Umami Grove - PSVR2 Review

There’s a moment early in Umami Grove where you’re standing beneath a tree, staring up at an ingredient you absolutely need, and you think: Surely the game doesn’t expect me to climb that? And then you try it. And it works. That’s the magic of Umami Grove, a VR adventure that trusts you to be messy, inventive, and occasionally ridiculous, and rewards you for all of it.

This isn’t a cooking game in the traditional sense. It’s a tactile playground where cooking is the excuse, not the destination. On PSVR2, that philosophy shines brighter than ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHVg357qEvk

The first thing you notice is how physical everything feels. Ingredients aren’t icons in a menu as they’re objects in the world. Apples hang from branches. Mushrooms need slicing with your actual hands. Fish flop around with just enough chaos to make you laugh and swear at the same time.

The game rarely tells you how to solve a problem. It simply presents a situation and lets you experiment. Sometimes you’ll feel like a genius. Sometimes you’ll feel like a gremlin who just destroyed someone’s living room. Both outcomes are delightful.

Every dish you prepare is the end of a small adventure. You don’t just “collect three ingredients”, you earn them through exploration, improvisation, and the occasional physics mishap.

A typical loop looks something like this:

1. Spot an ingredient in the environment.

2. Figure out how to reach it—climb, jump, stack, or invent chaos.

3. Bring it back without dropping it off a cliff.

4. Slice, boil, fry, or prep it using your hands.

5. Deliver the dish to a creature who may or may not judge your clumsiness.

The island is split into seasonal zones, each with its own personality with lush spring forests, icy winter peaks, warm autumn groves. Everything is bright, chunky, and inviting, with a soft cartoonish charm that feels right at home in VR.

The creatures you meet are the real heart of the experience. They’re weird, sweet, and full of personality with snail girls in trees, excitable flower creatures, moles with dreams of seeing the world from above. Their requests are small but meaningful, and helping them feels like participating in a gentle, whimsical storybook.

Threaded through it all is the mystery of the Golden Acorns, a light narrative hook that gives your exploration purpose without ever weighing the game down.

PSVR2’s tracking makes movement a highlight. You’re constantly climbing, ducking, leaning, reaching and jumping. It’s active without being exhausting. The game’s pacing is relaxed, forgiving, and built around curiosity rather than pressure. Drop something? Break something? Lose something? The world lets you recover and try again. The movement feels much more like play than a chore when compared to other VR games I have played.

The physics‑driven design is both the game’s charm and its occasional frustration.

• Objects sometimes behave unpredictably.

• Ingredients can vanish if left unattended.

• Rarely, items clip through the world and force you to re‑gather them.

• Environmental polish isn’t always consistent—occasional gaps or visual hiccups break immersion.

None of this ruins the experience, but it does remind you that the game is built on a playful, sometimes chaotic foundation.

Umami Grove isn’t long at around four hours for the main journey with a bit more for completionists. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s a comfort game, a VR palate cleanser, a reminder that sometimes the best VR experiences are the ones that let you play, experiment, and laugh at your own mistakes.

Pros

• Wonderfully tactile physics interactions

• Charming world and memorable creatures

• Natural, intuitive climbing and movement

• Cozy, low‑pressure pacing

• Satisfying hands‑on cooking

Cons

• Occasional physics glitches

• Simple cooking mechanics

• Minor environmental polish issues

• Short runtime

Umami Grove on PSVR2 is a joyful, tactile, and wonderfully silly VR adventure that turns cooking into a full‑body exploration of curiosity and creativity. Its simplicity is part of its charm, even if it occasionally limits depth. Technical quirks and physics oddities pop up, but the warmth, personality, and hands‑on delight of the world easily outweigh them. If you want a VR experience that’s cozy, inventive, and full of heart, something that makes you grin as often as it makes you think. Umami Grove is absolutely worth stepping into.

XPN Rating: 4 out of 5 (GOLD)

Umami Grove is available now!