In the past few years there’s been a boom – a quiet, polite boom, otherwise it would be awfully off-brand – in the cozy games scene. Taking a quick glance at the state of the world leads us to believe this streak won’t be broken in 2024. If you’re looking for the warm and fuzzy kind of escapism to start the new year with, we’ve got as comprehensive a list as one can be when informed by subjective opinion.
First, some ground rules: we’ve decided to avoid listing any farming simulator, cutesy farming RPG or games with farming as the main mechanic altogether, because frankly that’s cheating. Similarly, we’ve also avoided any game that uses the word “Cozy” in its title for the same reason – if you’re looking for cozy games, you’re absolutely guaranteed to bumble into these yourself.
We’ll be focusing on the new, but that doesn’t mean we will ignore the oldies that keep getting better, like a fine wine. Also, in the spirit of discovery, we’re shining a spotlight on some lesser-known gems. Sorry, Dave the Diver, you’re too mainstream (and a tad too stressful) for this cozy club. This isn’t an obscurity contest, but hopefully there’s a few here you haven’t heard of yet.
What’s a cozy game, anyway?
It has been pretty hard to remain oblivious to the rise of the cozy game subculture, as it’s been taking the gaming world by storm – not just the games themselves, but a whole community with plenty of gamers and influencers carving out their own soft, colorful and fuzzy corner of the internet.
Cozy games are not a particularly strict category with a specific definition – the term is getting rather diluted ever since hitting the mainstream, which doesn’t help things. Generally, the cozy vibe is achieved through a combination of slower pace gameplay, mostly peaceful mechanics, low difficulty, a freedom to choose from a wide array of side activities, filled with cute aesthetics and mellow tunes.
Cozy games don’t need to sport all of these characteristics, and we’re pretty sure you can find a certified cozy game out there bucking all these rules – like we said, its hard to pin down and more of a feeling than a fixed genre. Taking it easy is part of the cozy game ethos, so getting hung up on rules seems counterintuitive!
The best cozy games to play in 2024
We get wanting to escape from the endless barrage of utterly depressing impulses the world throws at us. With *gestures vaguely at everything* going on right now, it makes sense. Whether you’re a seasoned cozy gamer looking for something new, or just now dipping your toes into this quiet, chill corner of gaming, you’ll probably find something worth checking out below.
BOOK OF HOURS
Few settings better embody the cozy aesthetic than a homey library, probably trailing just behind a quiet farm and a fantasy tavern. The title’s capitalization might be a bit aggressive but that’s where BOOK OF HOURS stops being anything of the like. In this crafting RPG, you’re in charge of your own occult library circa the 1930’s, and it’s up to you what kinds of ancient tomes to fill the shelves with.
Played from a 2D cutaway perspective, seeing a cross section of your library and the various rooms you can expand it with, BOOK OF HOURS sports a pleasing illustrated art style. There are a wealth of gameplay mechanics and interlocked systems to get a hang of, and while the game won’t offer you too much guidance the lack of urgency gives everyone a chance to dig in at their own pace.
Fittingly BOOK OF HOURS will appeal to players who are more bookish, in that it very much encourages taking notes as you play, as you’ll need this for more advanced crafting and research. Coming from the same developers as Cultist Simulator, BOOK OF HOURS shares some of its energy but omits the punishments and the impending sense of failure.
This certainly isn’t your traditional all-smiles, warm and fuzzy brand of cozy game with some obnoxiously cute fantasy animal mascot, but it definitely hits that particular vibe. Hey, maybe one of those ancient occult tomes will hold the arcane wisdom needed to properly categorize what “cozy games” actually are.
Cat Cafe Manager
Pivoting to something that is a traditional all-smiles, warm and fuzzy brand of cozy game, let’s move on to Cat Cafe Manager. This astutely named title is exactly what it says on the tin. You manage your cat café in an idyllic small town – there’s not much breaking of expectations here, but Cat Cafe Manager is skillfully executed, so reinventing the wheel really wasn’t necessary.
Whenever you’re not managing your cat café in Cat Cafe Manager however, which does happen, you’re met with an RPG-lite allowing you to explore aforementioned idyllic small town and interact with its denizens for a bit of non-café management gameplay.
The main attraction of leaving your establishment, however, is the mechanic wherein you recruit your most important employees – the cats. You enlist your troupe of felines from the town’s supply of strays, which you need to befriend before adopting and subjecting to the rigorous labor of checks notes uhhhhh getting head pats all day.
You can even level up your cats and adjust their traits, and as your business expands the café itself can be expanded, customized and upgraded. Cat Cafe Manager has a sort of hand-drawn vibe to its aesthetic and definitely favors the pastels in its colorscape. You won’t be thrown any curveballs after getting a hang of the core gameplay loop, so its pretty easy to see whether Cat Cafe Manager is for you – but it definitely gets our recommendation.
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator
Not a lot of games out there have tackled the “medieval scroll” art style – just Obsidian’s Pentiment comes to mind off hand – which is quite surprising, but luckily Potion Craft is here to boost those numbers.
Plenty of games out there have some kind of crafting mechanic going on; like open world maps and microtransactions, its one of those things that seemingly get shoehorned into everything these days. However, few games make crafting their core and just about only mechanic – Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is exactly like that, and once again is happy to tell you upfront 100% of what its about.
You are an alchemist. You craft potions. All of this is done with the visual style of a child-friendly Voynich manuscript, albeit beautifully animated with just about every stated of crushed-ness visible on the reagents as you go to town on them in the mortar. Oftentimes crafting mechanics can be cumbersome and clunky, but here’s a low-stakes and creative game that escapes that curse.
Mineko’s Night Market
One of the more hyped up and mainstream cozy games released recently, a lot about Mineko’s Night Market feels a bit like what “Oscar bait” movies are to cinema – but then after it launched it seemingly lost a lot of traction, which is a shame.
Few cozy games have distilled the essence of what this subgenre is as purely as Mineko’s Night Market. This doesn’t mean its the best cozy game, or the best game on this list – its just this is the game we’d probably stick in a dictionary as a definition.
It’s cute, it has cats, it has a charming art style, it has Japanese macaques chilling in a hot spring, it has the visuals and audio down to a cozy T. It… also has spooky federal agents, but its okay because usually they’re taking a nap.
There is an overarching story and goal to pursue, but the island is filled with plenty of side activities to get lost in, and there are even some stealth elements at play. Mineko’s Night Market has a lot going for it beyond just being beautifully crafted, and it would be a mistake to pass over it for seeming like too generic and formulaic a cozy game.
My Dream Setup
Those of you who interact on the regular with the cozy subculture beyond the games themselves, and have explored the cozysphere on various social media will be familiar with cozy gamer influencers and their deluge of “setup” photos – you know, those posts showing of ridiculously manicured (and expensive) gaming desks and rooms tailored to fit specific aesthetics.
Its become such a juggernaut of the subculture that you’ll even get influencers and accounts dealing just with the setups, exclusively. Looping all the way back is My Dream Setup, a cozy game about virtually creating, well, your dream setup. We’ve now come full circle.
Simple but extremely relaxing, My Dream Setup is an isometric room furnishing simulator where you can design and customize the perfect gaming – or other cozy hobby – room. Embracing the cozy aesthetic in its entirety, you can decorate the room with a lot more than just gaming appliances and peripherals.
While the screenshots portray the glowing RGB lights and hexagon shelves in abundance, other aesthetics are also well represented. Getting a really fancy setup like this is, let’s face it, cost prohibitive for a lot of us, so My Dream Setup can let us live vicariously or fake it till we make it.
LEGO Bricktales
Even before The LEGO Group rolled out those pretty botanical sets, building with these plastic bricks had gained traction as a chill way to spend an afternoon, or even as a mindfulness exercise. This relatively new angle to the hobby rose meteorically during the major lockdowns of the pandemic and didn’t stop ever since – you’ll often see LEGO appear in cozy posts on Instagram and other platform.
Bricktales is bridging the gap between playing with the parts physically and cozy games – though arguably Builder’s Journey did that first (and we recommend it too). Bricktales gives you a great deal of freedom with its building system, but its still presented with the framework of a structured video game instead of just being a 3D building program.
Being beautifully rendered certainly helps, and the challenge builds have aesthetically pleasing visual themes going for them. When working through the more traditionally “video gamey” levels, there’s also ample freedom to solve the puzzles in multiple different ways – you’re not being railroaded into one pre-determined solution.
Bricktales also has another thing going for it – it takes up a lot less space than a collection of bricks, and doesn’t accumulate dust either!
Special shoutout to the ‘fox game’ subgenre
Here we’re talking about The First Tree, Spirit of the North, Lost Ember, etc.
If we had a penny for every relatively recent third-person exploration game where you play as a fox travelling through a snowy landscape with a vaguely mystical fantasy story, we’d have… a couple of pennies, which isn’t much but you know how this saying goes.
There are quite a few cozy fox games on the market right now across multiple platforms, so fans of the bushy-tailed friends can take their pick. Spirit of the North is the one we like the most right now, but we haven’t played a bad fox game yet – and it’s an active subgenre too!
Your usual fox game tends to be a bit more linear than most of the titles you’d usually list as a cozy game, but they hit the vibes otherwise. Bonus points when you have a dedicate barking button!
