I want to continue my thoughts on what makes a perfect cozy game to me. In the last post, I was talking about relationships and how the better cozy games really flesh them out. In this post, I want to concentrate on what I DON’T want in a cozy game. Or rather, what will turn me off/away. There are many tropes in the genre that for better or worse show up in too many of the games. I’m not including farming (actual farming, not the more colloquial meaning of doing the same thing over and over again to accrue money/resources) even though I don’t think it needs to be in every cozy game because there are plenty that don’t have it, too.
This is specific list as I want to drill down into the whatnots. I have many thoughts on what the genre needs (and doesn’t), as you may suspect.
1. No platforming. I could just leave it at that, but I’ll expand. I have terrible-to-almost-nonexistent depth perception, which makes platforming a chore for me. I also have terrible reflexes, which doesn’t help. I am so bad at platforming that I could not do easy mode on Celeste (Maddy Makes Games, Inc./EXOK Games). Which is VERY generous. But not helpful for my particular issues. Maps are nearly useless to me when it comes to trying to identify which level something is on, and it’s a big reason I quit playing Nightreign (FromSoft).
I did not know that Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games) was billed as a platformer. I just read the ‘a cozy management game about dying’ tagline and glazed over the platforming part. Which, had I known before I played it, I might not have done so. Which would have been a shame because I loved the game, 100%ed it, and it’s one of my top five non-FromSoft games of all time. The platforming in it is atrocious, though, and near the end, I almost quit because of a platforming section that was utterly awful. Seriously. I was maybe an hour from finishing the game, and this section made me metaphorically rip my hair out.
It was the same in the DLC. There was a platforming section that was so terrible, I cursed loudly as I tried to do it over and over again. I don’t curse when I play cozy games for the most part as I’m not about that life when I’m playing cozy games. The game would not have suffered at all from dropping the platforming–and, in my eyes, it would actually have been a better game.
Side note: I have said this many times, but games that aren’t platformers first and foremost should not have platforming in them. Platforming is really hard to do correctly, and it’s not for the faint of heart. I hate it in From games, and I hate it in every other game I play, too.
2. Fuck the QTEs. Have I made my feelings abundantly clear about this? The slow reflexes I was talking about earlier really affects this as well. I was playing Stray (BlueTwelve Studio), a cozy game about a stray cat being separated from their friends and the harrowing adventures they’re encountering in a (I think) post-apocalyptic world with robots. It has platforming sections that I hated, and the QTEs nearly made me cry. They were little robot zerglings (not their names, but something similar to it) who swarmed me (the cat, I mean) and I had to press a button repeatedly to get them off me.
I simply could not do it fast enough, and I had to do one of them for something close to an hour to do it. Then, there was another one later on that I just could not do. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it. In a fucking cozy game! I was probably an hour from the end, but I quit because I could not do the QTE. Honestly, in 2025, there should always be the option to just press a goddamn button rather than rapidly smash it over and over again. At least in a cozy game.
3. Cut back vastly on the amount of resource-gathering. I know this is the bread and butter of every cozy game, but in most of them, they make you do it far too much and far too long. I remember the early days of Cozy Grove (Spry Fox) when I felt like I was just scraping by to get by.y Since each day in the game was in real time, progress was achingly slow. I got why they wanted to do it that way, and several dozens of hours into the game, money and resources were plentiful and easy to come by, but those first few dozen hours were painful.
Side note: I am very sad that they got acquired by Netflix. Not for them because they need to get paid, but because that meant I could not play the sequel to Cozy Grove until Netflix got off their asses and made it possible to play their games on the PC and not just mobile. I did check the sequel out, but it felt very much like a mobile game and even more resource-gathering intensive.
When I was looking up Spiritfarer to get the tagline correct, I came across a Reddit thread that was complaining about the amount of resource gathering that game had. In a flash, it all came back to me. There was SO MUCH resource-gathering, and you had to build the machines/tech to do the resource-making in the first place. It was a lot. A LOT. And it was not enjoyable. I agree that at some point, it should have been automated or cut in half or something.
Side note: I’m still playing Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock), and I’m still deeply frustrated with it. I have upgraded my main tools twice, which really helps with the energy issue, but I still find myself needing to boost my energy at noon more often than not. And to do that is so expensive in terms of ingredients to make the food items. If I want to buy them, then they are pricy in a monetary way.
Except. I learned of a hack to get a ton of money quickly. I now have 57,000+ gold, which is way more money than I need. And it makes doing any of the other money-making jobs obsolete because this one is so easy to do. I’m not complaining about it, by the way, but it does underscore how tedious all the other things are. Or rather, what a waste. That includes fishing, mining, and resource-gathering (and selling). If I can do this one easy thing (three steps to it) two days a week (only two days when you can do all three steps), then why would I do the rest? I had about three thousand gold when I started, and if I hadn’t started at a very low level, I probably would have a hundo by now.
I don’t know how to get the balance right with the resource-gathering, by the way. I just know that most games don’t.