Isle of Food recently launched on Quest after an Early Access period on Steam, and its ingredient collecting and cooking sim recipes combine for a delicious dish.
The tactile nature of virtual reality, with its granular interactivity, can greatly enhance the experience of playing simulation games. Pulling a carrot seed from your backpack, scattering it onto the earth, watering it, and harvesting it with a shovel feels somehow more meaningful when every one of those actions is a physical one. This is where Isle of Food shines.
What is it?: A cooking and ingredient-collecting sim on a tropical island.
Platforms: Quest, SteamVR (Early Access)
Release Date: Out now
Developer: Svaiy Art Industries
Publisher: Istifa Games
Price: $19.99
A gameplay video of how attending to a customer’s order usually goes.
In Isle of Food, you play as the chef of a restaurant on a tropical island. You must attend to hungry tourists by collecting every resource—alive or dead—on the island to serve as a proper, edible dish. Spawning at a wooden dock, your tiki hut restaurant is bustling with hungry customers. Equipped with a grill, oven, blender, and plenty of cute little umbrellas for cocktails, the only items missing are the ingredients. One half of Isle of Food’s gameplay involves cooking up delightful recipes for your hungry tourists. The other half is all about collecting raw ingredients.
On this densely packed island, there are tomatoes, potatoes, cows, deer, fish, and more that appear in the mornings or evenings, whether it’s rainy or not. Anything that is not naturally accessible around you can be bought and crafted with a rather futuristic 3D printer to spend your hard-earned money on. Among the many items on offer, buying new furniture to customize the business and attract new types of customers is one of the main goals.
One of the first dishes a customer requests is a grilled sliced apple. Surprise. There are no apples in your pantry. You need to go and pick the apple from a tree and cook it within an allotted time. Once back with the juicy fruit, the cookbook on the table directly explains how to chop it into five slices, cook, flip, and deliver. Voila. Completing dishes quickly and accurately makes your customers happy, which awards you experience points. Get enough of these, and you level up, learn new recipes, and continue to expand your nascent business.
Isle of Food does not concern itself too much with realism, to its benefit. For instance, while a spatula can be used to flimsily plate a boiling hot veggie, I found it easier to simply grab it with my hand and put it on the dish. A handy wristwatch you can click on will make any tool you require appear, like a shovel or fishing rod. There is no fall damage, stamina, or life bar to consider either, as evidenced when I simply stopped holding the top of a palm tree to reach some coconuts. Lastly, offloading any collected ingredients from your backpack automatically to your kitchen’s stock with the press of a button is refreshing.
An interesting detail you notice while scavenging for ingredients is how the island itself feels full of secrets, many of which are not fully explored. There are giant glowing crystals next to where grapes grow. More puzzling even is the fact that an elaborate throne of an ancient civilization, complete with a shiny crown, is just lying there. Perhaps the medieval sword stuck a la Camelot’s Excalibur foreshadows more combat options, considering hunting animals with a bow and slingshot is necessary to obtain certain proteins.
Isle of Food provides expected accessibility features. The movement hand can be toggled between left and right. Snap or smooth turning, along with the respective angle and turn speed, can be tweaked. A seated mode is available. For those with motion sickness a tunneling vignette with various levels of intensity is also an option. As mentioned, no teleporting means getting stuck will equal restarting the game, for the time being.
Although it is billed as a full release, it does feel like the game still has some technical issues that need work. There is noticeable pop-in on the corners of the peripheral view. I got stuck in one part of the map with no unstuck button to speak of, which required a reboot. Some ingredients did not register as being placed on the dish I put them on, acting as floating objects instead.
Restaurant simulators are nothing new, but the physicality that VR brings to the process of exploring and collecting ingredients makes the experience feel novel. Hunting animals, harvesting vegetables, or climbing palm trees blends easily with the cooking part of the game, making for a hectic but fun gameplay loop. Isle of Food could do with more time in the oven, but what is on offer is worth a taste.
Isle of Food is out now for SteamVR in Early Access and Meta Quest.
