Cozy Grove (Spry Fox) is…was one of my favorite indie games. It’s a cozy game, yes, but it also dealt with some heratbreaking issues. The main gist of that game (and this one) is that you’re a Spirit Scout who has to help deceased bears (who are people, but bears) move on to the afterworld. The interesting conceit of the original game (and this one, I think?) is that there are real 24-hour days in the game. If you do the quests you need to do for any given day, you have to wait a literal day to get new ones. There are daily chores you can do (harvesting, planting flowers and trees, digging, etc.), too.
When I heard there was a sequel, I was thrilled. Then, Spry Fox was bought by Netflix and announced a Cozy Grove mobile game, which is this one. Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit. Since it’s a mobile game, I ignored it. I don’t play games on my phones because I find it frustrating to do much of anything on my cell. I assumed there would be a real sequel to the game at some point down the line. Because Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit was a mobile phone game, I assumed it was not the sequel.
Apparently, I’m wrong, but I’ll get to that in a second.
Last night, I went to Netflix to cancel my membership because they added ads to the base membership. “You’ll be pleasantly surprised how few ads you get!” they said. I cursed at them because anything more than zero is not a pleasant surprise. Of course, I can upgrade to the next tier to remain ad-free, but I watch something maybe once every three months or so.
Much to my surprise, Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit popped up and there was a button I could press to play it. I decided to take a look. At some point, it said that it was the beta and blah blah blah. I pressed through all that quite quickly because I did not care.
Before I get to the game itself, I have to say that today, I went to look for the game so I could play more. Much to my surprise, I could not find it. I went to the Netflix games page, and while it was listed there, I could not play it on my desktop that way. I Googled it and found out that if you’re in Beta, there should be a game menu on the home page of Netflix. I did not have that. I told Ian about it and he said maybe there was a toggle button in my account settings. I checked it out, and a big noooope.
I shrugged and decided that I had been put in beta by accident. And maybe that was why I was allowed to do so much on the first day. I put it aside and then later, decided to try to do a bit more Googling. I found the direct link to the game that way, and now I have that link open in a tab because I don’t want to have to spend twenty minutes to find it again.
I also found a thread on Steam by heartbroken fans who refuse to believe it will never come to Steam. This beta says to me, though, that while it may come to PC, it’s going to be through Netflix’s own manager. If they can make one that works efficiently and clearly.
Look. Steam is king when it comes to the PC. Everyone else is just playing catch-up. I get why Netflix would want their own manager, but why reinvent the wheel?
I have no issues with Spry Fox taking the deal beacuse Netflix probably threw mad money at them. And, given how unstable the industry is, get paid while you can. However, I really don’t like eternal exclusives, especially Netflix. They are not known for their games, and it suuuuuuucks that they want to lock away a game that was on Switch, the consoles, and PC.
What about the game itself? The basic premise is the same. You’re a Spirit Scout and you (and your fdellow scouts) get boat-wrecked on an island. When you wake up, everyone else is gone. Because I had played the first game, everything was very familiar and easy to figure out in this game. There’s a campfire named Flamey. yOu feed it spirit logs (that you get from doing chores for the bears), and things level up as you do.
One issue with the first game was how slowly things progressed. There was plenty to do each day, yes, but there was still a feeling of hurry up and wait once you were done with your daily quests. The biggest issue was that it took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to get the resources you needed to do anything (because only a certain amount would grow in any given day). In this game, they throw so much at you, it’s overwhelming. I have done complete chapters of the the first three bears I’ve met in the first day I played. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case in the first game.
I’ll take this over the first game, but I do think there’s a sweet spot in between the two. I am a bit overwhelmed at how fast and furious things are being lobbed at me in this game. I do wonder if it’s supposed to be this pace or if they’re scrunching the days because the game released in June of last year. I don’t think that’s the case because I finally ran out of things to do and Flamey told me to rest until the next day.
I have a hunch that there is just a lot to do on the first few days. Or that they truncated the amount of time it takes to finish each story. Mr. Kit, the vendor is back. I was disappointed in the first game that we never got more of his story, so maybe that’ll happen in this game. Somehow, I doubt it, though.
I want to say what turned me off the first game was the DLC. I loved the additional bears, so it wasn’t that. One of them is my favorite bear in the whole game. nIt’s that there was a version of a puzzle game that was in the main game. The puzzle in the main game is that there are several skulls in a formation with one missing. You had to find the stray skull and put it in the right place.
In the DLc, it was honeycomb instead of skull, but the same kind of puzzle. Except, there was a bug that sometimes the stray honeycomb simply didn’t show up. This is a main quest for one of the additional bears, and if you don’t solve the puzzle, you can’t make progress with her storyline. I spent hours pixel hunting for the missing honeycomb. By this point, my entier island was covered with stuff, so it was easy to overlook one honeycomb. I literally moved every item I had (several hundred items) to find that damn honeycomb, but to no avail. I tweeted at the devs, but they basically just shrugged their shoulders. I went to the forums, but there wasn’t much traffic about this game. Someone suggested something with the savees (moving your saved game to another slot), and that worked. Once.
Yes, this game came up again. I was exceedingly angry by the time that happened. Again, I had to take hours to deal with it when it should have taken five to ten minutes. Oh, and you can get hints for the puzzles, but that didn’t help in this case. I don’t remember how I made it work the second time, but I was soured on the game by that. Also, before the DLC. I decided to get the plat. One of the achievements was getting 150 unique flowers. (Other items, too, but I think this was the one that I needed). The problem with that is the resources are season-related. Meaning certain items only show up in certain seasons (which ran two months in real time with the third month being a blank month). So if I needed a flower from, say, spring and it was summer, I had to wait until the next spring (real spring) to get the reources I needed.
Ok, that wasn’t the one I needed. I looked it up. It Heavy Duty User: Elite, which meant breaking tools 150 times. it takes a lot to break a tool and the better your tool is, the longer it takes to break. So, since I had the best tools by the end of the game, it took forever to break them. There was a camera that you could ‘break’ by using up film every day (and apparently two characters sold one roll per day). And the accordion would break much faster than the other tools, so I used that to get that badge. But it was terrible, and it should feel bad.
More tomorrow.