While some older folk might still associate video games with only shooting, fighting, and action-adventuring, the video game industry has seen an explosion of new categories and genres in the last decade or so that’s attracted players from a variety of demographics. One such category that emerged more recently is the “cosy” game.
For the uninitiated, a cosy game usually refers to a non-violent, casual game that centres its gameplay around relaxing tasks or a comforting atmosphere. They often feature stylised graphics and cute aesthetics, and have been found to be more popular among women and girls.
More well-known examples of cosy games include Stardew Valley, The Sims, and Animal Crossing, but the world of cosy games is vast and steadily expanding, which is why we’ve curated this list of best cosy games to check out:
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If you love games like Stardew Valley, you’ll probably like some of these other life sim and management games. Gameplay in this genre usually revolves around life pursuits like maintaining a farm or business, living in a small town, cultivating relationships with NPCs, and the like.
Spiritfarer is sort of a cosy take on the mythological crossing of the River Styx – you play as Stella, successor to Charon, ferrymaster, and caretaker to the deceased. Accompanied by your fluffy cat Daffodil (who’s also playable via co-op mode), you sail the seas in search of spirits in order to befriend them and grant their final wishes before sending them off to the afterlife.
Similar to other life sims, you get to fish, garden, and cook, as well as gather resources to upgrade your ship. But as much as it is cosy, it can be a tearjerker too: as you can already guess, death and loss are central themes here, and each spirit has their own heartfelt story to tell.
Spiritfarer is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It’s also available on Google Play and the App Store exclusively for Netflix subscribers.
Good Pizza Great Pizza is a pizzeria management simulator where you fulfil pizza orders, maintain and upgrade your shop, and compete against the neighbouring Alicante to be the best pizzeria in town.
The game also has a story plot that features 100 different characters, each with a unique personality and design. Some customers might hand you tricky orders that you have to pay extra attention to, while others might let you customise the pizza however you want.
Good Pizza Great Pizza is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Google Play, and the App Store
Run a bed and breakfast as a bear in the aptly named Bear & Breakfast. Gather resources, design and decorate guest rooms, and cook meals as Hank the bear to make your inn the best it can be.
There are also story quests that will earn you new items and perks for your business, so don’t hesitate to roam around the surrounding forest areas and talk to the various animal NPCs.
Bear & Breakfast is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Fields of Mistria is a farming life sim that takes everything we know and love about the genre and makes it even better. Despite only being in early access at the moment, the game has already cultivated a dedicated fanbase that vouches for its polished feel.
Gameplay features like farm management, cooking, decorating, and fishing are a given here, but what stands out the most in Fields of Mistria are the romanceable NPCs. Well-written dialogue that highlights their unique quirks and personalities, coupled with smooth animation, make the NPCs in this game feel vibrant and charming, adding to the immersiveness of the already-rich in-game world.
Fields of Mistria is available on Steam.
Play as an adorable grape named Concord in A Garden Story. Appointed as Guardian of The Grove, Concord’s job is to rebuild the community while protecting them from the Rot. This involves making a trip through 4 villages and building structures, fighting off blobby slime monsters, and befriending the fruity townsfolk in each one.
Combat might prove challenging for some, but the game offers a “perish prevention” mode that lets players explore and gather resources without needing to stress about survival.
A Garden Story is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
If you’ve ever wondered what Pokemon might look like as a life sim, Ooblets might just be the answer. Rendered in a soft, rounded 3D art style, Ooblets is set in Badgetown, a small town at the edge of the titular land of Oob.
As a resident of Badgetown, you grow, harvest, and sell crops while also collecting little creatures known as Ooblets. Beat wild ooblets in dance battles to get seeds and grow your own ooblets, which can then help you in your farming endeavours. You can also befriend the various NPCs around town, as well as decorate your own house with cute furniture!
Ooblets is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Sticky Business is for the aspiring small business girlies: design stickers, pack and ship orders, chat with customers, and manage your online store in this cutesy life sim game.
The in-game sticker designer is somewhat like Canva, with many different pre-existing shapes and assets that you can arrange together to form new designs. You can even export your designs to print out IRL if you want.
Sticky Business is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
These games are chill brain-teasers that allow you to unwind while keeping your brain engaged. Don’t worry if you get stumped – just sit back and admire the beautiful art direction while you figure things out.
If you love the feeling of satisfaction that comes with tidying a space up, Unpacking might just be the game for you. As its title suggests, it’s about unpacking the items of an unnamed protagonist at various stages of their life as they move from place to place.
More than just scratching an organisational itch, though, Unpacking also delivers a masterful environmental storytelling experience. It’s completely wordless, yet the protagonist’s belongings tell the player everything they need to know. And for the ASMR lovers: the game features award-winning, realistic sound effects whenever you put an object down, taking the satisfaction of tidying to the next level.
Unpacking is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Google Play, and the App Store.
Donut County is a physics-based puzzle game where you play as a mischievous raccoon who opens up holes in the ground. The goal of each level, in general, is to swallow up everything in the space, including the residents. It’s loosely inspired by the cult favourite PS2 game Katamari Damacy, in which you roll various objects up into a ball.
While the gameplay and narrative are largely silly and light-hearted, creator Ben Esposito has said that the game is meant as an allegory for gentrification, with the titular Donut County being a reference to his own home of LA county. So if you’re looking for a short, fun game with a deeper meaning to it, add Donut County to your list.
Donut County is available on Steam and the App Store.
Put your problem-solving skills to the test in A Little to the Left, a puzzle game that has you organise household items into specific arrangements. While you can’t organise objects however you like, finding the solution to each puzzle is satisfying in and of itself.
If you’re one to breeze through the levels, you’ll never have to worry about running out of puzzles in this game, as their Daily Tidy Delivery gives each player a unique puzzle to solve every day.
A Little to the Left is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Tinkering with tools and old-school objects is gamified in Assemble with Care, where you play as an antique restorer who’s just moved into the town of Bellariva.
Repair cameras, disk players, radios, and more while uncovering the rich histories behind each item. In the process, you get to know the various residents in Bellariva and even help some of them reconnect with each other.
Assemble with Care is available on Steam, Google Play and the App Store.
These adventure games focus on free roaming and exploration without the fast-paced action and combat of their AAA counterparts; made for those who want to traverse through and discover new environments at their own pace.
A Short Hike can be described as Animal Crossing aesthetics meets open-world exploration gameplay. You play as Claire, a black anthropomorphic bird who’s been sent to Hawk Peak Provincial Park to stay with their Aunt May for the summer. With no cell service in the park save for the summit, Claire must make a hike up Hawk Peak for the first time so that she can take an important call.
To achieve this, the player must take time to explore the various nooks and crannies of Hawk Peak, interacting with NPCs, completing tasks, and playing minigames to earn golden feathers, which increases Claire’s stamina enough to reach higher areas of the park.
A Short Hike is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Restore a polluted ocean and care for axolotl-like alien creatures in Loddlenaut. Playing as a custodian who’s been sent to an alien planet that’s been abandoned by a mega-corporation, your job is to pick up trash, clean up oil spills, regrow flora, and look after the alien creatures until the ocean is clean again.
Recycle debris, upgrade your gear, and explore and clean more effectively. Along the way, you’ll also find remnants of buildings, ships, and machinery that’ll clue you in on the planet’s lore.
Loddlenaut is available on Steam.
If a cat were to take the place of the goose from Untitled Goose Game, Little Kitty, Big City would be the result.
In the game, you take control of a little black cat that’s gotten lost in the city; and while getting home is technically on your to-do list, the city is now your own personal playground. Run, climb, and jump around the big city, cause a ruckus and terrorise the locals, or chat with other animals. Alternatively, take a nap, or customise your kitty with various adorable hats.
Little Kitty, Big City is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Exercise your decision-making skills in these cosy strategy games. Unlike the usual emphasis on war and battles in other strategy games, though, the games here focus on landscape building.
Terra Nil takes the city-builder format and turns it on its head: instead of the usual mechanics of resource extraction and optimisation that are central to these games, Terra Nil is an environmental game about turning barren, polluted wastelands into thriving ecosystems.
Players are tasked with planting trees, building machines to remove pollutants, and cultivating wildlife populations, among other things. When you’re done, you must leave no trace – that means recycling the machinery you’ve built, and leaving the terrain.
Terra Nil is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It’s also available on Google Play and the App Store exclusively for Netflix subscribers.
Dorfromantik is a peaceful tile-placing game in which you build picturesque village landscapes. The player is given a stack of tiles and is tasked with placing each tile in a spot that will get them the most points. The game ends when the tiles run out. There’ll be objectives such as connecting a specified number of tiles of a certain type that’ll increase the number of points gained or even award the player with more tiles.
Apart from various game modes that might change the objectives of each run, Dorfromantik is largely free and easy, making it a great casual game that you can pick up and put down whenever you please.
Dorfromantik is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
If you’re not in the mood for any goal-oriented gameplay, then consider trying some sandbox games. This genre emphasises freeform play, allowing players to express their creativity in a myriad of ways.
The gameplay of Summerhouse is simple: construct buildings and decorate the exterior however you want. There’s no story, levels, requirements, or time limits; it’s a purely sandbox experience that’s atmospheric and zen.
Choose from three different settings – the sea, the city, or the mountains – and craft your own little neighbourhood. Place signs, telephone booths, vending machines, and even add foliage to parts of the buildings if you want to create a lived-in look. From tiny houses to quaint corner stores or pizza joints, anything’s possible!
Summerhouse is available on Steam.
Cloud Gardens is a game where you populate dioramas of abandoned spaces with a variety of plants. With numerous landscapes and plant seeds to unlock, players can exercise their creativity and find different ways to decorate each space.
Relax in the creative mode where you can place plants however you wish, or take on the puzzle mode where you must cover each space with enough greenery, paying attention to where and what you plant.
Cloud Gardens is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch,
Maybe you’re in the mood for heartwarming stories without rigorous gameplay, or maybe you’re just looking for interactive storytelling experiences. Either way, these cosy narrative-focused games have got you covered.
With art direction inspired by 90s anime and lofi chillhop aesthetics, it’s hard not to feel cosy while playing Coffee Talk. Part visual novel, part barista simulator, Coffee Talk is a game where you prepare drinks while having heart-to-heart conversations with customers.
Set in a fictional version of Seattle, Washington where fantasy creatures like orcs, elves, and mermaids live alongside humans, the game explores various themes like racism and discrimination, as well as neurodivergence, technology and parental responsibility.
If you’ve already played Coffee Talk, you can also check out the sequel Coffee Talk 2, as well as their upcoming third instalment Coffee Talk Tokyo.
Coffee Talk is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Cook and learn about regional South Indian cuisine in Venba. The game follows an immigrant Indian couple settling down in Canada, with themes of family, love, and loss forming the core of its narrative.
Between story scenes, restore old recipes and prepare various Indian dishes while Tamil-inspired lofi beats play in the background. You can even access an in-game cookbook after you finish the game so you can try making these dishes in real life.
Venba is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Cosy games might not offer fast-paced, action-packed adventures, but their focus on comforting gameplay has introduced the joy of gaming to many who would not have considered themselves gamers before. The next time you’re looking for a casual game to fill your downtime, consider trying out one of these games!
Psst: if you’re in the market for a custom PC or looking to upgrade your setup for maximum cosy gaming vibes, check out Aftershock’s K-Strawberry PC and Bubble Tea PC series!
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