I’m a cozy game fiend, but I’m also a girly with a conscience. And to be honest, sometimes this genre gets me down. No, I don’t want to play a cop simulation game, and I don’t think it’s cozy to play pretend landlord. But I love the genre for its empathetic, warm, feminine offerings, especially when I find games that give me that warm, fuzzy feeling — like I’m curled up in a perfectly cushioned nook with a soft light over my shoulder and a cat snuggling up on my lap — and also show me something new. Whether that’s a new take on what “cozy” might mean, or a genre-flip that brings horror into our sacred farming simulators, all of these games have made my thumbs sore from too many hours played.
I’ll keep this story updated with my favorite cozy titles — I play several new ones every week, and it’s about time I share the fruits of my absurd playtime numbers with the world.
Botany Manor is sort of like if you stripped down Blue Prince and also added a healthy dose of feminist history. The game is set during the late Victorian Era in England, where you’ll explore the manor of a late woman botanist and learn how to grow certain plants that help you get further inside. You’re frequently rewarded with beautiful letters and accounts of the botanist’s experiences throughout her career, including men stealing her groundbreaking work. The puzzles make you think a bit, but this game is more visual novel than head-scratching mystery, and the art is delightful.
As an early access Coral Island player, I am amazed and thrilled at how much the game has improved — in UI, in its narrative fullness, in minigames, in its romanceable characters, and more — since I started playing. Even if you started this tropical farming sim when the full 1.0 release came out in November 2023, you’ve seen the game transform. None of that is to say that the game wasn’t incredible before. It’s a deeply rich narrative with a lot of various cultural representations and empathy imbued in every line of dialogue, and it also fixes a lot of those typical farming sim sins. For example, you can slow down the clock in your early game, and you’ll always have access to your global storage when you’re cooking. It takes all the frustration out of a cozy game while still maintaining a compelling level of grind — my nearly 400-hour playtime is proof.
If you’re sick of cozy games that refuse to engage with the fact that the genre often romanticizes the gentrification of small towns, Discounty is a great fit. As an employee (the only employee) of the town’s only grocery store, you’ll be forced to make decisions that the community disagrees with, and that you, the player, will probably disagree with, too. Despite the store’s owner driving these choices, the town usually chooses to blame you, which seems like something that would happen in real life. Discounty still manages to be uplifting and fulfilling in the long run, though; between overfishing, pollution, and gentrification, the town is in a rut, and for better or worse, your grocery store will change that.
I found out about Leaf it Alone through a Steam sale, and I’m shocked that’s the first mention I came across. This leaf-cleaning simulator is a fabulous, quick, cozy little game that packs a lot of latent story into its no-dialogue, no-text gameplay. You really do just clean up leaves, but you’ll find and use new, better equipment as you move from area to area. Soon enough, you’re slotting hundreds of leaves per second into a suctioned vent, and the result is very satisfying.
Little Rocket Lab
Image: Little Rocket Lab (Teenage Astronauts/No More Robots)
At first blush, Little Rocket Lab seems a lot like other titles in the cozy life sim space: You arrive at your late mother’s home after years away in the big city and set out to fix it up and create a life in your small town. But in St. Ambroise, you aren’t just mining, crafting, and building relationships with your neighbors — you’re also bringing electricity to the entire town, ultimately creating a network of moving conveyor belts and power lines that’ll eventually power the rocket lab where your mom taught you about engineering as a kid. The story is decent, but this game really shines in its innovative take on grind by allowing the player to automate a lot of their chores; they can link various conveyor belts, furnaces, drills, and machines to create and deliver the materials you need around town. You can get about as sicko as you want in your version of St. Ambroise, but don’t get too married to any one layout; you’ll have to move your setup frequently depending on what materials you need and where they need to go.
If you enjoyed Sticky Business but wanted a bit more depth, Ship, Inc. is the answer. In it, you’ll run what seems to be a drop-shipping business, where you stock items, pack them safely, and ship them directly to your customers. It’s easy to spend hours upon hours playing Ship, Inc., but the gameplay does become a bit repetitive over time and there aren’t too many upgrades to make. That said, the team is releasing content updates regularly that include things like new brands to sell in your shop.
The indie darling that’s been getting tons of attention due to the developer having made it while living on a houseboat deserves the accolades it’s gotten. While it’s only a few hours of gameplay, it’s a lovely bite-sized title to spend an afternoon with — and importantly, it leaves you feeling good about yourself, as your in-game mission is to clean up an oil spill that’s damaged the local ecosystem. You’ll drive a collector ship around, sucking up oil and trash (if only it were that easy IRL), ultimately restoring the water to its natural beautiful blue.
This game will delight and surprise fans of reading and gaming alike over and over and over again. You’ll be tasked with setting up a mobile bookshop to serve a small beach town; your inventory includes both real-life books and fictional books, with an in-game story that plays out as you meet customers and make sales.. You’ll have the opportunity to recommend books to people based on their stated interests (something I know I like to do in real life) — and the game leaves plenty of room for taking a swing with a book you just know this person would love, even if it doesn’t quite match up with the exact request they’ve made. The game lacks some depth, though — you can min-max with power-ups that come in the form of decorations for your trailer, but it’s not entirely clear what the point of that grind is. The core gameplay loop is really just getting good books into folks’ hands. That’s enough for me!
Winter Burrow excels in everything atmospheric, from the tiny mouse sounds to the way the snow falls on the environment. It might seem like a cozy life sim — you’re a little mouse setting out to repair your parents’ burrow after their tragic passing — but I started enjoying this game a lot more once I conceptualized it as a survival game. Each day, you’ll gather your tools and traverse the wintry landscape, which gets colder and scarier at night. It’s adorable and sweet, but it’s also challenging at times, and hearing your mouse character get out of breath is at once precious and terrifying. My main critique of this game is the limited inventory at the start, which leaves you returning to your home base constantly to drop off items. Still, with every NPC you help, you’ll gain helpful recipes that’ll make your next excursion out of the burrow a bit longer.
Managing editor Zoë Hannah has a decade of experience writing, reporting, and editing. She's previously served as games editor at Vox Media's Polygon.com and deputy editor of reviews at Hearst Magazines.
