With Netflix having announced a sequel to come to mobile this year, and with me having actually finished a game for once, it seemed like a good time to put down my thoughts on this title.
I picked up Cozy Grove because it was pitched as something like a spooky Animal Crossing, without the villagers guilt tripping you if you miss a few weeks. It wasn’t that. It was something very different, very cute, very cozy… and very much better than my last attempt at playing an AC game. (Look, I’m not doing all the weeding that piles up if I stop playing for a month, alright?)
The Scariest Part
I enjoyed my time with this game, but there’s one spectral elephant in this mega-tent that we have to get out of the way, because it impacted every aspect of my enjoyment: the performance is absolutely dreadful.
I played the Switch version, and I have told people I know to buy it on Steam if they’re interested. I can’t confirm whether the Steam version is any better, but it would be hard to be worse. It’s a good thing you can get through most of your daily “tasks” in about twenty minutes, because that’s about how long you have before the game starts to not so much stutter as stagger like a drunk with a sprained ankle. Shadows load in before the object casting them, and somehow the game seems to both not keep objects loaded long enough and keep them loaded too long. The screen will, at times, be completely empty except for you and a handful of shadows, while the frame rate tanks so badly it’s hard to say whether you’re running into something that hasn’t loaded or if the game just hasn’t loaded your next step.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the rest of the game–which is to say, the good parts of the game.
Bear Hugs
(Yes, you can hug the bears. Well, most of them. Some of them have boundaries they would like respected, and that’s okay too.)
The selling point of the game actually isn’t the cozy sim aspect to it. There’s only so much decoration you can do, and the performance tanking anytime there’s more than five types of items on the screen discourages trying to push that any further. (Not to mention the load times going in and out of the tent, which were enough to convince me not to try to do much with the decor or the cats… but I digress)
The point of the game is the story. You play as a Spirit Scout, which is kind of like a Boy Scout if instead of helping old ladies cross the street, you helped ghosts to cross over into the afterlife. That’s the exact plot of the game, actually. Due to a scrivener’s error, you were dispatched to Cozy Grove, an island that no Scout is supposed to go to because no one has ever returned. Oops. Through helping the ghosts, you feed your campfire Flamey, and he expands the island bit by bit to show you all the ghosts that are left for you to help, each of them with a rich story of a life lived and lost and each of them with a secret kept even from themselves that keeps them trapped on the island.
And the ghosts are precious. They range from a guilt-ridden ship captain to a literal tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, and to a bear who just really likes rocks. That’s not even getting to [REDACTED] and the [REDACTED] who [REDACTED] in an attempt to [REDACTED].
Whoops. Spoilers.
Gotta Catch Forage, Farm, and Feed ‘em All
The cozy sim element might not take center stage, but it’s hard to ignore completely. Who needs decorations in your ever-expanding tent when you could instead have a dozen each of spectral rabbits, deer, and birds, each of them with an adorable name (pulled from a preprogrammed list; sorry if you wanted to name your pets Dicksby and the Bong), and each of them giving you a resource useful for cooking (of course there’s cooking, and a ghost to uh… “help” with it). The old ship captain also has a Pokedex an encyclopedia for you to fill out with each item you cultivate, cook, or craft. I still haven’t finished this one, if we’re being honest. The performance issues usually crop up by the time I really get started on them, and I just don’t have the patience or the tolerance for headaches to keep going. But the little exclamation mark when I have something new to donate to the collection makes me happy every time.
The game has one other problem that makes it hard to really get into filling out the entire encyclopedia. It’s a problem that plagues so many games in so many genres that it’s almost not worth mentioning. I’m talking, of course, about storage.
Over the course of the game, you unlock various ways to improve your storage space. The best one is to just buy up as many chests as Mr. Kit will sell you, which somehow fit into your backpack even if they’re chock-full of stuff that wouldn’t fit in your bag by itself. But keeping track of those becomes a chore in itself, and I eventually gave up on them and just decided not to bother collecting things anymore. This is a problem that is especially grating in cozy games, where you expect to start with a pathetically small inventory and develop it into a larger one that, somehow, is still never enough. It detracts from the coziness of any game, and doubly so in a game like this one that has hundreds of types of flowers, fruits, and fish for you to collect and turn in if you want to complete the encyclopedia.
Conclusion: Call it Creepy Cozy, Cozy Creepy, or Cute Cozy Creepy Cottagecore, it’s the Coziest Camp with the Cutest Creepy Critters
Despite the performance issues, I did enjoy this game. It has adorable stories, cute animals (both the ones you raise and the ones you help move on), and an aesthetic it absolutely nails in every way. I love every one of the bears. I teared up multiple times at stories I unlocked. I laughed at the letters the camp counselor sent every few days. I delighted in trying to get every new collectible out of Mr. Kit’s shop and planting every new tree and bush in the generous patches of land clearly set aside for the purpose. I haven’t played the DLC yet, I’m saving it for when I need to return to the bears and their island.
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If the performance issues weren’t as bad as they are, I would give this game an 8. I’m half tempted to get the Steam version just to find out if the performance is fixed there because I’d love to give this game an 8. But for the Switch version, with the issues I’ve thoroughly discussed to death by now, I can only give it a 6.5.
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