Restore Your Island Review (PC)

Restore Your Island can often feel like a daunting task—to spend dozens of hours scooping trash and moving clutter just to be able to breathe. In the first hour, it almost feels like a burden, more so given the situation that you happen to find yourself in. A desolate island; a waste-smothered shoreline, and an idyllic dream that looms on the far end of eleven hours’ worth of manual labor. It hits you like a freight train — that feeling that you’re going to be completing a lot of legwork before finally being able to find the perfect opportunity to bathe by the campfire and enjoy the ambiance. It often feels as if the strenuous labor far outweighs the benefits. But then, when you least expect it, something pulls you back and ignites your enthusiasm. You pet your dog, and you channel your energy towards the waves crashing against the shore. You pick up your shovel, and you begin the same graft for the fifteenth time. “Tomorrow might be better,” you mutter beneath your breath. “I just need to stick with it a little while longer.”

As the hours go by in Restore Your Island, progress begins to increase in pace, and the fruits of your labor soon translate into picturesque panoramas and serene dioramas. The clutter finally begins to knuckle out of the equation, and an otherwise monotonous process begins to feel less daunting and more rewarding. A pocket of land sheds just a fickle piece of tranquility; a fragment of wildlife emerges from beneath the rubble to establish a new nest; and your loyal companion—a dog—slowly begins to energize your efforts, almost as if to congratulate you for your persistence. More time passes, and eventually the world and all of its natural wonders soon begin to entwine with your work. Life moves forward, and the island finally locates a heart. The birds begin to flock to the ocean and hawk over your progress, and the trees soon find a root to flourish in.

It goes without saying at this point, but the truth is, Restore Your Island is an incredibly slow journey. Like Clean Up Earth, the lion’s share of the process either involves de-cluttering enormous spaces, or making small but seemingly beneficial upgrades to various tools to help remove the shackles from a once-beloved utopia. Heck, if you’re not hurling trash into cans, then you’re unlocking vacuums or other useful tools to help you—you guessed it—put even more trash into twice as many trash cans. But that’s not all that you do here. No, because if Restore Your Island was just about cleaning up trash, then it wouldn’t be as much of a rewarding experience as it would be a pointless graft with no real value. Thankfully, that isn’t the case here.

As luck would have it, there’s more to Restore Your Island than what initially meets the eye. For instance, the game frequently requires you to interact with the local wildlife, rescue sick or trapped animals, as well as refurbish old structures and revitalize trees to help restore habitats. What’s more, it features a plethora of tool upgrades and items that you need to unlock in order to reach distant locations and remove specific clutter. However, it’s best not to let all of these slick features fool you into believing that Restore Your Island is a full-fledged RPG. It isn’t. Instead, what you have is a simple, laid-back cleaning affair that you can more or less dip in and out of whenever you’re itching for some honest work. To some extent, it’s like The Gunk, but with fewer ultraviolet trunks and more trash. Oh, and a dog. The dog makes it, really.

Of course, Restore Your Island isn’t going to be for everyone. Given that there are no real challenges to carve out here, the likelihood of becoming a victim of sheer boredom is a lot higher than in most chore core sims. With a gameplay loop that primarily consists of repeating the same routine dozens of times over, you have little to no breathing room to explore alternate gameplay facets. In other words, it’s mostly about chiseling through the same process, and slowly but surely making minor improvements to your tools to help you revitalize broader aspects of the world. This isn’t a bad thing, nor is it a deal breaker. Still, if you want an experience that also means to be a survival game as well as a restoration sim, then you’ll likely be disappointed with just how much of a slow burner this one is.

With all of the above said, Restore Your Island is still a charming game that offers plenty for you to work with. Although it’s still without the weight of a huge campaign and various character-based story arcs, it does provide a quality selection of areas to explore and a simple progression hook that’s both satisfying and rewarding to mull over. And yes, you can pet the dog. There’s a handful of extra points, right there. The fact that it also includes a few mini-games and a fair amount of animal rescue quests, too, makes it just a little easier to fall in love with. It might not be perfect, but at least it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.

Verdict

Restore Your Island offers you a chance to recline and unwind in a cluttered world that boasts simplified gameplay and rewarding moments, bite-sized mini-games and enough fruits to justify your labor, no matter the amount you choose to pour into the graft. Again, it won’t be to everyone’s liking, and without a real challenge or an uphill battle to conquer, it is likely that you’ll fall into a monotonous cycle long before the rewards outshine the legwork. Still, if you’re after a simple and oftentimes relaxing experience, then I will say that you could certainly do a whole lot worse than Restore Your Island. It might not hold a candle to a bunch of other rivaling restoration sims, but when all’s said and done, what you see here is exactly what you get: an affordable solution for a persistent itch.