I love this game. I adore it with all my heart and soul. I wanted to state that upfront before I quickly add, I have such a rough time playing it. It’s nearly two months to the day I played chapter two, and I went in with a heavy heart. Not because I thought it was going to be bad, because I knew it would take a toll on me. In fact, Hamlet, the cute, round, and sarcastic black cat explicitly told me in the game that doing a certain action would cost me. It’s pretty clear that this game is trying to tackle some pretty hefty topics. Does it succeed? I’ll get to that later.
Let me get the frustrating parts out of the way firs. My biggest gripe with the game is the gameplay, ironically. The minor gripes: there is a lot of text to button through, and sometimes when I’m on automatic, I press the button one too many times. Fortunately, I haven’t missed anything too important, but it bugs me, anyway.
Two, it’s usually clear what the game wants from me, but occasionally, I don’t know which exact phrase they want me to input. There’s a lot of dialogue saved in my notebook, and the game can be pretty cryptic at times. I risked looking up the answer once when I got stumped and got a mild spoiler (I think?) and to add insult to injury, didn’t even get the answer I was looking for. I eventually figured it out, but I did not want that in my cozy game about death. Well, not so cozy, but definitely about death.
Oh, the third gripe is something I mentioned in the last post was that some of my choices don’t matter at all. The game wants me to go down a certain path, which I’m fine with! But then don’t allow me to choose and give me a stock answer if I make the wrong choice. I get why they do it, but it’s frustrating at the end of the day.
I mentioned that the game continues to break my heart, and chapter three completely broke me. I will not be talking about the chaarcters themselves because you really need to go into the game unspoiled.
I can talk about general themes, though. Despair, loneliness, grief, ousider-ness, and more. All the characters are broken in one way or the other, underlying the fact that no one is completely normal*. I’m in a dark place right now, and this game isn’t alleviating that feeling. On the other hand, it’s the perfect feeling to really sink into this game, so who knows if it was a wise choice or not?
I think I’m getting close to the end. I’m not sure, though, because I have studiously avoided anything related to the game. You really need to experience it as fresh as possible, and even when I read reviews before playing the game, I stopped the second they started spoiling even the smallest thing. Oh, and I read them after I played the demo (which was the first chapter), but before I played the second chapter.
(And other indies). That’s the subtitle, but I didn’t want to make the actual title too long.
I have one thing I need to say right away. Get rid of limited inventories. Completely. In the year of our largess, 2026, there is no reason for a limited inventory. When I played Skyrim (Bethesda), I only installed one mod. Well, two. One was to add snow because I love snow. But the other more important one was the infinite inventory for the horse. You can bet I downloaded that mod tout de suite.
If I remember, that game was especially egregious. It’s a vast open world game, and you could only dump your stuff at one of your houses? I think? And the fast travel was limited. I felt like I could only go two steps before filling up my inventory. Oh, and you could loot everything in every house.
Once I installed the endless inventory horse mod (you just dumped everything into your horse), it made the game 100% more enjoyable. I didn’t have to worry about picknig things up and where I was going to put them.
In Coze Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox), the inventory is so limited when you start out. So is the storagce in your tent/the fire. This is the same as the first game, and it was just as annoying then. There is no reason for it. I mean, I get that there’s an emotional reason for it, but all it does in make me irritated/mad/upset. Oh, and here’s the post from yesterday in which I explored my mixed feelings about the game.
I do wonder if it’s just that it’s easier to code that way than to make it endless? I don’t know why that would be, but jI know roughly nothing about coding. I will say that in this game, my motivation dwindles and dives when it seems like every three seconds I have to stop and move things into my storage or sell a bunch of stuff.
In the first game, at some point when I was rolling in money, I could max out my storage and buy chests to plac e them around the island. That was a stop-gap solution that I didn’t like because I never knew what was in which chest. I think you could access items from the main chest from any of the chests if you already had them in the main chest (the storage at the fire).
It was a mess, though. I really was hoping it would be one of the things that would be improved for this game. Alas, it was not. As far as i can tell, it’s exactly the same. A frustratingly small inventory that fills up in about five minutes. At least you can stack the same items, but only up to a certain amount of them.
It really disturbs the flow when I have to stop every five minutes or so to sell off a bunch of stuff or stash a bunch of items. Another small gripe is that when you run out of space, you simply cannot pick up the new item–so it lays on the ground where it is. And there is no marker to let me know where that is. I have in the past not been able to find something that I could not put in my inventory. It’s not a big deal when it’s a common resource, but if it’s one of the spirit logs (the reward a bear gives to you when you finish a quest for them. You give it to Flamey to make him stronger), then, of course, I want to find it again.
I’m back to talk more about Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox). In my post from yesterday, I was reluctantly admitting that I wanted something more from the game that I wasn’t getting. I compared the game to a favorite hoodie in that it fit well and was comfy to be in as you lounged around the house, but it wasn’t a looker nor was it something you’d go to, say, work in. It’s the same hoodie you’ve worn for the past ten years, and it’s just something you hold onto no matter what.
And yet, you know you should throw it away at some point soon, but your heart screams at you not to do so. So you ignore that voice and keep on wearing it–taking care to wash it gently to slow down the wear and tear.
I think I’ve pushed that metaphor about as far as I can without breaking it. My point is that I have been playing with a lingering sesse of, “Is this it?” Everything that was in the last game was in this one as well. The bears you have to help. The resources you have to forage. Mr. Kit’s store and its ever-expanding inventory. There were a few differences, but I wasn’t that happy about it, one in particular.
It’s the one where when you do the repeated chores like mining ore, you see the corporeal forms of your fellow Spirit Scouts as they help you do the chore. I hope there’s a reason for it that will be uncovered later because right now, I find it quite pointless. Doing those chores don’t take much time individually–it’s more the sum of doing them all. And having a helper on one of, say, six chores doesn’t really help. If it were every time, maybe? But doing it this way just irritates me.
One thing from the last game that is in this game as well that I really like is Mr. Kit’s daily array of clothing and hairstyles. They change on the daily, and I try to buy…well, in the last game, I just bought them all. In this game, though, I’m buying the ones I like–and all the special ones whether I like them or not.
As I was playing today, I still had that small feeling of, “Is this all there is?” It’s weird because I was enjoying my time (comfort food), but at the same time, I wanted something new. Oh! One more QOL change that I really appreciated is how they deal with the food. In the first game, there was a baker bear (who I really liked, by the way) who was actually really terrible at cooking/baking. I found that highly amusing, and I liked talking to her. I will admit, though, at a certain point, I just wanted to get on with my cooking and baking.
I’ve finished the next day in Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox), and I want to talk about it, and here is my post from yesterday that talks about it somewhat, but also about series in general. More specifically, how I think series go on for too long.
I want to talk about how sequels are in a no-win situation. I’ll start with Dark Souls II. It was destined to fail, really, because–hey, wait. I just did a quick Google, and while I can’t get an exact number for how many copies of Dark Souls II were sold, it’s at least several million (inclidng Scholar of the First Sin).
But, for many hardcore FromSoft fans, it’s the game not to be named. I, myself, enjoyed it a great deal as long as I didn’t think of it as a Dark Souls game, really, and I’ve certainly played it many more times than I’ve played the first game. It hasn’t aged the best, but I still go back to play it every now and again.
My point is that it’s really hard to make a sequel that pleases the people who love the first game. Why? Because it’s a no-win situation. If you stick too closely to the first game, then people are dissatisfied beacuse you’re not innovating (especially since the first game* was so different that the other games of that time), but if you change it too much, then people don’t like that it’s not like the first game.
This game is like my favorite hoodie that I wear constantly around the house. It’s worn in to fit my body, and it’s super comfortable. There are holes, yes, but I pay them no mind because they’re not showing anything inappropriate.
I really like wandering around and picking up resources all over the place. I can get lost in the little things, which is the joy of this game. I have to be careful, though, because it can become a burden if I allow myself to be dragged down by every little thing.
I think the point of giving the player so many things to do is to let the player pick and choose what they want to do. You’re not meant to do everything all at once, but that’s how my brain works. I want to do it all, and I want to do it all now. I am not good at delayed gratification, and I never have been. I mean, I can do it if I have rewards and such, but just for the sake of it? No.
I like the characters I’ve met so far–even the snooty one who speaks very formally. However, I don’t feel the pull towards any of them that I did in the first game. It’s early days, though, so I’m comfortable with waiting.
Back when Silk Song (Team Cherry) was being raved about, I read an article (I don’t remember where) about how there was another indie that was getting better reviews. The article was being cheeky because the game in question was a tiny indie called Schrödinger’s Call (with a cat face as the o in the first word, dev, Acrobatic Chirimenjako), and it had a small fraction of the reviews that Hollow Knight: Silksong had. Still. The reviews were impressive (I read them). Now, it has 89 on Metacritic and a 90 on OpenCritic whereas HKS has 90 and 91, respectively. And, to be completely honest, Schrödinger’s Call had about a quarter of the reviews that HKS had.
Still. Stellar reviews for both games.
Schrödinger’s Call has a demo on Steam, which includes the whole first chapter. Because of the reviews and the little I read about the game (I tried not to read too much), I installed the demo, and I was immediately intrigued. Not by the art style which is not my taste at all (kind of penciled anime, if that makes sense. I’ll include the trailer below.
It’s moody and dripping in atmosphere. You play as Mary, an amnesiac who is the focus of the game after something cataclysmic happen. She/You turn out to be something called the world’s last Confidant. I won’t go into details as to what that means, and I’m going to try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible. It’s really a game you want to go into with as little knowledge as possible. I can’t really talk about it without giving some light spoilers, but I’ll do my best to keep them at a minimum.
*SPOILERS*
Here’s my favorite part of the opening–there is a black cat named Hamlet. Well, he has a more formal name, but I’ll leave that up to you to find because it’s very clever. he’s snarky and crytic, but he’s the key to everything that’s happening. At least, I think he is. I’ve only played two chapters so far. And, like a real cat, Hamlet comes and goes as he pleases.
I’m rewatching the demo trailer to see what they say. Mary is the keeper of the phone. OK. The trailer tells you the basic premise. The moon falls to the earth. And it shows the phone a lot. Beyond that, Hamlet tells you a lot of things when you wake up from being unconscious. You don’t remember anything about your life, and as you’re sitting an a daze, he tells you that you’re the world’s last Confidant–meaning someone who listens to people who are stuck in their own thoughts and can’t free themselves enough to move on. I’ll tell you no more than that.
Wait, hold on. Is this yet another indie game that deals with death and dying, I hear you ask? That does seem to be my jam, doesn’t it? I would not call it cozy, but I am loath to say why. I mean, it’s mostly an interactive novel, though you do have to make choices.
Let’s talk about those choices. This is one place where I have conflicted feelings about it. Because the game has a deep meaning and it hits me right in the feels. But one of my small frustrations is that the game doesn’t let you choose the wrong answer to qustions that have multiple answers.
I mean, I get it. The game wants to you to go down a certain path. And they want your choices to mean something, but the choices don’t when if in the end, you are told to make another choice. Not in so many words, but the game won’t continue with the wrong choice you made. I get why they can’t map it out for both the answers, but then why give me the illusion that I’m actually making a choice?
Sticking to the gameplay for a minute–it’s pretty basic. You’re piecing together what happened to the person Mary’s talking to on the phone. They don’t have much memory, either, and the way to unlocking their memories is by empathizing with them. At least, that’s the way it’s been so far. I’ve only done the first two chapters because each chapter is meaty and heavy. Meaty as in there’s a lot to do in each one and heavy in that the themes are heartbreak and more heartbreak.
Oh! One thing I didn’t mention. The characters are animals, which seems to be my favorite way to have characters in a game. Three of my top five non-From games have animals as characters (Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall); Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games); and Cozy Grove (Spry Fox). I don’t know what it says about me that I’m more able to relate to animals than humans, but I’m fine with whatever it may be.
I mentioned earlier that the art style is not my favorite, but I have to say that except for the main character, I do like how the characters are drawn (especially Hamlet). What can I say? I like my cats black, round, sassy, and mysterious. Mary is impatient when Hamlet disappears suddenly, but that’s a cat for you. They come and go as they please, and that’s what I love about them.
I like that each episode/chapter is a mystery of sorts. Because the person I’m talking to on the phone is stuck, I have to free them. That means delving into their past and figuring out what is making them stuck. Along the way, I will get a few other people to talk to, and I can usally help them find peace as well.
This game is so coded for me. Talking about death and tugging at my heartstrings. Making me the one who has to help people move on. But first, I must listen to their woes and help them recover their memories.
As I said, it’s a heavy game. It’s already broken my heart more than once. I have been gripped with despair, pain, and compassion. I have teared up, and I have wanted desperately to comfort people/animals who aren’t even real. The end of the second chapter completely broke me. I’m not going to talk about it, obviously, but I felt everything Mary was saying. So deeply in my heart. I felt the pain that she felt. I wanted to cry out with her, and I finished the chapter in a daze.
I have to say that I can only play one chapter at a time. I played the demo several weeks ago (I think?), and immediately bought the game. Then, I kept wanting to play it, but my heart and brain weren’t in the right place to do it.
I feel like I’ll do the same thing for the third chapter. As much as I want to keep going, I have a feeling I’ll need a break before I tackle the next chapter.
The beauty is in the simplicity. There were a few puzzles in the game, yes, but they always had a purpose (usually to give an ingredient and/or recipe). The devs made it really easy to follow along, and there was only one time I had to look somethinig up. I’m still not sure if what happened was a glitch or what the devs intended, but either way, it was no big deal. It would have been a big deal, of course, if it had blocked me from progressing, but it did not.
The music is great and really fits the theme, too. I’ve included another track on the OST below. It’s very atmospheric, and the track I included today is under a minute long. All the tracks are vibrant and evocative; I’m impressed by it as much as I am by most of the other aspects of the game.
I know I’ve said it before, but I love a game that has a vision and carries it out well. I’m much more forgiving of a small indie team that is dedicated to their game than I am to a huge AAA team that, well, it’s not fair to say they’re not dedicated to their game. I would bet they are dedicated as well. It’s just that those games aren’t as interesting to me*. The last AAA game I played was….I can’t even remember what it was. I think it might have been Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions) at the end of 2024. I gave it a 6.5/7, which is at least 2 points less than most people’s rating of it.
I know to keep my mouth shut when people are gushing about something. I may just say it’s not my style or my kind of _______, but i rarely go on at length about it unless asked. One time in the Discord I’m in, people were raving about Pulp Fiction. I mentioned that I got dumped because of my opinion on it, and I said I’d leave it at that because I did not want to yuck anyone’s yum. One guy said it was one of his favorite movies, but he was curious to know my opinion. So I gave it to him. He said it was fascinating to read, and he thanked me for it.
With GTA VI, I just say it’s diplomatically not my kind of game and leave it at that. I watched Ian play a chunk of the fifth game on stream, and I hated everything about the game–especially Trevor. I don’t like pop culture that does not have a single redeemable character. I didn’t like Fallout 3, either, in a large part for that reason.
I firished Creature Kitchen (The Rat Zone) today. Once I was done with it, I went back and 100%ed it. I did look up where a few ingredients were and one recipe, but other than that, it was pretty easy. I was able to get most of the achievements while playing the game, which is how I ilke to do it. I don’t like having to grind for a meaningless achievement. (Looking at you, FromSoft and the ten hours it took for me to get that certain achievement in DS III, and that was a short amount time compared to many others).
The achievements in this game were for the most part reasonable. There was one that was kinda ridiculous, but, fortunately, it was fairly easy to do. Just tedious. I get why it was included (thematically appropriate), but it didn’t add anything to the experience.
Honestly, I don’t get it. I have seen it said over and over again that this is a creepy game, and it simply is not. It just isn’t. This is the hill I will die on with this game. I don’t see even a whiff of creepiness/scariness. Am I the one who is wrong? Probably. Or rather, I’m probably in the minority as I usually am. I will say that I’m starting to feel a tad bit gaslit about this because I don’t see it at all.
Normally, I can at least get a glimpse of why people feel the way they do, but I don’t see it at all in this game. I see cute. I see cozy. I see crunchy pixel graphics. I see charming. I see, yes, creatures. I do NOT see creepy. I do wonder if I’m being punked. Is this kind of a long con where everyone is in on it?
Setting that aside with difficulty, the game kept me engaged until the very end. Without any spoilers, I felt like it was giving me a big hug, and I smiled a genuine smile of warmth and appreciation as the credits rolled.
The story was simple and sincere. I was wondering if there was going to be a twist, and there wasn’t. Not really, anyway. I’m going to put a spoiler tag on this, but it’s not really a spoiler. I’d rather be safe than sorry, though. I tend to err on the side of being spoiler tag heavy.
In the Discord I’m in, there’s an ongoing debate about spoiler tags and when they should be used. My thing is that it doesn’t hurt to slap a spoiler tag on something, so why not? There are times, though, that it looks we’re writing confidential FBI docs.
I have been moaning about the glut of mediocre games on Steam in the last–well, several months if not years. Steam Next Fest has become a drag. I’m not saying there aren’t good games in the Steam Next Fest; I am saying that it’s really hard to find that gem. That’s why I depend on groups likke Wholesome Games to give me a heads up on what’s new in cozy gaming. In this case, they had a trailer for a game called Creature Kitchen (The Rat Zone). I have included it down below. I don’t usually go for the crunchy pixel look, but there was something endearing about this one. I don’t know what it is, but I was drawn in.
Then, I found out it was a cooking game, and I was sold. I didn’t even need to know the story or anything else. Me cooking for different animals*? Hell yeah! There was a demo, so of course, I installed it. I didn’t have much of an idea what to expect, so I went in with an open mind. I did love the fact that the game had an eighties feel to it. It’s in first person, but for whatever reason, my nausea remained at a very low level. It’s manageable, and I only had to take a break once.
I can’t overstate how charming the game is. And how it leads you gently from point to point. For the most part, I had no problem figuring out what I was supposed to do. Only once did I get stuck, and it was a glitch in the system. Meaning, it was a fault of the game–not anything I’d done.
By the way, my biggest complaint–and it’s not even that big–is just a bunch of small QOL issues. Such as it doesn’t constantly save, and you can’t auto-save. Which means that you can lose a small bit of gameplay. Like, a minute or so. It’s not great, but I’m also not too pressed about it.
Another small complaint–the frying pan mechanic is really frustrating. You have to cook a piece of food on one side for a few seconds before flipping it to cook the other side. Much like you have to do in real life, yes, but you have to flip it at a certain angle that is counterintuitive to me. And if you don’t do it just right, then it falls out of the pan and into the fire. And you have to cook it again. As someone who has awful dexterity in my fingers, this is agony to me. And it doesn’t add anything to the gameplay experience.
I sympathize with devs who want to include mundane activities, especially in a cozy cooking game, but–by the way. This has been called a creepy-looking cozy cooking simulator. I may be missing something, but it’s not creepy at all. I mean, there’s
Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin) is my casual/cozy word game that I am currently playing. It’s a word game that is a combination of Scrabble and Balatro (Local Thunk). You are a bird and you have to score words to make the filgght to each stop on a route. There are different conditions for each route, and you have to finish one to unlock the next.
There are feathers that modify something for the whole run. Like, you get ten flaps per each X you play. Flaps are points. There is also a power stat, and you multiple the two. I never know exactly how many points I’ll be getting per hand, which makes things very interesting.
This game very much has that “Just one more run” feel to it. Not quite as much as Balatro did, but that’s a good thing. I got so lost in that game; it really felt like an addiction that I just couldn’t quit. I lost actual days to the challenges, and at one point, I was so focused on finishing the Orange Stakes on the Plasma Deck, I had lost all the joy of playing the game. It’s supposedly the easiest deck, but it was the hardest one for me. I just could not get the hang of it, and there was a point where I was actively hating the game. That’s when I walked away from the game.
This is one of my issues (and probably partly because of me being neuroatypical): When I get into something, I get obsessed with it. It’s all I can think of, and I cannot let it go. It can be a good thing, such as with my martial arts. It allows me to focus on, say, the Double Fan Form until I taught the whole thing to myself. It took a year, yes, but I kept at it through the tough times. I don’t know why I didn’t quit–well, yes I do. It’s sheer stubbornness, really. I’m not competitive with other people, but I’m very competitive with myself.
I challenge myself to be the best, however, and sometimes, I’m too hard on myself. That’s because I’m Asian; that’s how we do. It’s also because I had parents who didn’t say much of anything nice about me or to me. Yes, that was partly an Asian thing, but it was also dysfunction. One thing I say to people is just because something is cultural, it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. What I mean by that is that every culture has its negative aspects, and I used to bristle when people tried to hold up Asians as the model minority because it’s just another way of not seeing us as individuals.
How the hell did I get here from where I was? I’m not sure, but whatever.
I’m back for the third and final post about the Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox) demo. I want to talk about what I liked and didn’t like in the demo. I have said that the aesthetics are not my style, but they grew on me in game one. Let me rephrase that. The environments are vivid and the bears are cute; it’s mostly the player character that leaves me feeling a bit empty. I got used to it, though, anad I loved being able to dress them up as I wished. There were so many cute outfits, and I had to buy them all.
Here’s my post from yesterday about the basics of the first game and how the demo has differed so far. In this point, I’ll talk more about that and what I hope the sequel will have. And won’t have. Oh, and I’ve included the trailer from the original game below since I’ve included the trailer for this game in the last two posts.
I left off the last post by talking about how the quests seem much easier to finish in this game than the first, at least in the demo. I have mixed feelings about that because while it was frustrating in the first game to have to wait literal days to finish quests, I’m not sure I like finishing them in a matter of minutes, either. Then again, they may just be the first steps to a bigger and longer quest. I think I would be pleased if that was the case. I think that would be a good middle ground. Have some quests that can be finished in the current session and some that might have to wait until the next day.
Actually, that might have been how it was in the first game. It’s been some time since I’ve played it, so I’m not sure. It’s weird, though, because the ones you do in the moment seem to be too easy to finish. I will say I was frustrated by one thing. There’s a way to fix the bus, and you have to find several different parts. I could not find one part for the life of me, and I realized that it’s because they did not want you to find it in the demo. Or maybe not at all beacuse once the bus is fixed, presumably it can be driven. Though how it was drivin onto an island, I am unsure.
I hope that the cast of bears I have to help will be as memorable and endearing as they were in the first game. I’m a bit wary of the content creator bear, but I mean it is part of the current social landscape. Meaning, it’s a valid job, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be represented in the game. And yet, I’m a bit wary because they are already doing the ‘like and subscribe’ vibe that is so off-putting to me. They, themselves, though are very sweet.
I like that in the first game and in this game so far, there are a wide variety of characters. It’s one thing I appreciate in cozy games–so many of the devs are deliberate about maknig their games inclusive. Not just racially, but sexual orientation, disabilities, gender identity, neuroatypicality, etc. Even religion has been touched upon in some games, as well as spirituality. Death is definetely dealt with, too–and in a sensitive manner.