Isle of Jura is a Basic, Yet Relaxing Fishing Experience on the Steam Deck - Free Until March 9th

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Isle of Jura probably isn't a game you've heard of before. I certainly hadn't heard of it until today when I saw that it had been made available for free on Steam until March 9th or until a certain number of redemptions.

But is Isle of Jura worth checking out, especially on the Steam Deck?

Isle of Jura - Gameplay Impressions

When I say Isle of Jura is basic, I mean it. The game keeps players on a relatively small island, with 5 NPCs who don't really have anything to say and tasks them with finding various aquatic species to complete their biology project. You'll start out with a fishing net for finding creatures in the shallows, but as you sell your finds to the local cafe, you can purchase new equipment that will allow you to find new species.

The gameplay mostly consists of playing the fishing minigames. They start off pretty simple, so much so that it can get a bit repetitive after the 100th time you've done it, but it is a free game after all, each fishing implement changes the minigame, and once you reach the 3rd upgrade, it suddenly escalates in difficulty and isn't so much fun anymore to be perfectly honest.

There are over 50 species of aquatic creatures to find in the ponds, rivers, and ocean surrounding the island, and I'd say there's probably a good 1-2 hours of content here, it is a pretty relaxing time if you don't mind the repetitive minigames. The creatures you catch, along with your best record for their weight are also recorded in a journal.

There is also no way to control the camera in the game, with it instead moving to preset rotations around the player at various points of the island, it's a curious choice and one that makes navigating the island more difficult than it needs to be, but you get used to it.

Isle of Jura is definitely worth adding to your library while it's free and maybe booting it up on an afternoon to see what creatures you can add to your collection.

Also, can we talk about why it looks like we're fishing in the sky and not the water?

Isle of Jura - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Isle of Jura runs fairly well on the Steam Deck. It does have controller support, although that support doesn't translate perfectly to the Steam Deck. For example, the game tells you that you fish with the right trigger, but on the Steam Deck, you use the Left Trigger (L2). Other than that, the controls work well enough.

The game doesn't technically support 16:10 resolutions, but running the game at 1920x1080 does fill out the screen, and we can also run the graphics quality on "High" without issues.

Setting a TDP Limit of 8W is enough to maintain 60 FPS throughout the whole game, the game is hard-capped to 60, so there's no chance of playing at 90 FPS here. The power draw was around 9-11W.

Final Thoughts

Isle of Jura is definitely worth it if you can pick it up for free like it is right now, it's a decent experience in short bursts, and you could get a couple of hours of playtime out of it. Its usual price seems to be $4.99, and I would be hesitant to recommend it for that price. It runs perfectly fine on the Steam Deck though.

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