5 cozy indie games that are actually worth your time

[Music] a lot of indie games out there are calling themselves cozy after a day of living through the hellscape that we call thank God it's not 2020 anymore but geez it sure still kind of sucks right I too just want to manage a small potion shop while gardening my own ingredients as I prove myself to my aunt so I can be the next Builder witch or small business owner in a town of charming singles I can marry but here's the problem not all cozy games were created equal their story doesn't grab you or the gameplay Loop just isn't quite enough to keep you coming back or maybe the character designs are looking like a Lily's Garden ad these are all Fates I want to save you from so that's why I've put together my list of five cozy games that are actually worth your time do you like the idea of disco elesium but can't bring yourself to play it because it's about a dying town and a Dying World populated by Souls made selfish by neglectful government that refuses to take responsibility for the people it is task to govern reflecting a reality that is uncomfortably close to our own I think you should check out clam man like disco elesium it's a crpg with a hilarious inner monologue and like disco elesium you play a total clown and Clan man Open Mic you play an office drone about to try your hand and stand up for the first time ever your objective is to have a great set but here's the thing in the real world the metrics on something like that are subjective arbitrary and entirely unpredictable the solo Dev behind this one has pulled off something special by developing mechanics that actually reflect a little bit of the feeling of writing a standup set without actually needing to do any of the difficult work of trying to be funny a successful set at the end of the day is great not only because you won the narrative reward feels really good too what happens is the Pro Comics who put you up for the standup set like you more and they start to accept you into their cool kids club and what greater reward could there be than social acceptance even simulated through a small mulles man in a tie the art and music really resonate with The Narrative of the game the squiggle Vision type animation feels playful and really helps to sell the already hilarious writing and meanwhile the soundtrack and the color palette are both more muted which keeps this goofy under the SE setting in check it's a game that wants you to laugh but also wants you to get comfortable and feel at ease with it the actual gameplay is not unlike other crpgs you've got this big gold looming but until then your job is to wander around town and meet other sea creatures in need of assistance by doing these side quests you're gaining stories and life experience and they give you ideas for jokes however ideas are just ideas at the actual set you'll have to use skill rules and dialogue option choosing skills is there a name for that word choice selecting talkie tree navigating you'll have to use that stuff to actually stick the landing and tell a good joke to the crowd and the skills you base roles on are pretty funny they self-awareness which is kind of like wisdom and it's an important skill that benefits observation humor aquad Dynamics which is like dexterity is good for slapstick comedy improv which is kind of like Charisma is good for would you believe it improving on stage and then there's detection which is kind of like intelligence and while it's not good for telling jokes it's great for solving the mystery that this game motions towards you see the game opens with an office elevator having mysteriously shot through the roof why I'm not totally sure I actually never got that far clamman 2 open mic is a free prologue to the up up coming game headliner so some of the stuff you'll see is setting up something that's going to happen in the full game even so this is a pretty generous demo clocking in at about 3 hours for me I could also criticize how the voice acting was inconsistent as in not all the lines are voiced and some of the voice lines seem to bug out and stop playing hey man is that the uh the what but since I played it there has been a major update and that seems to have addressed this issue it also added some new content and I see they've added additional skills here in the Character Creator pretty neat I think I'll probably wait until headliner is out before I dive back into this world but I think more people need to know about clam man it's doing something new and special with crpgs and it exudes nothing but the coziest of Vibes YouTuber Hazel said it best the holiday season is the best time for vintage jrpgs jrpgs are cozy I was never a jrpg gal and honestly I never really got him it's 100 plus hours of slogging through Random Encounters and reading text boxes and navigating menus this game however has me rethinking my position see if stars is much shorter than your typical jrpg clocking in at about 30 hours or so but it doesn't skimp on locations or Story by cutting out the part of jrpgs that can feel like fillers like only having 5 to 10 battles between new locations instead of 20 to 30 we get to focus on the characters the world and the most important part wheel just like other jrpgs sea of stars has its own subgame with tables at every Tavern throughout the world I know I said the game takes about 30 hours but if you get as into Wheels as I did you might end up adding another 10 hours to your play time Wheels is a strategy game that combines poker and War Hammer at the start of the game you choose your two figurines whose Unique Mechanics will Define your place time every turn you spin your five Wheels your wheels Define how much Mana you gain and where you're Distributing it don't like your first spin lock in the wheels you like and spin again you get three spins per turn at the end of the turn any triggered attacks get sent flying with these Charming little Clockwork animations first castle to zero Health loses like poker deciding what Wheels to keep and what Wheels to lose keeps you interested and on your toes throughout the game and between games switching up different combinations of figures to try different play Styles had me starting new games over and over and over sabotage Studios knack for Designing fun and engaging mechanics can also be seen in encounters back in the main story timing your attack is going to result in extra damage so instead of selecting a menu option and sitting passively to see how the random number generation went you're going to be engaged every turn enemy special attacks can be stopped if you hit them with the right combination of damage types so while other jrpgs had me determine which skill hit the hardest and repeat that AB naian you're encouraged to think on your feet and use all your character skills also the number of party members and the number of skills each character has are much limited compared to traditional jrpgs for me this was a feature it keeps me from spending too much time min-maxing my skills in menus and keeps me engaged and moving forward with the world game and story while SE of stars isn't trying to write an entirely new kind of RPG it clearly knows and loves its predecessors I saw influences from Final Fantasy Chrono Trigger and Golden Sun I even found myself reading extra side stories that you find throughout the world by the campfire and when in a cutscene I saw a character obliquely referring to those Tales without re-explaining them to me it made me feel more immersed in the world of course I know why the sleeper is carrying the giant Island every child knows that story sea of stars also knows that jrpgs are inherently cozy and to emphasize that it slips in some of the mechanics we see in other cozy games in addition to telling stories by the fire battle items are entirely replaced by meals that you cook yourself using ingredients you harvest along the way and it's none of this select item you made item soulless textbox UI when you cook the meal you actually watch it being cooked this brings me to the art which might be where sea of stars shines brightest the color palette is largely bright and warm the animations are cute and fun and the character designs are creative and oneof a kind the attention to detail and the art Direction really blew me away look how they apply this gentle displacement effect to these trees to indicate them gently swaying in the wind it completely changes the vibe of this level from Silent wintry Forest to one brimming with energy and creatures my major criticism of sea of stars how you going to introduce the best charactera character this late in the game look at this boy he looks like the Kool-Aid man he turns into a spring when he jumps and a crab when he strafes his name is beast and I only had him for a few hours but if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in this room and then myself seef stars is on Game Pass as of writing so if you have that you can check it out for free if not it also has an hour demo on Steam if you want to dip a toe in before making the investment stardew Valley for Goths is what graveyard keeper is and it won't apologize for it it's got everything you love from stardo recipe unlocking villager shmooing and a kind of mid fishing game except this time you're putting bodies underground instead of seeds this is probably the oldest game On My List released in the distant year of 2018 I tried to focus on newer games for this list but this was a worthy exception earlier this year I had a rough patch in the old brain chemistry and I found myself reinstalling it I wanted to play something with a warm skillful art style and a gameplay Loop that I knew would consume me for me graveyard keeper is a game I gravitate to when I need that numbing coziness most I think the biggest surprise this game had for me was its witty writing the corpse delivering donkey is a communist we sell concessions at witch burnings and our player character the keeper makes sarcastic quips at the unreasonable and presumptuous requests villagers make of us and I love the keeper this guy got isite into his job and all he wants to do is get back home to his true love so he's kind of a wife guy and I don't want to spoil anything but the final hours of this game are all about reconciliation and coming together as a community and I think that's really cool this is by far the longest game on this list as it took me something like 70 hours to get the keeper back home the first time I played things you'll do as a graveyard keeper include organ extraction farming preaching Mining reanimating Zombies some light cult leading riding woodworking beekeeping Alchemy wine making shipping Freight and that doesn't even include the multiple DLCs most of which come with the story and additional things you're now responsible for I think a lot of people might find all that overwhelming so I'm not saying this gamee is for everyone for every fun interaction you have with a villager you're in for a few hours of resource managing playing this game is a little bit like playing how many to-do list items can you remember before you get distracted which is a real roller coaster Milo minute fun with my particular brand of ADHD but it might be an absolute nightmare for yours or maybe you're one of those neurotypical people I hear about what's that like are you happy me neither so let's say I need to spruce up the church for this week's sermon I'll need to craft the fancy Church benches so to do that I'll need the fancy joinings so I'll need a bunch of wood and metal for that but I've already mined all the close by or deposits so I got to haul up to the Quarry and this kind of sucks but wait why don't I just animate some zombies and they'll mine and haul it for me so that's going to take some zombie juice which means I need some essence of life which I can get from distilling brains in the distiller so I can animate that corpse and I'll grab the resources to build the porter stations and all I need now is to carry the zombes back to the Quarry and oh jeez I should stop by the bees and get some wax for the church candles on Sunday I live for this kind of task juggling if you also love a huge Resource Management game with gameplay Loops big enough to get lost in for hours and you want a nice long cozy game with a lot of gameplay bang for your buck and a really nice message at the end graveyard keeper is a great [Music] pick have you ever wanted to be a parent that sounds pretty good to me all right let's go show Daddy what I found oh here you are no no let me introduce you to the raising genre games about raising a child mushroom mus is a fresh take on this genre instead of a princess this time you're raising a mushroom daughter the game happens in three phases one go to the build- a daughter Shop with a witch two do your best to parent your little fungus and three play as your young adult mushroom daughter and figure out what to do with The Wretched gift of Consciousness so pretty relatable stuff One Touch in mushroom moose May that I absolutely love is that as your mushroom grows up her character model changes as a toddler toad stool she might be more fungal as she grows up and starts to get to know humans she might start to look more human or maybe your playthrough swings hard the other way and she starts to look more like a balers gate mikid and this is all backed by a soothing original soundtrack that perfectly fits the setting [Music] your choices don't only affect how your daughter looks they also change her personality decide to fight a giant flower monster with the odds against you and you'll increase your potency decide to spend time playing with school children and you'll increase your Humanity I don't actually know how to affect my dampness or my celium or why they matter but I love this choice of stats who cares about the dexterity of a chantrell what matters is how squishy a shroom she is these stats then affect your success passes of various roles a critical story moment yes pass which adds a crpg Vibe into the mix that makes me want to raise a thousand different mushroom daughters just to see how all the different choices pan out one thing that eventually got on my nerves is how unclear it is what skill I'm using there's some correlation to the symbology here but I never quite figured out what icon corresponds to what skill and why I'm kind of mixed on complaining about that though cuz obscuring the skill checks ended up feeling more immersive instead of weighing known probabilities I'm forced to just choose whatever feels right in the moment and pay the consequences if I make the wrong call kind of like real life it takes about an hour to play through all three phases for one daughter it's easy to play around and when sitting but every road not taken makes me want to try again things as simple as oh I picked Fox Glove and now the UI is purple what if I'd pick Cardinal I could go for a red UI for a while and it's unlikely I'll ever grow the same daughter twice cuz events each round are randomize sometimes you run into Carneys and you learn knife throwing other times you get invited to a ball at the castle and you have have to be a normal human for a while which is kind of a fun fantasy for me this game is exceptionally generous with the amount of content that you get especially given that it's currently a namey own price game on itch.io for steam fans it looks like it'll be available sometime in 2024 but for now I've put the itch link down in the description Cosmic wheel Sisterhood is my personal favorite on this list and it's a game I keep coming back to over and over it is unapologetically ambitious in its themes yet it refuses to sacrifice approachability both in gameplay and story you play Fortuna a tarot reading which about 300 years into Millennial long sentence when she foresaw that her coven would be destroyed the coven's leader cast her into Exile 300 years later and desperate for anything other than the same four walls and the sound of her own voice she summons a forbidden Behemoth a leviathan named abar capable of altering reality they make a deal in exchange for getting her out of Exile abar will take a price of our choosing Fortuna's immortality the one she loves most or her entire coven the terms of the pack manifest as the story unfolds creating many different paths that Fortuna can walk on her way to Freedom if you haven't noticed I have a soft spot for pixel art and I fancy myself an a ficado of fine pixels and what Cosmic wheel sisterhood's low reses art style brings to the table is expressiveness look I see the regret in the way she kneels by her sister's grave that expressiveness might be aided by the winning soundtrack it's ethereal pondering but it also still kind of [Music] bangs and it is perfect for the setting which might be what sucked me in most about this game not only are witches Immortal but they also all live in space and every witch has a specialty fitting of her talents while Fortuna was a fortune teller before she ascended other witches are experts in tcraft architecture there's even a pepper mancer I love the pepper mancer look at her little hot sauces character design in this game is off the chart strong and I love how much you can tell about their personality and the Witchcraft they practice just from looking at them have I thought about my Cosmic wheel Sisterhood OC no what come on OC's are lame yeah I'd be the burger mancer and I'd be best friends with the pepper mancer and we would make magical spicy Burgers together the game also doesn't shy away from introducing complicated Cosmic ideas early in the game you meet this crazy base spider witch and her specialty is weaving intelli a type of Arcane energy that manifests as a thread and it's harvested from the collective subconscious of communities it's also a real thing that Aristotle invented he used it to describe the vital principle that guides the development of organisms back in the cosmic wheel Universe though antel has substance it's a real thing that you can collect an orgy might yield a lustful fabric of antell perfect for a seductive dress a tribe of desert Nomads might yield and a key perfect for capturing moisture from a garden this theme of community and how we collectively Orient ourselves towards shared goals even when we aren't consciously focused on it is woven in Telly pun throughout the entire story I think this is the most thoughtful game I've seen influenced by the pandemic caused social isolation that many of us found ourselves in after all we start with a witch forced to stay alone in her home for way too long the gameplay itself is simple but rewarding abrar teaches us how to make a new Tarot deck and the cool thing is we the player actually get to make the cards by rearranging the symbols like stickers to create beautiful and or silly designs we then get witch visitors who tell us about themselves and ask for a reading to help with whatever problems they're dealing with we draw from our custom deck and assign our drawn cards to the question they post and again we the player get to choose from a few possible outcomes all offered by the nature of the card that we picked this game gave me an immense sense of power while I was playing it felt like I the player got to play an active role deciding in how the story unfolds and this was a welcome change of place from a typical narrative choices matter game where I'm usually reacting in character more than acting as a co-author so by the end of the game I felt like the Ludo narrative interaction was a lively discourse rather than the simple call and response you get in even the most thoughtfully crafted games this is the first game of this size that on finish ing the full 5our story line I immediately started a new save file just to see what other stories I could tell my biggest criticism of this game is totally unfair I think this game is screaming for voice acting the characters are all unique personalities but the story has so much emotional depth and the writing is so strong but I still got tired of reading sometimes and I would love to see how a talented cast of voice actors could bring this script to life if I knew what these characters sounded like they'd burrow deep deeper into my heart though again I'm being totally unfair here this game is from a very small team on a budget and voice acting is spendy and you know what's even worse I want this for all the unvoiced games on this list but I'm only going to complain about it here you are my favorite Cosmic wheel Sisterhood so I expect the most from you and honestly I'm putting Cosmic wheel Sisterhood in this video cuz I really want more people to pick it up I hope we can demonstrate that not only does this game deserve more releases and features but we want more games like this games that are unapologetically bold in their ideas and authentically warm in their character writing games that tell us hard truths and give us a big hook at the same [Music] time and there you go five cozy games that are actually worth your time maybe that framing is going to bother some people I mean there's a lot of games out there that are perfectly fun and fine but they were never going to make this list games that are well designed a good time but don't make me feel anything other than numb and I'm going to keep playing and enjoying these games absolutely though they also just kind of made me cynical about Cozy games as a genre I mean what does that even mean just farming and crafting games games that don't Center battles games that are easy games with bright color palettes all these features even combined feel like an inadequate description to me partially because genre is an Ever shifting construct that is only lightly useful to group similar games together but also because all these features have a million exceptions so what do we mean when we say a game is cozy maybe it's started with stardew Valley in 2016 stardew won us over with an addicting gameplay Loop and a fantasy of ditching our dreary lives for fresh air small town camaraderie and satisfying manual labor stardew a game developed by one person was wildly successful selling 20 million copies and Counting and it launched a movement in Game Dev with Studios of all sizes trying to replicate that stardew magic and just when we thought no no no no no I can't take another farming game please stop a certain spiky microscopic ball entered Our Lives driving us all indoors and in that abrupt and scary reality it's no wonder a demand for soothing entertainment spiked and another cozy Juggernaut hit the scene at just the right time while farming was exhausted we saw rise in games that were clearly influenced by either stardew Valley or Animal Crossing but look to build on these influences maybe instead of farming its potion making and selling your wares is now a deck building game maybe instead of Designing a perfect Island you're designing stickers for your Etsy store the games I'm motioning at here are potionomics and sticky business and I really love playing both of them and loads of other cozy games that I was never going to put on this list as fun as these games are I felt like they lacked something sure I play video games to be entertained but I love video games when they're transformative but how does a game transform when it's stated goal by calling it self cozy is to give you a feeling of warm comfort and relaxation transformation is change and change sucks it's not warm comforting or relaxing cozy games are designed to give us Refuge from turbulent unpredictable realities that are constantly changing what separates a cozy game from a transformative cozy game that's actually worth your time is that it heals it's not just Advil it's a multivitamin games that have cozy relaxing mechanics that are predictable and fun but they also take your time to share new idea that could Inspire optimism or hope games that know how to use their soap box and that's all I'm going to say on this particular Soap Box I hope you found a game worth your time on this list and I got a whole bunch of other videos you can see here on the screen and if you liked one maybe check one of those out and hey consider liking this video and subscribing it actually does make a huge difference to me and I um I really appreciate it thank you plus you'll hear about more neat indie games like this one thanks again and stay cozy my friends

Channel: Katie and Catburger

Views: 8,111

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Id: 5uQIVTj1qQ8

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024