If you’re a fan of farming simulators and cosy games, then Puffpals: Island Skies has probably come up on your radar at some point over the last few years. This sweet, Animal Crossing-esque farming simulator being developed by plushie company Fluffnest was originally announced on April 6, 2022 with a Kickstarter project launched the following day.
In less than 24 hours the project was fully funded and met its first two stretch goals: adding fishing, and a group of sentient fruits and vegetables. Not long after, Island Skies began to smash through its remaining stretch goals and exceed its $75,000 goal by $2,489,821, and pull in thousands upon thousands of backers.
However, cut to three years later and the project hasn’t come to fruition. In fact, the entire brand of Fluffnest is slowly disappearing from the internet. The store in which Fluffnest originally sold their plushies has been taken down, and attempting to access the game’s official website takes you to a domain for sale. Basically, it’s not looking good for PuffPals: Island Skies.
As a result, thousands of backers have started taking to Kickstarter to request refunds for their pledges. With the highest pledge for this campaign being $5,000, offering the opportunity to design an NPC which would then be put in the game (and which had five generous backers), as you can probably imagine the vast majority of refund requests exceed $100.
Access to the game alone was locked behind a $20 pledge, but YouTuber Mujin explained in a deep dive video investigating what exactly happened to Puffpals: Island Skies that dividing the amount of money earned by the number of backers averages out to around $59 per person—almost three times the cost of the game in Early Access.
On May 21, 2025, the PuffPals: Island Skies Kickstarter received its final update, stating that “For the past few years, we were under NDA with a third-party studio and couldn’t discuss many of the things happening behind closed doors” before sharing details about management changes and how the company plan to move forward with the project.
Regardless of all these challenges, Fluffnest reassured backers in the post that “despite everything, we are continuing to push toward Alpha 2. We remain committed to delivering the game we promised. While we can’t provide a date, our focus is on development, quality, and our own well-being. We’ll share another update as soon as we have a firm release date for Alpha 2”.
I’ll be honest, I’m not convinced that date is coming. Especially now the entire company seems to have started removing itself from the internet.
There has been no official statement from Lily or David, the two creators of Fluffnest and PuffPals: Island Skies, regarding both the storefront and the games development. We have reached out for a comment on the matter, but are yet to hear back. Hopefully there’s still a chance we’ll get to play Island Skies in some capacity in the future, but I’m not feeling too optimistic right now.
