The cleaning sim genre has slowly grown over recent years, with Viscera Cleanup Detail back in 2015 being one of the earlier games to hit it big. Since then the genre has expanded greatly to encompass not just cleaning but repairing and renovating, with the House Flipper games and even WW2 Rebuilder, tasking you with restoring bombed out cities after the Second World War.Restore Your Island from Muscat-based PaiBand Game Studio is most similar to Island Saver, a very cartoony game which came out in 2020, but which is based on a similar concept.
You’re a homeless guy who is unceremoniously plucked off the street and flown on a helicopter to a small, remote desert island. Apparently your uncle has died and left the island to you, and now it’s your task to clean it up. Every beach is festooned with years of accumulated detritus, turning what should be a tropical hideaway into a rubbish dump. At the start, you’re only armed with a litter picker and a single bin. Methodically you must move across the beaches, picking up every single piece of trash. The bin can’t hold much though, so you’ll need to sell your recycling in order to acquire upgrades. Gradually, you’ll be able to afford various improvements, additional bins, more storage for trash, and more tools to make litterpicking easier.
The ramp up is very natural and the speed at which you earn upgrades is ideally pitched so you never feel frustrated. Quickly you’ll unlock the sand sifter, allowing you to roll a contraption across the beach picking up all litter in its path as well as potentially unearthing a number of buried treasures scattered across the island. There are a number of pirate chests around the place as well, the keys to which are likewise buried. After the sifter you’ll get the magnet, allowing you to pull specific types of trash towards you as you walk near, which eventually upgrades into a full vacuum cleaner. The mechanics are a bit magical (the magnet can also work to pick up plastic litter for example) but it’s a fun novelty.
As well as cleaning the beach you’ll also need to restore the plant and animal life of the island. Plants are very simple and just require you to buy fertilizer (which gets increasingly expensive) to restore a particular tree or bush to full growth. Animals are a bit more varied, staring out with your beloved dog, who needs some first aid when you initially find him. You can choose the breed of your dog and also pet it, but aside from following you around the island and playing a minigame to feed it, they basically do nothing. There are also a number of other animals around the island, all of whom need to be rescued in some way. The sea turtle needs cutting out of barbed wire, or the octopus needs rescuing from a plastic bag.
The main thing limiting your activities is your stamina. This isn’t a survival game so you don’t need to sleep or drink, but stamina is determined by how much you eat and how much litter picking you’ve done. The more litter you grab, the more it depletes your stamina. You can pay at the shop to buy pizza to fully restore your stamina (although this can get expensive), but you can also pick up a variety of bananas and coconuts across the island which drop from the various plants you’ve rejuvenated. This provides a free way to partially restore stamina, although the number of fruit you can carry at the beginning is also limited.
This is deliberately a very low stress game; there’s nothing making you pick up the litter and your rewards for doing so are fairly minimal aside from seeing the island in its pristine glory. You get to pick your house early on but you can’t really customize it, and like interacting with the dog or other animals it feels a bit like set dressing. Your progress of cleaning each sector is shown at the top corner of the screen, with each quarter of the island separately tracked. Completely cleaning a sector gives a brief cutscene showing life returning to the island, and when you later walk by you’ll see various crabs and sea turtles making their way over the sand.
Graphically Restore Your Island looks nicely impressive with some good sunsets, and plenty of detail on the trash itself, which ranges from plastic bottles to food cans, to wine bottles, to organic waste like spoiled bananas and dead fish. There’s also a pretty good soundtrack to enjoy, which you listen to via your Walkman, and you can find and collect different cassette tapes to unlock additional songs. It took me about 4-5 hours to completely restore the island to glory, after which there’s not much to see. However, the developers are promising a second, larger island will be available soon after release, allowing a new challenge for those eager to pick up more litter.
Restore Your Island does what it says on the tin; a relaxing and low-stress mozy around your own private desert island, turning the garbage-filled beaches into clean white sands. There’s not much depth to it, but the simple act of tidying the beach is satisfying in itself. I hope alongside the extra island more features will be added to flesh out the island restoration angle, perhaps making fixing the plant life a more involved process than simply pouring on fertilizer. Nonetheless, I certainly enjoyed my time on my little castaway island.
