth, and when an experience relies so heavily on these basic actions, they should be easy and comfortable to perform. One of the few examples of Aka controlling well was during a rhythm-based mini-game, but of course there was absolutely zero reward for completing it, let alone getting a perfect score.

Aka’s heart is in the right place, and it may have an audience with players looking for a breezy, slice-of-life game. Unfortunately, playing the game offers too little of an incentive for how challenging it is to control your red panda friend. While it may be true that a good deed is its own reward, such a proverb doesn’t lend itself well to the medium of video games. There are some worthwhile moments to be had in this world, but they’re just too few and far between.