I’m on Day 117 of Cozy Grove by Spry Fox. I have appreciated it being my stress relief on a daily basis. Bite-sized fun that can be anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour a day, depending on how much of the day-to-day you want to do. This is both a boon and a deterrent, which I’ll get into in a minute.
By the way, I find it amusing that in the Reddit, someone was talking about bugs and saying that while they understood there was a warning that time-traveling may cause bugs, the OP (Original Poster) said they ran into a bug that they didn’t think was because of time-skipping. They casually included that they did do time-skipping, which was the amusing part. They gave no basis for it other than they didn’t think it was true. Someone else hypothesized that the devs said that to cover up for the bugs that were already there, but also with no evidence.
I will say that I do not time-skip in the game and I have not run into any of the bugs they commenters in that thread had mentioned. That’s just an aside, not part of my main take.
I’ve sent my last spirit buddy on her journey and before that, got the canonical ending. It was…look. I don’t want to disparage the game because I adore it and it’s done so much for me. So please note that my what I’m about to discuss does not diminish my feelings for the game in any way. It’s just that, unfortunately, the last third or so of the game is not nearly as good as the first two-thirds for several reasons.
First of all, the resource management becomes unwieldy. This is in part because there are badges for different things and planting a certain number of plants/trees gives you badges. That’s fine and dandy, but that means an increasing amount of picking the plants, fruits, and nuts each day. Plus the other resources you have to mine and the animals you have to feed and pet. It adds up. In the beginning, it was maybe a two minute chore. Now, it’s ten to fifteen, which I don’t want to do every day. Here’s another problem. There is very little space on the island and the different living things prosper being close to certain items. So, in the case of the flowers, they benefit from being grouped together. That’s fine and dandy, but the pathfinding in the game is not great, so it can be really hard to click on the particular poppy you’re trying to harvest.
Oh! Bugs. I will say in the early days there were times when clicking on items simply stopped working. I think it’s because of cross-pathing, but that doesn’t explain why I suddenly couldn’t click on my campfire which has nothing around it. That hasn’t happened in months, though, so I think they fixed it. But, yeah, it’s irritating to constantly click on the wrong thing because I have to put the resources too close together.
Another reason I’ve given up on daily harvesting is because I’m dripping in old coins (the monetary system of this game). I remember back in the beginning, I would have to scrape for days to get enough to buy, say, a bush (5,000 old coins, if I remember correctly). Also, I didn’t know how to get cocoa beans for the life of me and the forums weren’t very robust. It drove me to the Discord because I could not find it for the life of me. Turns out that they were a rare drop from fruit bushes (???) and you could buy one a day from Mr. Kit. I think it became 2 a day when you paid the (at the time) exorbitant amount of 400,000 old coins for the second upgrade. I think it was that much? Or 200,000? Either way, it was a ton at that point.
That is one negative about the first part of the game–it feels harder than it needs to be. I get that the devs want you to embrace the idea that the game is slow-paced and it’s not a sprint, but it actually just left me feeling frustrated and sore. I eventually accepted the real-time passage of the game, though I never loved it; I understood what they were trying to do. I have to laugh, though, in looking back because now I have all the cocoa beans I need–and more.
Part of the reason to harvest the resources is for money. Since I have an overabundance of money, I don’t need to harvest the resources. In addition, it looks nicer to have them blooming than to pick them all so unless I feel the urge to round up the amount of old coins I have (I’m sitting on 1.9 mil), I don’t bother. Oh, and if I need the resource for a particular reason, such as to make jam from the fruit.
Let’s talk about how and when the game falls apart. Or rather, when it started to lose my interest. One of the strongest things about the game is the characters. I loved getting to know them and their stories. I liked how many of their stories were intertwined and they are so heartbreaking. Until the final three bears. Then, it’s more about the history of Cozy Grove and while I loved Dalia of Cosgrove (and I still think her name has something to do with the name of the town) for being the revolutionary, the end of her story (intertwined with Bearos the Third, the living embodiment of god or some such) fell extremely flat for me. I was there for her revolutionary fervor and gleefully placed all the revolutionary symbols around Bearos the Third. To have it end with chatting and settling their difference, Dalia renouncing her revolutionary ways, well that didn’t sit well with me at all.
In addition, there were too many needless chores for the spirit bears that were outside the storylines. You didn’t have to do them, but it’s hard for me to skip them. They repeated and were mostly to get resources in return, but, again, there’s little I need at this point. Also, once their questlines are done, they become gold spirits and lose their personalities. I wish they kept their own personalities even after they raptured themselves. At some point, the repeated chores and the harvesting started to feel like busywork.
They added new content that sounded great in theory but really was less than the sum of all parts. Like skipping stones into open clams to get rewards. The skipping is finicky (like the fishing), which just left me frustrated. In addition, again, I have all the resources I need so the promise of more of what I already have isn’t alluring. There are two added rewards–pieces of Treasure Maps and pieces of Lost Lore–and when you get eight of the former and I don’t know how many of the latter, you can turn them in for a reward. The problem is that getting a piece is very rare. I do all the resourcing (digging, mining, hacking, clamming, etc.) every day and still only have 7 of the 8 Treasure Map pieces I need. I think I have 2 of the Lost Lore pieces and I forgot how many I need. Again, I understand that the devs want people to take their time and not be focused on the end game, but there has to be a balance. The update to include these things was over a month ago and I still can’t access that new gameplay–which is too long.
Another issue with the game is that the devs don’t really know what to do with the ambient NPCs. There are two that have been there since the beginning of the game and two they added in the update. Let’s tackle the latter first and then the former. One of the NPCs added was Ms. Carouse who just wanted to party. She was fun as hell and I enjoyed buying her stuff and chatting with her. However, the idea was that there was supposed to be a Summer Festival and part of Ms. Carouse’s inventory was fireworks. I bought them and hoarded them, thinking there would be a parade or an end event in which I could set them off. Nope. She just disappeared one day never to show up again. Oh. I just saw that there was something that happened at night during the Summer Festival. Which I missed. Sigh.
The other one is Darla O’Hare. She shows up every Saturday and is a snooty lady. Her quests consist of her designing outfits for me to wear (and they’re uniformly awful) and then gushing over how marvelous they are. She sells wigs, which are haircuts, which is cool. But they’re limited every week and I rarely buy any of them. I was hoping for more, honestly. I don’t hate her, obviously, but there just isn’t much there. Honestly, just having Mr. Kit sell wigs instead of daily haircuts would have done the same trick. There is no backstory for Darla so I don’t care for her at all.
Pandam the traveling bear is…fine. He shows up every Wednesday selling his eggs (and a few other things that never change–at least I don’t think they do? I know the foodstuff doesn’t, but not sure about the decorations) while muttering his sadsack story. His stuff was very valuable to me in the first month, but not now.
And, finally, Mr. Kit. Oh, Mr. Kit with Kat on his head. I love him, the spry fox (get it?), but here’s my frustration. All the other NPCs talk about him and drop little bits of his story throughout the game. Great! I want to know more. They build him up to be something more than just a merchant with exorbitant prices. As a result, I want to know more about him. How does he fit into this town? How did he become a merchant? What is his power? There is no answers to these questions and it frustrates me to no end. I feel the game could have done so much more with him, and, yet, feel greedy for wanting more.
As I said earlier, I still heartily recommend this game. I’ll still dip in on a daily basis (maybe. My interest is waning, but I only have three more achievements than can only happen over time). I just wish there could have been a few decisions that would have made this game amazing.