Ophelia Payne

If there is one thing I love, it’s the beach, and if there’s one thing I hate the most at the beach, it’s trash scattered around.

Island Keeper, developed by Scalise Artworks and published by Ultimate Games S.A and Ultimate Publishing, presented me with a nightmare scenario…a gorgeous island covered in trash. Your task is to breathe new life into forgotten islands while playing this cozy sim adventure.

You are a solar-powered maintenance bot, and I loved the fact that you didn’t have unlimited range either.  You are restricted as to how far you can travel from the main base until you are able to put down booster signals to help you expand your range and explore further. Since you rely on solar power, you must deal with day/night cycles as well as anything else that can affect your power, like severe storms.

As mentioned above, your mission is simple. Clean up the excessive amount of trash on the islands and bring them back to life. Collect the trash, recycle it and craft tools to make your job easier. This demo is simple at its core, and if you are looking for exciting and action-filled gameplay, this isn’t for you.

While I only played the demo and can only comment on what I had access to, it was simple to follow. A checklist of tasks was straightforward and there was enough information to understand how to complete all the tasks you needed to.

While the demo covered the cleanup, you also got a taste of the crafting, exploration and even a little glimpse into the ability to use boats and eventually submarines. The full game clearly has a lot more depth to it.

I mentioned that Island Keeper is a cozy game, and I stand by that for the demo. Seeing that future developments will include wolves and sharks makes me wonder how cozy the full game will remain. The demo makes it look like this will be a game for a wide variety of ages; I hope these predators won’t make it too scary for younger players. 

I enjoyed the visuals in Island Keeper; as you picked up the trash on the island, it slowly became covered with vegetation, including wildflowers and trees. Animals like deer, turtles and birds also appear. According to the Steam page, it looks like we will also eventually get a dog companion. I really hope we can pet the dog. Base building will also be coming in the full game. 

There is clearly a story to unravel, and the NVISION corporation has something to do with that. We had a little peek into it during the demo but not nearly enough to know what the story will be.

The demo for Island Keeper was engaging and interesting and over faster than I had hoped. It looks like a game that can be enjoyed by a wide variety of gamers, and I look forward to seeing what the full launch looks like.

  Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.

**Special Thanks to Keymailer for the review code**