cozy games suck lately ever since Animal Crossing New Horizon sold a ridiculous number of copies everyone has been hopping on the Cozy game train which is great I love me some cozy games but some of them aren't quite up to Snuff why are so many of these cozy games sucking the Cozy game genre has been severely lacking games since the beginning of time we've had a few like The Sims Harvest Moon and of course Animal Crossing but then came Eric Baron known online as concerned to ape this solo Indie
developer enjoyed the Harvest Moon game but he saw areas that the games could be improved on so he got to work developing an entire Farm Sim all alone and it turned out fantastic to date stardy Valley has sold over 20 million copies across multiple platforms these numbers are completely unheard of for an indie game especially when developed by a single person concerned Apes game shows developers and players that you don't have to be part of a huge Studio to create something amazing and profitabl
e the dev did work his butt off though you don't just make a masterpiece like stardy Valley overnight no matter how good you think you are at pixel art fast forward a few years Animal Crossing New Horizons releases and the pandemic starts everyone was home everyone was bored and with the switch being so cheap compared to other consoles the barrier to entry to play Animal Crossing was extremely low especially for those people who are playing video games for the first time cozy games like New Hori
zons are some of the easiest games to learn it's not a game that requires a lot of previous experience with a controller or video games in general your grandma can pick up a couple of joycons press a few buttons and successfully play or your dog Panda could probably do it oh never mind she's scared of it Zoe could probably do it there we go good girlo as a result a perfect storm is created that allowed New Horizons to become one of the greatest selling games of all time on the switch selling ove
r 40 million copies worldwide and it also caused about 20 million new Switch console sales in 2020 alone everyone saw these crazy numbers there was was finally a demand for cozy games and people wanted to capitalize on that let's time travel back to present day the Cozy Community has exploded there are 40 million people who are interested in these relaxing games so why not make a game that they would want said every developer ever now that we're 3 years after New Horizon's release we're getting
a lot of cozy games from brand new Studios and small teams which is awesome but also awful you can tell some of these titles were created to just solely make a ton of of money which is fine if you spend 3 years making something it should be profitable but there's no love behind some of them no patience no formula that makes these games well good A lot of them kind of suck is that just because games like Animal Crossing in sturdy Valley raised the bar so high it's hard to live up to almost Perfec
tion the more you look at some of these cozy games and compare them to just other games in general the more you notice A lot's missing there's plenty of cozy out there but these games need something more just having nice music isn't enough I can just go to Loi girl she's always there when you need her and she's free. free mainly there's a lack of reward for almost no risk let's take a look at a half cozy game c of the Lamb it's got a really nice aesthetic allows you to decorate but also has a ch
allenging aspect of a Rog likee combat mechanic hence the half cozy the way you unlock decorations is by exploring and fighting your way through dungeons as you progress you'll unlock some items which you can decorate your area with there's a lot of risk going through these dungeons you have to kill all the enemies and defeat the boss all while surviving death means you have to start over that dungeon run plus your cult members think you're weak and not worthy of being their leader because you'r
e just lame so if you fail now you have to go through the whole dungeon all over again and make your people like you so they don't turn against you games don't have to have combat to have a good risk reward system the risk could just be the time you're putting into the game is the reward from completing this goal worth the time that you have to put into it like the catch 100 fish in a Nook mile goal is it worth your time it's just a few Nook miles you can get these by spending more time completi
ng the easier Nook mile plus goals but for some people the reward of completing the goal is worth the risk of spending time to catch 99 fish in a row messing up that last one and then having to restart the entire fishing process all over again a lot of cozy games don't have risk which makes sense right they're supposed to be cozy but we need to be rewarded somehow for our work why risk an hour of my time to get nothing out of it I need to work towards something games in general need some type of
progression whether that's unlocking items to decorate with or completing a full-blown story there has to be some kind of satisfaction when playing and the story better be good there are some cozy games that you progress through a story but sometimes that story just isn't captivating I don't like progressing just for the sake of progressing unless I care about the world and the characters or I'm rewarded for exploring the world and if the story progression isn't appealing enough then the game i
s Bor boring and it doesn't give me a reason to keep coming back Disney Dream Life Valley I swear I only go back to Disney Dream Life Valley because of the battle pass and then i' just never even finish that and then I'd stop playing and then it's just it's a problem though the latest update did add a little bit to the story so that was nice but it only lasted like 20 minutes this seems to be an unfortunate Trend in the Cozy game genre it feels like some developers use the word cozy as an excuse
to have minimal gameplay sometimes this is the overall Vision like this bug catching game it's sole purpose is just to catch bugs which is fine if that's all you as a player want in a game but besides completing your encyclopedia catching bugs is the only thing to do it was fun for the 30 minutes I played but I got bored pretty quickly it just wasn't for me which makes sense because bugs really aren't my thing they have legs and wings and yeah I don't know I just I don't like bugs but I wanted
something more out of the game granted this one was just a demo so I'm sure the full game does have a bit more but I need something unique to keep me invested a lot of these cozy games make players do stuff for the sake of doing stuff why am I playing this game is it just to kill time or do I want it to be engaging just because a part of a game takes a long time to complete doesn't replace the fact that you need to add content stuff taking a long time doesn't equal more engaging content it just
gives players more of a reason to fall out of a game that content better be appealing especially if it's a mechanic that requires a lot of time taken from someone's day players want to play games that are worth their time not a waste of time there are a lot of cozy games where the Villager dialogue is a struggle and it takes away the immersion I don't need someone to tell me about the current weather 20 times or tell me over and over again that it's easier to get around without Thorns around any
more bestie I know I destroyed them villager interactions are supposed to be a fully fleshed out mechanic I understand that writing a tunnel dialogue can be a pain especially when developers are trying to translate it into a bunch of different languages but if there are going to be villagers in Romancing at least make me want to romance them like Hedy the hodari so glad we can romance him games like Pia and stardy Valley give each character their own story to discover and quest lines to complete
based on their lives as well as personalized exclusive rewards that you can only get from that character players feel like a part of the town instead of just a player in a game and the NPCs interact with you differently based on your relationship with them I accidentally played paleo without headphones on and r said that one line well Drew was sitting next to me you're into bad boys aren't you anyway they interact with you differently or this game called grave Seasons where you can accidentally
marry a murderer talk about risk many cozy games completely gloss over the important mechanic that is character development even New Horizons though after playing some of these other games New Horizons villagers they don't seem so bad give us more than repetitive pointless dialogue let them verbally abuse me like the GameCube Animal Crossing at least being shut down a bit gave me something interesting to read for a second the world isn't always sunshine and rainbows and neither should my gamepl
ay Bland dialogue and stories do nothing for players except make us complain on Twitter and talk about it in every video ever about what could be improved about Animal Crossing don't look at my videos stop talking about it I swear this is the last one where I talk about bad dialogue cozy games need to do something different to set themselves apart from the dozens of other cozy games that are coming out around the same time the amount of days that I go on Twitter and there's a post about like oh
look at these four games all coming out on the same day how am I supposed to play all four games stagger them please we're in a cozy boom there's a ton of competition I want these future games to do something that others aren't take a little to the left for example definitely a cozy game it has puzzles to solve like a lot of games do but it concentrates on those puzzles by creating unique experiences some even have multiple solutions that make you want to replay the level there really isn't anyt
hing like a little to the left out there except those flash jigsaw puzzles that you randomly play when you're bored on top of satisfying puzzles to solve with a ton of progression rewards and feeling like the smartest person around it also has an amazing soundtrack an incredibly satisfying sound effects these stamps unsticking themselves perfect the coin sounds on point this game does a lot to set itself apart from the rest of the genre not everything has to be Animal Crossing we we have animal
crossing at home we don't need more clones and you really don't want to compete with Nintendo's cozy all the little details they add make their games in experience that's almost impossible to replicate except for stardew Valley I don't think wood has ever been so satisfying to chop but sometimes there's room for improvement let's take stardo Valley for example it's a game that took heavy inspiration from the Harvest Moon series greatly improved upon it and now the modern Harvest Moon story of se
ason games are just trying to keep up with stardy Valley we we can't keep playing the same game over and over again players want to play something different or if it's going to be similar it better drastically improve upon what we already have kind of like how stardo Valley did but just stop making us Farm if we're farming for the sake of farming it's the worst you can't just add farming to any kind of game and call it a cozy game Square enex I at least want a cooking mini game or something to d
o with the food that we Harvest or just be Farming Simulator and make it only about farming I don't need to harvest crops in every cozy game cozy games are a trend that everyone is hopping on to even games like Pokémon are trying for a more cozy experience gone are the days of grinding relentlessly and finding your way through David Bowie's Labyrinth to avoid as many trainer battles as possible you can essentially choose how you want to play the game which I guess is fine but it it's just kind o
f like it's just boring I'm just going to go back and play Pokémon blue but but you can also like give Pikachu a bath now so that's pretty cozy I guess but players don't want games that just play themselves I still need some level of tediousness to keep me interested I don't want to avoid everything difficult in a game don't let me just run around the trainer there still needs to be some type of challenge because the genre is such a trend there are a bunch of games that you can clearly tell they
're just trying to make a quick Buck there's no love behind the game barely any effort just the bare minimum to get by I need to be completely immersed in the Cozy world to fill up my internal coziness I don't want to play a newly released game and 2 weeks later there's a paid expansion or DLC announced developers should take a note out of concerned Apes book give us free updates for almost 10 years okay that's a bit ridiculous but his continuously positive actions make anything other than free
expansive updates seem lame and greedy he had a vision for what stardy was and kept pushing out free updates after release into until it got to his original vision and then some we've gotten so many updates for this amazing game most of us don't mind paying for True extra content I'm going to bring up a little to the left again but they have a great complete game with DLC that was released well over a year after the initial game came out not to mention the base game is good and it's a good price
$15 for hours of play in a daily puzzle that you can keep coming back to I'm not at all salty about their fairly priced DLC that doesn't break the bank unlike other games that have been around for decades that somehow charge crazy money for a few pieces of furniture look at these These are stupid I hate it and a little to the left ends I can pop in once a day to do a daily puzzle but it's not a game that requires a ton of Daily Commitment and you aren't really missing out on anything if you dec
ide to not play for the day no economy to miss out on no fomo while I love games that I can keep playing 5 years down the line I'm so sick of love logging into 18 games every day to do my dailies not everything has to go on forever if it doesn't make sense for your game make the game end and if it's a game that can be played forever the developers need to give players a reason to keep going do something different than the others don't make my daily just logging in so I can pay money for my wishe
s so I can maybe get this one cute character maybe that might possibly show up maybe but we will all stop playing eventually and Crossing will always have a leg up on these cozy games with Nostalgia a huge studio and the Brilliant Minds of Nintendo behind the game it's impossible for Animal Crossing to fail just don't look at this one this one never existed the greatest cozy games come from some type of nostalgia for many players that's when we're at our coziest we yearn for a world that doesn't
exist for us currently it's important that we dive into a place that we want to live in that creates a nice Community to be able to connect with others without a pull or some type of Heartache or Adventure we really don't get the full immersion of cozy I'm happy to live in a world where cozy games exist a select few have been a great escape maybe too good of a distraction but I have become more picky with the Cozy games I buy quality over quantity always life is short don't spend it wasting tim
e on an un cozy experience there are too many out there that don't live up to the hype and while I'm sure the developers have the game's best interest at heart sometimes it doesn't always come through when playing games need more than just slapping together when can like fishing and farming and calling it a day the Cozy game bar needs to be raised so the future of the genre is beautiful any games you want to recommend drop them in the comments below and I'll see you next time bye
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