It feels wrong to come down on a game of this nature. Being described by Steam users as “relaxing”, “cute” and of course “cosy”, supposedly takes some pressure off of looking at this game critically, but as I see it, labelling a game as casual doesn’t excuse sloppy game design. As a fan of collectathons and generally wasting time, Cozy Grove is a collection of repetitive daily fetch-quests and doesn’t have enough meat on its bones to make me want to sink the countless days it requires to experience.

The game’s heart is in the right place, I’ll give it that. An island home to bear spirits, with you, a Spirit Guide, fulfilling their requests, to expand and bring colour back to a now grey landscape. With a comforting and warm soundtrack accompanying your daily playthroughs, you strive to discover just who these bears once were, and while doing so, gain “scouts” style badges, for doing pretty much anything. I’ll focus first on the things that work well. The art style is exceptionally fitting to a game of this genre, and for me, is the strongest element Cozy Grove has. Some of the characters and creatures (specifically the Imps) are playfully animated, and despite the stationary position of all of the spirits, their cutesy design leaves each feeling unique, as more are introduced. Another positive is Mr Kit because he’s adorable, that is all.

If this game was released exclusively for mobile devices, then I wouldn’t be nearly as critical of its limited gameplay, daily-run concept, and other long-term, content-lengthening methods that plague a lot of (usually free) mobile games, but as it’s available for consoles and PC, it’s a different story.

Meeting new Spirits and learning about their past lives could have been interesting, if they were anything other than generic, and if it also didn’t take several real-world days to hear one more sentence from them. Compared to a game like Spiritfarer, where the characters are so human in the way they interact, and have stories from their past life which you’re genuinely interested in learning about, leaves me underwhelmed with this game in comparison, and not enticed enough to want to discover their past.

That, for me, is where this game severely suffers. I’m not actively engaged with a game that strives to bring you back daily over a long-term playthrough, which in itself is a huge underlying problem. The characters aren’t interesting enough to want to know more about, the furniture and items aren’t unique enough to want to collect and arrange, and the tasks are so similar and repetitive, that they aren’t even satisfying to complete. My girlfriend, who’s also been playing this game, said I shouldn’t review it until I’ve completed all of the character’s stories, and while usually I wait until 100% completing a game to review it, I can’t agree less. Not only would it take several weeks if not months to “uncover” the whole story of these characters, I just don’t care enough to slog through a whole heap of nothingness to reach whatever the game’s ending consists of.

From a collectathon standpoint, It’s a mountain I don’t want to climb, with some badges requiring a ridiculous amount of time put into the game. Playing in all four seasons of the year, collecting every single thing in the game, and logging in a specific amount of days are all the worst kinds of achievements for this game to have. I already don’t want to play the base content, but if I want to properly complete it, I have to keep on for a long time after the fact. No thanks. I’ve done this with games that I’ve actually enjoyed and in some of those cases it drags out the post-game content to a boring length, which ends up being to the detriment of a game’s overall enjoyability.

I personally think there are so many better options than spending 10 quid on this game. Want a game where you fulfill spirits’ requests? Try Spiritfarer. Want a collectathon with actual gameplay to keep you enticed? Play any old 3D platformer or Lego game. Want a relaxing, casual gameplay experience? Animal Crossing does a far better job and has been doing so for 21 years.

I ought to thank this game for allowing me to channel my cynical, pessimistic thoughts into a single review. It’s a good outlet, but that is the complete opposite of what I was hoping to get out of playing a game like this. Cozy Grove isn’t “too relaxed” It’s just devoid of any unique or diverse tasks or content, and gets stale very quickly. If you’re looking for a time waster, this is the literal definition of it, but then I suppose that could become a selling point, which I think puts a stain on the casual genre, as a game like this can and should have enough content in it to warrant playing, this one just doesn’t.