In between my struggles with getting into Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock), I’ve been playing a bunch of demos/other games I have in my backlog. They are all independent games, and most of them if not all of them are cozy. I have to say that I’m having trouble getting into any of them, and I wonder if I’m just burned out on indie games at the moment.
I tried Blue Prince (Tonda Ross) again because I really thought it’d be my jam. I liked what I saw of it (it’s a puzzle game with a pretty novel premise. And, it’s truly one guy who developed it), but, unfortunately, it’s first person. I did eevrything I could to deal with it, including putting a small cut of a Post-It in the center of the screen this time.
Nothing worked. I got immediately queasy, and when I first played it, I had to grit my teeth to get through an hour. Which was pretty much how long a day took, and you could not save before the end of the day. Which is bullshit, by the way. That’s not respecting the player’s time. Binding of Isaac: Rebirth used to be that way, and a run could take over an hour once you got good at the game.
I just could not find the sweet spot for playing the game, and I regretfully uninstalled it again. There’s something about the perspective that made it especially nauseating.
As I was playing the different games, I couldn’t help but think about how I would make my perfect indie/cozy game. Most of the games had something that I liked, though there have been a few that I quit playing within seconds. One was a motorbike game that I never would have demoed if not for the fact that it had a cute animal in the title. No, I did not look to see what it was about before downloading the demo. I tend to just download demos willy-nilly as long as I have space because why not?
There are a few that I like quite a bit, but they still frustrate me to some extent. I know this is a me-thing to some extent because I am not someone who will call anything perfect. Eevn my favorite games of all time (Elden Ring, Dark Souls III, Night in the Woods, and Spiritfarer) all range between 9.5 and 9.75.
If you want to say that my favorite game of all time gets a 10, well, i would argue with that. Strenuously. Nothing is perfect, and I stand by that. Nothing is even close to perfect, and I stand by that as well.
With that in mind, I am a bit at sea when I think about what my perfect indie game would look like. More and more, I’m beginning to believe that ‘cozy game’ is a misnomer (as I mentioned in an earlier post) because many of the so-called cozy games aren’t so cozy.
One of my biggest issues with Wylde Flowers (yes, I’m harping on that) is how tiny my energy bar is and how few actions I can do in a day without boosting my energy. I just bought better a better watering can, a better pickaxe, and a betterr axe, all of which vastly help with the chores. Instead of taking three whacks to mine a piece of ore, for example, it just takes one. This is good because you have to find the key to the next level before you can move on, and if you don’t before you run out of energy, you have to start over again.
I am not a big fan of this mechanic, I’ll be honest with you. Especially in the beginning when it took three whacks to mine one piece of basic ore, and my stamina bar was nonexistent.
Look. I play games to get away from the stress of real life. Well, that’s why I play cozy games, anyway. Oh, and to cry. I will always appreciate when a cozy game can make me cry. But I do not like it when I have time-based quests or I have to grind forever for whatever reason.
Having had played tons of cozy games, I want to mention aspects of some of them that really resonated with me. This doesn’t mean that putting them together would make for a great game, but I don’t care. It’s my blog, and I can do whatever I want.
My favorite cozy game ever is Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall) with Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games) a close second. I was inclined to like NitW before even playing it because it had a snarky, depressed, crushed with low self-esteem and other mental health issues, bisexual black cat (all the characters are animals) named Mae as the protagonist. I loved her from the start, but I did not really gel with the game itself. I finished it, and I was ready to say that it was a good game and be done with it. Then, I watched a video by Errant Signal about how you had to play it more than once to truly appreciate it. I saw things in his video that I didn’t know existed in the game. Mechanics, areas, and even a character.
I went back to play it, and my second playthrough was so transformative, I played it a third time. And with that third playthrough, it became my favorite indie game of all time. And it defined what cozy games should be–to me, anyway. They should be gorgeous to look at and to move in. They should have evocative and haunting music (the track I included is my favorite from the game). And they should have serious themes that really rip my heart to shreds.
Those second and third playthroughs were crucial for many reasons. One, because you had to make choices that locked you out of certain scenes–you could not avoid it. So you could not see all the content in one playthrough. Two,
OK. I just have to say, apparently my idea of a cozy game is starkly different than the ‘normal’ definition. Not surprising as I’m always different, but depressing. Appparently, it’s anything that’s pastel-colored, cutesy, has animals/kids instead of adults, non-violent, and more a vibe than anything else.
That’s not my definition of a cozy game. At all. Hand-drawn art is the norm these days. Not necessarily pastel–I have seen many with vibrant colors or warm, earth-tone colors. Non-violent? Maybe in the the no killing each other kind of way, but that doesn’t mean that death doesn’t happen. In fact, three of my top cozy games have death as a prominent topic. Night in the Woods tackles socioeconomic issues and mental health issues, too. In a very stark and realistic way. And queer issues.
I bawled my eyes out at NitW and Spiritfarer. Both of them touched my heart deeply, and I felt such a connection to the characters. And, yes, in both games there are animals as characters (all of them in NitW and most of them in Spiritfarer, but they are fully-fleshed out, and I identify with so many of them.
I have more to say on this, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.