Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: cozy games

My 2025 game awards, part three (b)

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I want to write more about Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock) because it’s emblemtic of my gaming year. I bestowed it with an award yesterday, but it is not without its flaws. I have written several posts in which I highlight the positives and the negatives.

It has a mystery baked into it, but it’s, if you’ll pardon the pun, half-baked at best. I figured out what was going on before the denouement, and I was disappointed when it was revealed that I was right. There was no way the mystery was going to be satisfying. I knew that from the start, so I wasn’t very disappointed when it turned out to be true.

One of the biggest issues with the game wsa that there was just too much thrown into the soup. They could have taken out the mystery, the breeding of the animals (to make magical, colorful animals), and several other additions, and the game would have been just as satisfying. There is a point of oversaturation, and I think this game passed it.

Here is a quick list of activities/events/things included in the game: planting, farming, and harvesting; selling items and buying them; nurturing silk worms in order to make silk for clothing (this takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r); making clothing and selling them to Violet; mining for gems, coal, and other minerals; making jewelry and selling it to Parker (and this does not show up, really, until the very end of the game; making hair dyes and otther hair stuff for Eury (also a late game addition); fishing, making several different spells; gathering resources; amassing an amount of items for various townfolk; finding recipes; cooking; meeting with the coven every night; romancing, dating, and getting married (and then divored); figuring out the mystery; and that’s not even everything.

Oh, I forgot to mention the animals. Feeding them, finding their favorite food, and then later down the road, breeding them. As to the last, it was not clear at all how that came about, and I didn’t fully realize I was missing out for dozens of hours. I was not happy with that. At all. That’s one of my small gripes about the game–the tutorializing isn’t great.

I never liked the art style, but I accepted it at some point. I can’t remember the music, and I’m pretty sure I turned it off because I don’t like to listen to constant music as I play. The voice acting was solid, but the dialogue was thin. I have mentioned that when I played the original Hades (Supergiant Games), I still got original dialogue well past the true ending (which meant beating game ten times).

With this game, the repeat started after the first date, which was very early on. I’m not asking that every game has hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue, but I would like to get through at least a quarter of the game without hearing repeat dialogue on the regular.


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My 2025 game awards, part three

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I have played several games this year–more than I usually play. Most of them were on Steam because that’s my main game client. There was a game I had heard about and seen the trailer for the sequel, which was actually a prequel, of the game I’m about to bestow an award upon. Give me a second to come up with a a weird name for the award. Here is the post from yesterday in which I talked about two detective games that I really enjoyed, more or less.

The cozy game that wasn’t very cozy until I discovered the Fish Fingers trick, and then it turned out to be easy street with surprising emotional heft and depth

Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock)

This game was a mobile game first and the developers worked tirelessly to bring it to consoles and PC, and upgraded it endlessly to include things that the community wanted. I did not vibe with the art design because it was too cartoony for me, but I grew to find it low-key charming. It’s still not myy preferred art style, but I don’t hate it, either.

The basic premise is that the main character, Tara, loses her job and her betrothed at the same time. In order to lick her wounds, she rushes off to the farm of her grandmother, Hazel, who is ailing and needs help. The farm is in shambles, and Tara sets her mind to cleaning it up. Romance is a big thing in the game, too, and I really appreciated that there was a nonbinary character who was romanceable. Voiced by Erika Ishii, upon whom I have a huge crush and who is nonbinary in real life.

The big reveal (that is in the trailer) is that Hazel is a witch and part of a coven. They are tasked with turning the seasons and keeping things running smoothly in Fairhaven (the rural town in which they live). One of the early quests is for Tara to figure out who is in the coven and what their title is.

I appreciate that there are people of different ethnicities and nationalities. And sexual orientations. It’s not very realistic given the environment, but I am fine with that. I give the side-eye to people who whine about that not being realistic whereas they are fine wit the idea of mowing down enemies by the dozens.

I was frustrated with the game in the beginning because like lots of ‘cozy’ games (that really are misnamed), life is hard. Real hard. With shit stamina, vigor, and money, I could do like three things before I had to find sustenance.

This is the standard for life sim games, but it’s not fun. There is so much to do, but you can do so little. I was late in the game when I discovered the Fish Fingers trick, and once I did, I broke the game with it. I was never wanting for money after that, and it made the game so much more enjoyable.

This is another game in which I had such highs and such lows. I struggled so much in the beginning that I thought about quitting. It’s not fun to do three things then need to fuel up, do three things, then need to fuel up, etc. Part of the reason I play games is so that I can get away from reality! I have chores I have to do in real life; why would I want to do them in a game as well?

I admire the devs for adding so much content over time. I got the whole thing as one papckage, but I read up a bit about what came when. I think it plays better as a complete game, but who knows? I was not there every step along the way. I usually don’t play games in Early Access because I rather play a finished product.

The romances were interesting, in both a good way and a bad way. I appreciated the diversity of characters who you could romance, but I did not like that the trajectory of each relationship was basically the same. You had to give gifts to the person (which is common in video games) and then at a certain point, that person would ask you out. If you accept and confess your feelings, you’re off the market and dating that one person.

When the game first released, you could only marry one person per playthrough. By the time I played it, you could divorce and remarry as many times as you liked. There was a quaint divorce custom that was, well, cringeworthy, but as one of the achievemnets was to marry all the romanceable characters, I–oh.

Something I found out well after the point where I could do something about it was that there are two characters who, if you do not marry them both before the end of the first season, I want to say, then they hook up and stay together for the rest of the playthrough. Which means you cannot marry both within one playthrough. Which was as annoying as hell. One of them is the hardest character to romance, despite how flirty she is.

There’s a tension in games these days. If you want to even think about doing the plat, it’s best to look at the achievements beforehand. I don’t like to do that, though, because I’d rather my first playthrough be organic. I really regretted not knowing that about the two NPCS, though, because that meant I had to do a whole nother playthrough to get one achievement when I was already done with the game.

In adidtion, the relationships were pretty shallow. Some flirting led to the first date, and then yyou were a couple. A few more dates later, and you were pushed to propose. Then, marriage. Then, they lurked around your house when they weren’t at work.

In addition, when you dumped them, only one showed any real emotion over it. The rest shrugged their shoulders and said, “That’s life, isn’t it? We’ll stay friends” and moved on. In fact, the second I divorced one character, she was already in a relationship with the other character in the very next scene! Yes, I unwittingly chose one of the two characters who romance each other if they’re both single.

I will write more on this tomorrow. I’m done for now.

 

Oh, the games I’ve played (this year), part three

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I want to talk more about the games I tried out this year and did not get along with. There have been severeal, I see, as I have been looking over my Steam Replay timeline. Some of them are just the demos, whereas others are games I’ve bought. Oh, here’s the post I did yesterday on some of the games I played this year.

The first one is The First Berserker: Khazan (Neople), a brutal soulslike. I have one word to say to this game: NO.

To expand a bit more, I was sighing within two minutes of playing. I will say, though, get paid, Ben Starr–get your bag! He’s in everything, and he’s the main character (the player character) in this game.

I am so tired of soulslikes glomming onto the brutal difficulty part of From games and thinking that’s all it takes to make a good soulslike. Oooooh let’s make it so you can die in two hits by a scrub! Ooooooh let’s have mob after mob attack you in a way that you can’t see them coming, nor can you separate them. Ooooh let’s make it so that the opening saps your will to live. And then let’s have a mini-boss who will break your back, your spirit, and make the game not fun at all to play.

Oh, and ever since Sekiro, let’s include a parry/deflect that is an integral part of the combat because god forbid a dev dare make a soulslike these days without it. God forbid that the combat be hefty enough on its own so that you don’t have to use the parry/deflect. And god especially forbid that you don’t crank the difficulty up to a billion before I’m even out of the tutorial area.

I don’t blame From for this, but I can’t help feeling a bit bitter. I was already the dregs when it came to From games, and now, I cannot hang with many of the clones. The only way I made it through the base game of Lies of P (Round8 Studio/NEOWIZ) was by maxing out a consumable-forward build and using said consumables to beat every boss from the fourth one on (or fifth?) in their second phase (and they all had second phases after that point). That’s even how I beat the super-hard optional secret boss at the end of the game, plus a drastic change of my build in general. I didn’t feel good about it or proud (well, some pride on the last boss), but I did what I had to do.

I played maybe an hour of The First Berserker: Khazan and quit without hesitation. It was not enjoyable at all, and it was missing the point of Souls games, at least for me. The vast majority of people play the From games for the bosses. I felt no joy in playing the game, and I knew I would have quickly been at that place where I could no longer play the game.

I don’t know when it happened, but I’ve gone from being eager and excited when a soulslike is announced to being disenchanted, jaded, and ‘ugh, no’. It’s almost a revulsion at this point. Take, for example, Nioh 3 (Team Ninja). It was announced at… I want to say The Game Awards, but I’m not sure. It was recent, though; I know that much.

I have earnestly tried to play the first two games and got my ass relentlessly whupped. I was not having any fun, and I eventually gave up on each (for different reasons). I was numb when I saw the trailer for the third game. It did not move me in any way, and if anything, the trailer turned me off of it. I can’t think of the last soulslike that excited me. It’s not that I’ve outgrown the genre, but that it’s grown in a way that does not include me. In other word, it’s dumped me and not vice-versa.

Side note: I don’t have loyalty to any brand, not even FromSoft. Currently, I buy their games on day one or even pre-order them, but I was deeply disappointed by Nightreign and their decision to make The Duskbloods a Switch 2 exclusive. If they eventually bring it to other platforms including PC, I’ll probably buy it–but I won’t be happy about it. PvPvE does nothing for me. I’m sure they’ll do it well, but it’s not my thing at all.

Look, just because I love past From games does not mean that they earn endless grace from me. I mean, they can make whatever games they want. Clealy, they don’t need my approval to do that. But, I don’t have to buy those games if they don’t appeal to me.

I’m curious if they’ll do a sequel to Elden Ring. I can’t imagine they won’t given how successful it was, but I would rather see them move on to something else. no, I don’t want them to return to Dark Souls, either. I would like a game in which the combat was not so emphasized (and hard) and there was more focus on the exploration.

Another game that I was really looking forward to was Date Everything (Sassy Chap Games). It had a very interesting premise in that you receive this pair of glasses that make it possible for you to, ah, date everything (well, not everything, but most things) in your house. And by things, I mean things. The microwave, bed, your diary, washer, dryer, vacuum cleaner, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Erika Ishii is in it, and they play ben-wa balls named Ben-hwa. You can bet I ‘dated’ them as soon as possible. It was pretty damn hot, but also weird, which is a good tagline for the whole game.

Ben Starr is also in this game; as I said, he’s getting PAID. He’s the doors in the game, and he’s one of my favorite characters. I like talking to him, and apparently, he’s 17 doors. I have found maybe five of them?

The dialogue is snappy for the most part, but it just does not gel for me. It’s trying too hard, and I did not vibe with it. All the names are puns, and all the dialogue is written as if for a sassy sit-com. Itt’s well-written, but just not for me. Also, I learned that once you ‘date’ someone (read, bang), that’s it. There are no long-term relationships. Granted, I don’t know how long the person who told me this had played the game, but they seemed to be pretty confident about it.

I did feel it was way too easy to woo a few of the people I banged, including Ben-hwa. I felt like I was enacting a main character fantasy with the support of all the NPCs. I would have liked it to be…I don’t even know what. More authentic? But that’s not the point of the game. I mean, the very premise is weird and wild, so why would the rest of it be grounded in any way?

I played maybe a half-dozen hours of it and never really warmed up to it. Regretfully, I put it away after twice giving it a real shot. I don’t think I’ll be going back to it.

 

 

 

Some of the games I’ve seen this year, part two

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Steam started doing Steam Replay a few years ago in which they break down the games you’ve played in the last year. Every pop media website seems to do some kind of wrap up at this time of year, but this is the only one I care about.

It shows how many games I’ve played this year (51!! With 37 of them being new); how many achievements I’ve gotten; which games I’ve played the most, and so much more. It shows which games I’ve played by the month, and it’s pretty neat.

In the Discord I’m in, we vote on awards in different categories. I had to turn in my ballot two days ago, which is a bit frustrating. I was holding out as long as I could because I wanted my Steam Replay to drop so it could prod my memory as to the games I’ve played this year. The shocker is that–well, I’m not going to talk about the shocker here because I’m going to save it for my silly awards later in the week.

I played Elden Ring in every month this last year except January–and in that month, I played Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin) and Dark Souls III. I always have a FromSoft playthrough on the go, sometimes more than once. I will say, though, that because Elden Ring has a dedicated jump button, it’s hard to go back to the earlier games without one. Each of the previous  games (except Sekiro) make you use an awkward combination of buttons to jump. To make matters worse, it was a different combination of buttons in each game. Like, left stick forward and B in one and I think holding down B and then quickly pressing B again in another.

I think they went back to left stick forward and B for the third Dark Souls game, but I don’t fully remember.

I mainly play Elden Ring these days, but I do dip back into the older games. Recently, I went back to the OG Dark Souls to get Big Hat Logan’s big hat. I rarely do that quest in that game because it’s so long and convoluted, and it costs a shit-ton of souls. Why did I do it recently? Because I hadn’t done it in a while, and I wanted the big hat. Which, ironically, is not the best big hat in the Souls games. That would be the Sage’s Big Hat in the third Souls game–which is the best piece of armor in any game. Period.

Anyway, I went all-in on the magicks while going for Big Hat Logan’s big hat, which made me realize something about pyro that I had not known before. It scales. I mean, That’s not the thing I didn’t know because of course it scales. What I didn’t know was how much. Normally, I pump up my pyro as high as I can get it and just melt shit. Or rather, do large chunks of damage because I never really feel like I’m melting anything.


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Some of the games I’ve seen this year

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I normally play FromSoft games  and a few indies here and  there. I feel like I might play a huge chunk of ten games a year at best? And any year in which a FromSoft game is released (that I actually play, that’s a hint for later), that’s basically all I play other than casual games to change it up. In 2022, I played Elden Ring all year long. My guess is that I might have played one or two other complete games that year. I’m not sure, though, because my memory is completely shot now.

Ha. Yesterday’s post was supposed to be about the games I’ve played  this year, but it really was not. I’m (probably) going to tackled that topic  today and why I don’t usually play that many games a year. Why? Because I tend to get obsessed with one game at a time, plus a casual game on the side.

I’m fascinated by people who hop f rom one game to another because  I can’t  do that. At one point, I was playing Dark Souls III when Geralt showed  up Monster Hunter  World. Trying  to switch between the two games was very hard. That’s on  me, though. It’s hard for me to go  back to some games once I’m done with them.

Side note:  I have wondered if I have ADHD, but I don’t think I do. I have some of the traits, but not the main ones. Also, once I learned that ADHD and autism have several symptoms in common, I leaned more towards being on the  spectrum than  having ADHD.

Here are some games that I tried this year, but did not finish for a variety of reasons.. I will explain why I didn’t finish each one.

The big one is Tiny Bookshop (neoludic games). It sounded right up my alley. Quitting your job and going to a bucolic beach town in order to set up a mobile bookshop. I tried the demo and did not love it, but I decided to give it a go when the game came out.

I got into it more than I did in the demo, but it was so stressful. Why? For several reasons. One, there are very few save slots. This matters because of the next point. There are several side missions/character side quests that are very elaborate/involved/labor intensive. Also, the game does not adequately explain what you need to do for these quests or even the main mission sometimes.

This all matters because I was trying to do everything as I went along because, yes, I was trying to 100% it. That’s on me, obviously. There are so many side quests and different events, it’s hard to keep track of them. Plus, you can only go to one location a a day, which makes the quests rather tedious.


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Oh, the games I have seen (this year)

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In looking back on this year, I have been thinking about the games I’ve played. Yesterday, I wrote a post about how I’m aware of what a weirdo I am, but not how far outside of the norm I am. I can usually understand why normies feel the way they do, but sometimes, it’s just beyond me.

Also, I feel unreasonably hurt when I get something wrong. I mean, I can tell 95% of the time what I should and should not say because I’m constantly watching like a hawk for what I should be saying and doing. The times I slip up are when I say something I think should be acceptable, but isn’t. Or rather, times when I hdon’t even think about what I’m saying because it seems so innocuous to me.

It’s one reason I don’t like being around people for an extended period of time. I am so aware of how weird I am and how I come across if I’m not careful.

Side note: Here are the reasons I’m like this. One, neuroatypical. I did not fully realize this until a few years ago. Before that, I just thought my brain was broken. Now, I know it’s ‘different’ and ‘unique’. To be honest, I still think it’s broken, but am more accepting of it than I was before. Plus, I have always seen the benefits to thinking the way I do as well as the flaws. Granted, I wasn’t as convinced the pluses outweighed the negatives in the past, but at least I was aware there were positives.

The other reason is that I was made my mother’s emotional support person at a young age. I was not allowed to show any negative emotions of my own because only she and my father could have those. My father’s main emotions were contempt, disdain, and anger. My mother’s was depression, guilt, and manipulation. Yes, I know those aren’t technically emotions, but I said what I said.

If I ever showed any negative emotion, I would be beaten down (metaphorically) for it. My father would shout at me whereas my mother would pull a face and either be belligerent or injured depending on how she was feeling. I spent most of my life feeling as if I had to continually tamp down my own emotions because there was no space for them to exist. I still do, quite frankly.

How does this relate to games? Well, I rarely like the games that other people do. I am not going to belabor my bewilderment that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive) was such a huge hit because I’ve written several posts about it. I just need to mention it in this context because I truly don’t see what everyone else sees in this game. Especially when it comes to the story.

This is how I feel about most popular media, though. I rarely feel the same way about really popular movies, books, or TV shows that most people do. There’s no reason why it should be any different for games. Even the popular ones that I like such as FromSoft*, I like for different reasons. I’m not in it for the difficult bosses; I see those as the price I have to pay to see the incredible Miyazaki worlds. For now. I have a feeling I won’t be able to play them for much longer.


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My perfect cozy game (what I don’t want), part four

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One of the issues with me and any kind of pop culture is that I’m never sure what I will like. I am very sure about things I won’t like, and I am rarely wrong on that front. This is me in a nutshell, though. I know what I don’t like/don’t want much more than what I do like/do want. I have told people that I won’t like something, and then they have been offended when I went on to, indeed, not like that thing. It’s gotten to the point where I rarely talk about it in the general/casual population because I know how outraged/upset people get when I don’t like what they do.

Side note: I have a friend whose husband takes it as a personal insult if she doesn’t like something he’s passionate about. Even if she’s very gentle about how she says it, he takes offense. It’s gotten to the point where she just doesn’t bother, and while I feel bad for her because she has to constantly stifle her opinions around him, I also understand why she does it.

It’s a people-pleasing tendency, and it’s really hard to break. In addition, I rarely find it worth it to voice my opinion and try to defend it when it’s unpopular. Not because it’s a worthless opinion, but because I just don’t have the patience or the fortitude.

Back to the actual post. Yesterday, I wrote my three most important ‘do not wants’ in a cozy game. Those are the biggest things, but there are other ones as well.

4. Don’t make the scope too narrow. I like games in which you can do a plethora of things. This is a hard one, though, because I don’t like having too much to do, either. I can’t tell you exactly where that line is drawn, but I know it when a game crosses over it.

One of my favorite indie games (which eventually became a cozy game, but did not start out that way) is Hades (Supergiant Games). It’s a roguelite/like with procedurally-generated rooms and rewards, a ton of dialogue (I was seeing new dialogue even after I officially beat the game (which takes multiple runs), vivid characters based on Greek mythology, and a ton more. Every run was fresh and diffreent, and even though there were not that many weapons, each had several ways to use them.

I will admit, I did not gel with the game for the first few hours. Then at some point, the game clicked, and I inhaled it for the next few months. As is typical of me, I was obsessed with it. By the time I finished, I was half-a-dozen achievements away from 100%ing it. The remaining achievements were mostly things that could be done without fiddling too much with the game (setting up ridiculous runs and such weren’t needed. Mostly). It was a surprisingly painless hundo chievo, which I really appreciated.

Let’s put it this way. I have done All the Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. With the exception of Elden Ring, the rest were horrendous to achieve. My theory is that Miyazaki did not want to put in achievements, but he had to beacuse that’s the way modern games are these days. (These days meaning a decade-and-a-half ago or so until now.) Therefore, he made them as painful as possible as a way of protesting.

Anyway. Hades is chock-full of so much goodness. I will say that personally, my favorite part was the storyline and the characters. There were little nods to From Soft games, which I always appreciate. I love mythology, so I was so happy to have so many of them in this game. Each god offered different boons, and there were other perks as well. The on-ramp was steep in the beginning of the game, and it didn’t really level off until after beating the final boss for the first time (which was only the beginning of the  game, really).

One of the best accessibility options in the game (which I did not use, but was glad was there) was something called God Mode. Every time you die, you get 2% added to your defense. It goes up to 80%, and you become basically a god at that point. I thought that was really clever because it doesn’t change the gameplay at all, and in the end, you can turn it off at any point. As I said, I did not use it, but I was severely tempted at a few points.

5. On the other hand, don’t branch out too much, either. I am a contrary witch, and I know that about myself. I can frustrate people because I will state seemingly contrary points of view with equal fervor. It makes sense, though, beacuse very few things are black and white. I see nuance moreso than most people, and I’m comfortable with that.

I’m still playing Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock). I’m still having much frustration with it, and yet, I cannot quit it. I’m still in the first season because there is just too much to do. In this game, you get to choose when you want to change the season, and I feel like I’ll never be ready to do that. I have so much shit that I need to do, and here’s a big issue with the game. There are too many micro-systems to deal with.

Not only am I doing a bunch of farming, some of which has to do with other systems as well, I’m fishing, mining, and foraging. That’s just the resource-gathering I’m doing. I also have to nurture my relationships with roughly a dozen villagers (and a cat). Now, I have animals, and they each have their own preferred foods as well. I have taken to writing notes on what the humans like and don’t like, but I am NOT going to do that with the animals, too.

I have read that there are spells that will help with that, but not in this season. I have a feeling that the witch stuff doesn’t really get going until then, which is another negative in my opinion. I have a few spells, and they are useful, but they are very basic.

Ever since I learned the money trick (apparently, it’s a deliberate thing the devs put in or at least did not get rid of because you can embargo selling this item in the settings if you don’t want to be tempted to make mad money easily. I now have nearly 400,000 gold, I think), I have been rolling in it. I don’t even feel bad about it because there is too much to do in the game to worry about making a dollar here and there. The only thing is that it makes a lot of the little chores pointless because why bother selling a diamond necklace far a thousand when you need three or four more ingredients than you do for the trick way to make money?

I know that games want you to keep going back to them over and over again, even if they are not live-service games. And I can see how you can put hundreds of hours into this game, but I’m flagging. I get overwhelmed with choices in real life, and I feel it doubly so in a game like this.

 

My perfect cozy game (what I don’t want), part three

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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.


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My perfect cozy game, part two

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I was going to write about my perfect cozy game in yesterday’s post, but then I went completely off the rails. That’s because I found out the (dismissive and sexist) definition of coz games–by the way, apparently some people think the term started at the beginning of the pandemic and then go on at lengeth about that thesis, even though it’s not true. It’s so irritating–acting like they discovered this new thing and could talk about it confidently, even though they got the basics of it wrong.

I mean, that’s pretty typical of everything. Each generation believes they invented music, movies, and sex, so why not video games as well? I will say that the pandemic intensified the desire for people to play cozy games (Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo) springs to mind), but it wasn’t the birth of cozy games.

In addition, I hate the sneering tone that many people employ when they talk about cozy games. The genre has evolved leaps and bounds in the last five years, and to talk about them as if they were just ‘girlie’ games (ughhhhhh. Going past that with great difficulty because I cannot do yet another thousand-word screed about sexism and ‘cool girls’ in gaming) is frustrating. And even if they were, so what? Don’t non-men deserve to have games that cater to them as well? (No, I’m not saying all women and other non-men love cozy games, but many do).

Why is playing a game that is based on doing daily chores and building relationships with other people a bad thing? “Keep your politics out of my game!”? Hell, no. Make your game dripping in politics. The more, the better! Plus, it’s a piece of media like a movie, a book, or a TV show. I want to  feel something as I play, and not just run around, mindlessly shooting people. I don’t need to have bulging muscles, a big dick, an empty brain, and a cigarette dangling from my lip. Hey, look! I can do the gross stereotypes, too, though I did have to hold back the bile as I typed that.

I don’t play shooters, in a large part because they are first-person, which I can’t do because of motion sickness. But equally, I don’t play them because I don’t like mindlessly shooting enemies for hours on end. That’s boring to me, and I much rather mindlessly farm (literally or figuratively) for hours on end. And talk to the people around me who I may or may not be able to bonk. Er, woo.

Here’s what I want in my cozy games.


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My perfect cozy game

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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.


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