We've survived the June deluge and… Wait, somehow there are even more cozy games launching in July? I've counted up 30 new cozy games worth taking a peek at this month. That's way too many for me or anyone else though, so as usual I've called up my cozy comrades to pick the ones they're most looking forward to that you might want to look closer at too. As ever, our full list of cozy game launches for July is at the bottom for the super studious among you.

July cozy game forecast: Cat monsoon 😺🌧️

I don't have anything super insightful to share about this month's slate of cozy games other than: Damn, that's a lot of cats! Cozy games and felines go hand and hand all the time but there are seriously a lot of cat games this month. There's cat puzzles, cat strategy, cat desktop pets, city builders, and shop sims. Cat lovers, this month is dedicated to you. Admittedly, none of our cozy collective picked a cat game as their choice for this month, but the options sure are there.

Our cozy game picks for July

July cozy games calendar

Good thing the days are looking longer around here, because I'm going to need my full stamina bar and an irresponsible 2am bedtime to keep up with the cozy game launches in June. The calendar may not look as long as the list from May yet but just you wait until we clear the first week of June. I think things are going to drop in hot all month long.

June cozy game forecast: Sudden launch watch 🌪️

June is always a whirlwind in gaming because of the many, many publisher and platform showcases where we'll hear announcements and reveals for upcoming games (check our Summer Game Fest schedule for more). Sometimes games will even surprise launch during a showcase, or reveal a very imminent release date, so there are probably going to be even more cozy games this month that aren't on the calendar yet. Here's a couple events to be aware of in cozy gaming this month:

• Wholesome Direct: A showcase dedicated just to cozy games that will air on YouTube on June 6.
• Steam Next Fest: Another one of Steam's regular big demo events runs June 15 - June 22 and lots of cozy games tend to participate.

Our cozy game picks for June

June cozy games calendar

The winter doldrums are officially over and the cozy games release calendar is showing signs of serious spring downpour. I'm tracking a total of 27 swell-looking cozy games this month and, as always, that's definitely not everything that's out there. You can't blame me for missing a hidden object game or two when those things seem to spawn in by the dozens.

May cozy game forecast: Sim storm warning ⛈️

One way or another, this month is going to be defined by simulation games. Two of the most-wishlisted games are Outbound (crafting sim) and Paralives (life sim), along with other games specifically anticipated by us cozy gamers like shop sim Thrifty Business and narrative sims Coffee Talk Tokyo and Wax Heads. Notably, three of those mentioned have been delayed at least once. Not exactly uncommon these days, but it did ping my attention. It sure feels like the mood of May is going to depend on whether all these widely-anticipated simulation games fly or flop.

Our cozy game picks for May

May cozy games calendar

The cozy games launching in April are almost unanimously chilled out. It's really feeling like groundhog day around here because somehow the extra six weeks of winter aren't over. I've dragged PC Gamer's cozy gaming collective out of their burrows to curate the cozy games of April calendar and tell you a little about what they're planning to play. Spoiler alert: no farm/life sims to be found. So just shhhh put your cable knit sweater back on and play a game with no fail state, little critters.

April cozy game forecast: ❄️ Chill warning

There's nary a farm sim in sight this month! The cozy game calendar for April feels like it really expects you to stay tucked under the blankets for one more month of rot time before the spring rush begins. We've got multiple hidden object games, multiple diorama builders, and emotional adventure games. The cozy games of this month are going to really let us play at our own pace—no rushing to get in bed or do chores before 2am, not this time!

April cozy games calendar

Our cozy game picks for April

I've been pretty good this year and avoided flooding my Steam library with more games I don't have time to play, but Steam's latest themed sale got me. From now until April 6, Steam is running House and Home Fest. It's basically seven days of homey, cozy games that feel specifically targeted at me.

I'm basically a videogame realtor, and all about anything that lets me build, organize, or clean some semblance of a house. I've scrubbed the dirt off of countless rooftops and walls in PowerWash Simulator, and who knows how many permutations I've created of my idealized working space in My Dream Setup. God forbid I apply that energy to cleaning my own house.

If that sounds like you, then I've got a few cozy game recommendations worth checking out in Steam's House and Home Fest.

Creature Kitchen

Creature Kitchen (Steam)

This one is a recent favorite, but I was smitten with the cute critters of Creature Kitchen when I wrote about the demo a month ago. I've completed the full game since, and even went back for some achievement clean-up since I couldn't get enough of the creepy-cozy cooking sim.

It's a short game—it took me about six hours to finish everything, achievements included—but perfectly paced with just-difficult-enough puzzles and tons of weird little guys to befriend. I loved looking for clues to make snacks for the mice in my walls or the weird apparition in the pantry. They're pickier eaters than I would have expected, but once you figure it out, Creature Kitchen is a satisfying little puzzler.

💲 Price: $7.99/$6.39 | £6.69/£5.35
✅ Has a demo

PowerWash Simulator 2

PowerWash Simulator 2 (Steam)

Look, I recently tried to replay the original PowerWash Simulator since I didn't finish all of its DLC, and I just can't go back to it after playing the sequel. Months later, I still stand by everything I outlined in my PowerWash Simulator 2 review, and feel the upgrades made in its sequel are just too good to handwave and go back to ol' faithful.

New attachments like the Swirlforce Ace, a heavy-duty circular cleaner, and upgrades to the soap system are gamechangers. Couple that with improved co-op, and it's way more fun for everyone involved. The Adventure Time DLC is on its way soon, so it's the perfect time to scoop up the sequel if you haven't already.

💲 Price: $24.99/$21.24 | £19.99/£16.99
✅ Has a demo

Hozy

Hozy (Steam)

I just started playing Hozy, but I've loved my time with the fixer-upper sim so far. While there's no shortage of things to do, I love that it doesn't let me overwhelm myself by trying to tackle a million little projects at once. Instead, Hozy breaks down remodeling an entire neighborhood into several smaller cleanup jobs where you restore old buildings one room at a time.

You'll do everything, too. Pick up the trash, scrub the floors, squeegee the windows, paint the walls—Hozy gets pretty granular with the work that goes into making buildings as good as new. But the best part comes at the end, when the game dumps boxes full of furniture and clutter into your lap and lets you go wild.

💲 Price: $14.99/$13.49 | £12.49/£11.24

Unpacking

Unpacking (Steam)

Speaking of unpacking, you can do that in… Unpacking. The 2D home decor sim is all about the best parts of Hozy, but with a dash of puzzle-solving as you try to make everything fit into your new room. Every room starts with a neat pile of seemingly endless boxes, and you've got to find a home for every action figure and roll of toilet paper in there.

Unpacking caters to the maximalist in me. Screw overly sanitized spaces and homes with hotel vibes. I want crap in every corner and lived-in spaces with real personality. Unpacking lets me do that, but on a handy grid to make sure I get the symmetry right. I should try that when I'm hanging frames in real life.

💲 Price: $19.99/$7.99 | £15.49/£6.19

My Little Life

My Little Life (Steam)

My Little Life is another one I started recently, but so far I'm having a good time tending to the tiny, needy people making demands at the bottom of my screen. Considering it's an idler, they're pretty patient little dudes, but they rely on you for more than just cute decor and shelter.

While those things are important, the tiny humans also rely on their desktop gods for food, comfort, and even new career paths. It's kind of like playing a mini version of The Sims, but I can't drown the annoying ones in the pool. Or maybe I can, and I just haven't discovered how. At least not yet.

💲 Price: $5.99/$4.19 | £4.99/£3.49

And here's everything in my Steam cart

This could be a pile of bad decisions, a collection of the best cozy games I've played in a while, or both. I have no idea, since these are all games from Steam's House and Home Fest sitting in my shopping cart. Either way, three games for under $20 isn't a bad deal by any means.

Two are idle games, which isn't very surprising when you see how many I go through while sitting at my desk. I've already run the gamut of things to do in Ropuka's Idle Island (which I also recommend, but it's bundled with another cute idler, Mini Cozy Room (Steam), and I'm itching to try it for the multiplayer mode.

Tools Up (Steam) is in my cart for the same reasons; I'm looking for something cute and cozy to play with friends between all the hellish survival horror games we play. And then there's Camper Van: Make it Home (Steam), a game I've had on my wishlist since it launched last year. I can't believe I'm about to buy this and Outbound in the same few weeks, but I'm committed to the van life now.

Steam's House and Home Fest ends on April 6, so I've got a few days before I have to commit to anything. Until then, I would love to hear any cozy game recommendations from the sale that you may have, so leave me a holler in the comments below.

If there's one thing I've always wished for, it's for Animal Crossing to be available on PC. It's impossible, I know, but every time I've picked up a new cozy game a little voice in the back of my head has reminded me of the hundreds if not thousands of hours I've sunk into life as the town mayor or island director, or just the only human on an island of fantastic animal companions, and reminded me of how much I miss it.

At long last though, my wishes have come true, and a native port of Animal Crossing on GameCube has finally made its way on PC as part of an existing Animal Crossing decompilation project. It's been an unfathomable number of years since I booted up my save and was met with the scorn of my villagers—after all they weren't the kindest creatures—but this is definitely the thing that will convince me to do so.

Unlike a port which you can just boot up and play, you do need a copy of Animal Crossing GameCube already, which does make it a bit more challenging as it's not a particularly cheap game to buy if you don't already own it. But according to the description of the GitHub project "this repository does not contain any game assets or assembly whatsoever" and the project reads all of the assets directly from the disc, so it's sort of essential and completely worth it, if you ask me.

With that said, the current version isn't perfect, and few issues have been noted by players already, such as bass distortion in the fossil room of the museum, a low static hum, and a few random memory issues that can cause black screens and broken textures. But, the developer of the project shared in the comments of a YouTube video that they have "mostly fixed them for the next release" and just want to "test it a bit more before I'm confident."

But it's all looking good, and just knowing that the project is being worked on to make Animal Crossing GameCube on PC as polished as possible is enough motivation I need to dig through the boxes in my loft and dust off my copy. If it means I can be reunited with Filbert from the comfort of my desk without having to figure out how to use an AV cable adapter in 2026, I'll do anything.

If there's one thing cozy games love to do, it's shifting a release date by a couple days or even a month, only a week before launch. I've seen more than one try to pull that over on me in March so far. They probably don't love it, really, but they sure do it a lot and it makes keeping track of each month's cozy game releases a real juggling act.

To keep you from feeling like a cozy circus clown dropping farm sims on the ground all month, I've gotten PC Gamer's cozy gaming collective together again to track down the most up to date releases—though I make no promises about dates that change after the month begins—and make a pitch for the cozy games we're personally looking forward to playing the most.

March cozy game forecast: 🌧️💿 Demo downpour

This month begins with the Steam Next Fest, the big event where tons of upcoming games offer free demos ahead of launch. At time of writing, almost every cozy game we want to play in March has a demo available. Next Fest does end right at the beginning of the month on March 2, though. In past Next Fests, some games pull down their demos after the event, but others may leave theirs live until launch day. I've marked which games have a demo right now in the release calendar below, but you may find things change over the course of the month!

March cozy games calendar

Our cozy game picks for March

The Legend of Khiimori

Cupiclaw

The Abbess Garden

Bubblegum Galaxy

Collector's Cove

Every time I think cozy gaming might be peaking it just gets bigger. The cute corner of the PC gaming hobby has been growing for years and that's meant not only are there more cozy game players on PC, there are also a lot more cozy game players here at PC Gamer—rad! Cozy games can be on the small side and don't always make it into our main 2026 games calendar, so we're carving out a special little corner here.

Gathering up which cozy games are coming out each month is basically a full time job, but instead of making it my full time job I've summoned a cozy coalition to help keep track of what's coming up next. I've made our foremost crafting, farm-simming, and building likers look ahead and decide what they're most psyched to play in February so you don't miss something that looks like your kind of cute.

February cozy game forecast: 🌵Dry

Despite what I just said, keeping track of February's cozy game launches wasn't that hard because, well, there didn't seem to be a lot of them. Even all of us cozy game connoisseurs struggled to dig up releases. Without bigger cozy game launches taking up my attention, I was able to dive a bit deeper and fill up our cozy calendar below with some niche choices that I definitely would have missed if they launched later this year.

You'll find our cozy circle looking forward to small indie picks and some surprisingly spooky cute games too. Scroll down for a full list of cozy release dates below our personal picks.

Don't forget that Steam Next Fest, the big festival of free game demos, kicks off this month on February 23. Cozy games tend to be pretty big participants in Next Fest events, so you can expect to try out a ton of games that are planning to launch later this year.

Our cozy game picks for February

Reigns: The Witcher

Creature Kitchen

Bento Blocks

Reanimal

February cozy games calendar

I've made cozy gaming most of my personality in the past several years, but even I sometimes feel numb to the aesthetically-mandated cotton candy color palette. Sometimes I want to play a cozy game while giving my eyes a little rest from the pastel apocalypse. I also just like trying to slip in some chill games to my friend group's rotation without them noticing that I've put cauliflower into their mashed potatoes—it's good for their blood pressure!

For this list of cozy games without cozy aesthetics I've banned pastel colors, chibi characters, and I've even managed to go completely pixel art free. That last part is maybe a little more hardcore than I needed to go (otherwise something like Graveyard Keeper would have been a nice fit) but I wanted to completely set aside the cozy goggles if at all possible.

Promise Mascot Agency

Cozy style: Management and exploration
Steam Deck: ✅ Verified

I need you to trust me when I say that this game about an exiled Yakuza tough and his severed pinkie mascot sidekick is a cozy game—the best one, according to our Game of the Year 2025 awards. It may start with a street fight, but the entire rest of Promise Mascot Agency is just driving around a quaint old truck, making friends, helping the locals, and bringing prosperity back to a languishing town. There really isn't anything more textbook cozy game than that.

Michi takes over a love hotel in a haunted old town and begins recruiting dozens of mascots to work for his agency. You'll help with high stakes obstacles like poorly stacked boxes, collecting old arcade cabinets, and running a counter campaign against the corrupt mayor. Most of your time in Promise Mascot agency is just driving your truck around a map full of collectibles while on errands for your pals, a much more chilled out experience than the initial pitch makes it sound.

Read more: Promise Mascot Agency review (94%)

Chants of Sennaar

Cozy style: Puzzle adventure
Steam Deck: ✅ Verified

This one toes the line of cozy aesthetic, but it isn't really pastel so I'm counting it. Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle adventure game where you're teaching yourself four new (made up) languages in extreme immersion style. You start with simple puzzles like understanding greetings and then move on to tougher phrases like figuring out plural conjugations from context.

Despite how that sounds, it's so much more fun than just a fantasy grammar lesson. You'll explore different parts of a tower, working out how to sneak into locked rooms and communicate with new friends whose language you don't speak yet. Taking notes on what you think each symbol means in a little in-game notebook of illustrations is extremely cozy core and every successful translation feels like a major victory.

Read more: Chants of Sennaar made me feel like a child in a school computer lab again in the best way

Project Zomboid

Cozy style: Survival
Steam Deck: ✅ Verified

The default experience of Project Zomboid is a tense top-down survival horror game—not cozy at all—but it's extremely easy to start a custom game with zombies turned off entirely. Without the threat of the undead, Zomboid is a quiet, slow-paced survival game about becoming self-sustaining after society vanishes.

You can co-op with friends or play solo, finding a perfect abandoned house in the suburbs to call your own as you learn to build a garden, become an accomplished furniture carpenter, cook meals, and siphon gasoline from abandoned cars to power your generator. It's totally calm and cozy living in rural Kentucky after the whole world's been raptured without you.

Read more: 7 hardcore survival games that are great to play in peaceful mode

Potion Craft

Cozy style: Crafting
Steam Deck: ✅ Verified

I think illuminated manuscripts are visually distinct enough from typical cozy game style to count here. Potion Craft is easily the best cozy shop sim I've played, still. Lifting a mortar and pestle to smash your herbs, tipping just the right amount of water in, and hefting the bellows is such a wonderfully tactile way to play—it makes me really feel like a witch in her shop the way no other crafty shop sim has managed to.

It's so easy to get completely absorbed in perfecting your own system of naming and labeling each type of potion you discover, saving new recipes in your book until it's completely pincushioned with tabs. It's completely cozy, with a medieval look that isn't quite too saccharine.

Read more: Potion Craft has finally given me a crafting system I don't hate

Dystopika

Cozy style: City building
Steam Deck: ⚠️ Playable

Townscaper-like building toys are basically the pinnacle of cozy gaming—no stakes and total creative freedom—and Dystopika has the least cozy visuals of the entire bunch. Instead of building a quaint seaside city, you're constructing a dystopian tech metropolis.

Similar to the cute washing lines and little paths that procedurally crop up in other little building games like Tiny Glade, Dystopika spawns in massive power cables, flying cars, and chillingly beautiful light pollution. You can also upload your own images to slap onto its massive glowing billboards, which you can use for some hauntingly beautiful shots or just meme around making it look like your dog is a technocratic overlord.

Read more: This brilliant dark and moody cyberpunk city builder is my kind of cosy game

At the end of every year I always feel impressed by just how many cozy games launched, and more specifically how many I actually found the time to play. Looking back, 2025 was a year where cozy games really broke the mold and appealed to a wider audience.

Notably though, I found that I didn't just spend hundreds of hours in a dozen farming simulators. This might be a conscious effort on my part, because other than becoming infatuated with Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, I actually didn't sink much time at all into finding my next farming obsession. So if you want to do the same, here are my favorite cozy games from 2025.

Top six cozy games of 2025

• Once Upon a Katamari
• POCO
• The Guardian of Nature
• Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk
• Out and About
• Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Some other games I spent more time than I like to admit playing, but didn't quite make the top six: Ritual of Raven, Discounty, Instants, Is this seat taken?, and Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time.

Once Upon a Katamari

Style: Puzzle

The release of a new mainline Katamari game is always exciting, as someone who's poured hundreds of hours into the series already, and even more so when the game is absolutely fantastic from start to finish. These fast, time challenge levels that give you just one simple objective are incredibly moreish, and never have I felt the "one more run" mindset so hard. The story sends you hurtling through different time periods, never giving you enough repetition to get bored of.

Once Upon a Katamari also introduces new elements, welcoming new players while also refreshing the old experience for series fans. Rolling around has been streamlined through a new control scheme that simplifies movement, and new tools have been added to each level such as a rocket to help you move faster and a radar to pinpoint the location of valuable items like crowns. Anyone can pick up Once Upon a Katamari and have a good time, which I think is one of the reasons why I ended up loving it so much this year.

I wouldn't say that Once Upon a Katamari is your typical cozy game. If anything, it's much more chaotic than the casual, laid-back simulators I'd usually describe as "wholesome" or "cozy". But the amount of joy a few hours in this game provides me is what makes it so worthy. It might not have the lo-fi pastel colored goodness we're used to, but it does pack in simple rules, and adorable characters you get familiar with which in some way makes it a cozy game.

Poco

Style: Point-and-click adventure

Something about cozy games lends itself to unsettling concepts, and Poco is definitely a prime example of that. This free-to-play point-and-click adventure following the story of the world's smallest clown really stuck with me when it launched in May, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I've even dipped in a few more times to make sure I saw every possible ending.

It's the world that really enchanted me, which is mostly down to the combination of 2D and 3D elements. Throughout Poco you'll have to use the environment to progress, whether that's picking flowers to turn into paint, or tracking down items to return to the cast of oddities (referred to as Homunculi) who you befriend along the way. The challenges are simple, but there's something so incredibly enthralling about it that you'll be gutted when it's over.

Poco is cozy in its time commitment too: I rolled credits within the hour. It's certainly a game that leaves you wanting more, and if they announced a sequel at any point I would be absolutely thrilled. I feel like Poco was a real hidden gem this year.

Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk

Style: Idle management simulator

2025 has been the year of idle games for me. When I feel like I don't have the time to sink into a full-blown adventure, I've loved having a little desktop pet or idle game running in the background while I work. There's something oddly satisfying about getting passive virtual income from something that slowly ticks away, and Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk was a sleeper hit for me.

After it shadow dropped during the Wholesome Direct showcase, I immediately downloaded it and started stocking my first few machines. Before long, I was raking in cash from an empire of vendos and decorated alleyways for my customers to sit and enjoy. So many idle games I've played, like Rusty's Retirement, Ropuka's Idle Island, and Tiny Pasture tick away whether or not you interact with them. Vending Dokan is a little more hands-on, which kept me more engaged.

You need to keep on top of your stock, order in the drinks your customers want if they aren't available in your current rotation, keep the area clean, and decorate to improve the general aesthetic. It doesn't require your constant attention, and you will spend a lot of time just waiting to earn enough money, giving you an excuse to actually work on the real life to-do list you've been putting off while playing. No—I'm definitely not projecting.

Out and About

Style: Foraging simulator

I may have strayed from the farming simulator this year, but that doesn't mean I've cast all simulators aside. Out and About was on my list of most anticipated games for 2025, and it certainly lived up to my expectations.

In Out and About, you'll set off to start a new life in an incredibly run down town. With a little bit of help and inspiration from the people around you, your skills as a forager help the local square flourish and re-build a community that had been impacted by a devastating storm. You'll learn all about plants and their properties, including what to look for when you're picking them.

Before you can take them back to the kitchen and cook something, you'll need to successfully identify the plants you've found. You wouldn't want to eat anything poisonous by accident. When you have made a mass of items, you can sell them at the market and match their properties to the needs of your customers, and then use that money to reinvest in the town.

What I love most about Out and About is the level of detail that has gone into the foraging mechanic. All the plants you encounter in the game are foragable in real life, and there are tons of recipes that can all be recreated in real life too. From teas and treats to salves and soups, there are over 100 recipes to learn in-game and out, and it's made foraging as a hobby feel a lot more accessible and less intimidating.

The Guardian of Nature

Style: Point-and-click puzzle

The Guardian of Nature is an incredibly peaceful point-and-click puzzle game, but even though it feels relaxing, it tells quite a heavy story. You'll play as Henry, a botanist who can shrink down to the size of an ant or grow back to his regular, human size. You'll use this skill to visit parts of the forest that the human eye may miss otherwise, like burrowing underground to reconnect plant roots or to helping out any animals who've gotten lost along their way.

It's not just about reconnecting parts of the forest though, as some unusual characters have started chopping down trees and using them to build houses for their kind, and you need to put a stop to that before the world Henry's used to changes entirely. Henry never actually speaks, communicating entirely in little grunts, but I wound up feeling so connected to him anyway. The animals you help out are particularly cute too, which helps.

It's the sort of game that can be played for a few hours at a time without feeling like you need to tie up the entire story in one sitting. This feeling is definitely encouraged by the fact it launched in episodes, giving you bitesize chunks to work through at a time, which I definitely appreciated and saw as a welcomed cozy break among the constant releases from the year.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Style: Life simulator

It would be a sin for me to not mention Hello Kitty Island Adventure this year. I've been pining for a PC release ever since it launched as an Apple Arcade exclusive in 2023, so I embarked on my adventure to Friendship Island the very second I could. Throughout 2025, I have adored every second spent with Hello Kitty and friends, most importantly my beloved PomPomPurin. Hello Kitty Island Adventure has really patched up the Animal Crossing-shaped hole in my heart.

Island Adventure has all the cozy game hits: crafting, fishing, cute characters, easy enough quests, and a long list of chores to keep you busy. For example, you'll get different visitors every now and then, like friends and family for the islanders, and you'll need to prepare cabins for them. Each character has very specific requirements to meet before they will visit, such as the location of their cabin and what furniture they need inside. Having this to occupy your time on top of quests and befriending the main cast keeps you busy and really brings the island to life.

The release of the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC in September only reinforced my love, and has left me excited to see where the game goes next. Hopefully, we continue to see more development on Friendship Island through 2026, including more characters to befriend and new realms to explore.

Days are getting shorter, the weather is getting more unpredictable, and I can never tell if it's quite cold enough to wear a jacket out or if the sun is still producing enough heat to make me instantly regret it. That can mean only one thing: it's autumn. The best time of year to use whatever excuse I can to stay home and finally face my ever-growing backlog of cosy games.

Over the last few years we've seen an influx of games specifically designed to echo the feeling of autumn, but this year is a little light on the orange leaves, pumpkin spice, cinnamon roll-inspired game front. Luckily, autumnal games launch all year round now, so there are several new releases from the summer with distinctly fall vibes Here are five cosy autumnal games I'll be putting more time into this season.

Ritual of Raven

Release date: August 7, 2025 | Steam

Autumn is always the best time to start sinking endless hours into a farming simulator. I don't know what it is about longer nights that leaves me desperate to sow seeds and till soil. Rather than being another bog standard farming simulator to add to your ever-growing collection, Ritual of Raven does things a little differently.

Instead of relying on old tools and eventual upgrades to streamline farm life, things are a little more magical around these parts by enchanting other creatures to do your bidding for you. You'll also get to customise your farmland and build relationships with the cast of weirdos you meet as you take on the new role as a witch's apprentice. I can't think of a game more fitting with Halloween rapidly approaching.

Seasonala Cemetery

Release date: June 7, 2025 | Steam

With the nights getting longer in autumn, I spend a lot of time thinking. Even if it's not about something in particular, it's just a thoughtful time of year. Seasonala Cemetery is a perfect game for anyone like me who spends a lot of time lost in their own thoughts. It won't have you going on any weapon slinging adventures or completing any in-depth quests. Instead, you'll spend your time exploring a "living, breathing cemetery" and learning about the game's history through all of the gravestones. It sounds morbid, but it's actually a delightfully meditative experience.

Seasonala Cemetery also uses your PC's real date and time to alter your experience, so if you're picking it up this time of year, prepare yourself for gorgeous orange and yellow leaves. The weather changes too, so prepare yourself for some moody, rainy walks around the cemetery for the ultimate autumn night without having to pull out your umbrella.

Fireside Feelings

Release date: June 7, 2025 | Steam

Sometimes all you want to do in autumn is huddle around a fire with your friends and have a good chat. Luckily, Fireside Feelings, which is basically a conversation simulator, lets you do exactly that. Instead of jumping online with your real-life friends though, you'll get to have conversations with a variety of quirky characters powered by other random players. Conversations aren't live, so there's no direct interaction with others. Despite this, there's still a real sense of community.

Outside of chatting, you can unlock items and furniture to decorate your campfire with. This is definitely my favourite part of the whole experience since it lets you really hone in on the cosy side of things. After all, it's your space to sit and talk with your friends, so you want it to be the perfect nook for you.

Tukoni: Prologue

Release date: November 19, 2020 | Steam

Yes, I know this isn't a full game.

Anything in the Tukoni series (including the books and puzzle games) screams autumn to me. Even though the prologue is the very definition of short and sweet, it's still a game I'd recommend playing. It won't take you much longer than half an hour to get through this point-and-click puzzle adventure, but it'll definitely leave you wanting more.

I fell in love with the world of Tukoni, so much so I immediately played the demo of Tukoni: Forest Keepers which continued to scratch the autumnal itch. Which, I'd also recommend playing if you want that extra shot of cosy autumn vibes straight to the bloodstream. The puzzles in Tukoni are by no means challenging, so won't have you scrawling in a notepad in an attempt to solve them. The cute characters are definitely enough to keep you captivated though.

Flowers and Favours

Release date: August 29, 2025 | Steam

This florist simulator might not immediately scream "fall game" but its warm colour palette definitely blends in with this time of year. The task at hand is simple: take orders from customers, and create bouquets that suit their needs.

The creativity Flowers and Favours lets you harness is what makes it such an enjoyable game, in my opinion. In case it wasn't obvious, I've got absolutely no experience as a florist, but this game makes me feel like I could absolutely excel as one. When you receive an order from one of the many animal companions that come to visit, you've got creative freedom so long as it fits within their brief. Pulling different plants and colours together is incredibly satisfying, and there's a surprising amount of variation. If you're particularly impressed with what you've created, you'll be able to take a photo and admire your work in a scrapbook afterwards too.

Upcoming launches

This list isn't to say there is a complete drought of cosy autumnal games this year. We've still got a few games launching during this year's fall season.

Strange Antiquities

Release date: September 17 | Steam

If you played Strange Horticulture, you'll already be well acquainted with the atmosphere Strange Antiquities presents. However, if you're entirely new to the game, you're in for a treat. In Strange Antiquities, you'll become the keeper of a shop dealing in occult antiquities in the gloomy town of Undermere. There are plenty of curious events to investigate and mysteries to uncover as you work away in your dusty storefront.

You'll use your collection of trinkets to help the townsfolk with their many problems, which includes examining and cataloguing every item that crosses your palm. Just because you have an array of items doesn't mean you'll always pick the right one to sell a person, though. Your choices form the experience, which means you can choose whether you purposely cause chaos, or help anyone that steps foot inside. And yes, you can pet the shop's cat, Jupiter.

Keeper

Release date: October 17 | Steam

Keeper is an atmospheric puzzle adventure where you play as a sentient lighthouse. Need I say more?

In this heartwarming tale of friendship between a lighthouse and spirited seabird, you'll embark on the epic journey toward the centre of the island you awoke upon. This won't just be a simple walk though. While you explore, you'll be tasked with navigating realms beyond your comprehension. With no dialogue between characters, you are left to your own devices as well. What lies ahead is a mystery of psychedelic platforming I cannot wait to experience.

I love clutter. Just tons and tons of crap stacked precariously on a shelf—all of it mismatched, sorted into asymmetrical piles, and serving no clear purpose. I like homes that look lived in. Clean, but not sanitized of personality. That's why I dig the hobbit design philosophy (or lack thereof), and have kept my eye on Tales of the Shire since its 2024 reveal. I'm wound way too tight to live a peaceful life in the shire, but their sentimental piles of mess resonate with my real life approach to decorating.

So after a few minutes of opening cutscenes and questing during a Summer Game Fest demo over the weekend, I asked Wētā Workshop if I could spend the rest of my Tales of the Shire demo time just… moving furniture around back at my hobbit hole. Thankfully I was met with enthusiastic approval. Apparently rearranging all day is a perfectly acceptable way to approach life in Bywater.

And that's how I spent a majority of it—obsessively picking up everything from one room and bringing it into another to make piles of decorative clutter. My closest in-universe relative is probably Smaug, though instead of gold, I'm sitting on a pile of colorful bottles, fraying pillows, and thrift store trinkets. Tales of the Shire is quite laid back; it's more akin to Animal Crossing than anything else, at least how I played it. My biggest concern was, "Can I make it cluttered and cute?" And the answer was always yes.

My demo began the same way players will start Tales of the Shire next month, by meeting Gandalf and being thrown into a few quests around Bywater. Truthfully, I didn't have enough time to develop a strong impression, but I'm not so sure I dig the character designs or personalities. It's part of why I was so easily derailed from the main quest, and with my time being so limited, I opted to go all in on cooking and decorating. Since hobbits measure their days by when they'll eat next, I assumed Tales of the Shire would nail that recipe.

For now, I'm going to have to hold off on awarding any Michelin stars. The actual process of boil'em, mash'em, stick'em in a stew was… fine. I liked rummaging around and foraging for ingredients and figure that will only improve the more I'm able to explore, but I can't see the actual cooking mechanics growing on me. The prep work didn't feel as satisfying as the end product looked.

Since hobbits all have their own tastes, Tales of the Shire tries to give you control over the little details, like making an ingredient smooth, tender, crisp, or chunky. You can season dishes too, swinging the flavor profile toward sweet or sour. It's a little too tedious to feel rewarding, but if the UI saw a bit of clean-up, I think Wētā Workshop would be on to something. Relegating those recipe details to UI elements in the corner of the screen didn't do much to express that my hobbit's knife technique mattered. The menus look like they're an afterthought, rather than complementing the cutesy kitchen decor.

Setting the table, surprisingly, was way more fun. You get to move dishes around and get creative with how to present the spread. It's a chore I absolutely hate at Thanksgiving but loved in my miniature Tolkien home.

That's when I leaned into the I'm-going-to-make-a-mess approach. It only took a few minutes of playing around to realize decorating my hobbit home was surprisingly free. There were hardly any restrictions on dragging things from inside to the outside or vice versa, so I took a bunch of cups outdoors to cozy up my garden as makeshift vases. It was also quite easy to move around garden beds and accessories, with no penalties for setting something down and picking it right back up.

By the time I was done with my demo I'd uprooted the whole damn garden and confined everything to a corner. It left the rest of the yard pathetically barren, but with more time, I would've done whatever quest or chore the other hobbits requested of me to get more furniture and plants. My inevitable jungle of a yard would violate a novel's worth of HOA rules anywhere else, but I'm delighted the hobbits let me get away with it.

This really is the life sim for disgusting maximalists. Much like the number I did in the garden, I spent the remainder of my time piling household items together in the dining room. To my disappointment there were a few non-decorable surfaces like the dining table, but since you'll regularly place tasty spreads there, I get it. Instead I focused on stacking pillows, bowls, books, and potatoes in a cupboard. I understand the combination makes no sense, but that's where Tales of the Shire and I are in sync.

It's a bummer I wasn't more endeared by passing interactions with the villagers, though. There's not much that sets them apart from each other, and their banter isn't quite as interesting as their surroundings. In Animal Crossing, the striking designs and personalities of the townsfolk are the game's biggest strength; those little guys carry the whole thing. On the flip side, actually decorating your grid-based home is limiting to the point I lose interest fast. Tales of the Shire theoretically meets my biggest need. It has all of the decorating features I long for in its closest mainstream cozy cousin, but I'm a little worried the personality I can create in my home won't extend to the actual NPCs, or even the UI. But I'll listen to any of the little gossips if they give me more stuff to feed my charming piles of mess.

I love a good comforting decorating game as much as the next person. I've sunk more time into dressing up everything from farmyards and homes to full islands than I could comfortably reveal. But I can't lie, over the last few months I have found myself getting bored of the routine of picking up and placing furniture in a desperate attempt to make something visually appealing. That's until I played the demo of Twinkleby, which reminded me that I don't need to make something picture perfect every time to still have fun.

Rather than being tasked with a huge amount of land, or an entire house to decorate, the demo of Twinkleby gives you a fairly small island to let your creativity run wild on. You're also given a selection of furniture and decor to place, including two small houses which you can decorate internally too. From the get-go, you can immediately place everything wherever you want. The only restriction is making sure it doesn't overlap with any other item you've already put down. Even that can be easily avoided since it's just as easy to move items around as it is to put them down in the first place.

With that said, you're only given a limited amount of each thing, with the opportunity to unlock later down the line when you've progressed slightly further and collected falling stars that land on your map while you're building your little world. Given the amount of space you're working with in the demo, you don't really want much more than you're given though.

Otherwise, you'll have random potted plants and bookcases scattered around. As much as I praise the freedom you're given to decorate wherever and no need to make things so visually appealing, even I wouldn't dare put inside furniture outside. Thankfully, among your items you're also given things like trees, bushes, and rocks alongside streetlamps, bridges, and park benches to decorate with rather than relying on household furniture.

The thing I loved most about the demo of Twinkleby is the fact you are decorating with a purpose. In games like Tiny Glade, I enjoyed the freedom but couldn't help feeling slightly off put by the fact I had no real reason outside of a sense of accomplishment to create something satisfying. You're not just doing it for your own pleasure. You will get visitors who want to live on your island and reside in the houses you've just meticulously crafted. Not only that, these visitors have needs they want you to meet too.

For example, the two visitors I had both arrived hungry, so I set up a picnic spot next to the river with enough food to hopefully satisfy both of my guests. Yeah, okay, this did also feature an entire roast chicken and a plate of what I assumed to be empire biscuits but you never know what someone is craving, and I wasn't given an entire menu of items to choose from so had to work with what I had. Before you judge me, both of my little visitors happily tucked in and enjoyed the meal.

But, as is the way with all demos, you're only given a small portion of the game and your experience with Twinkleby is capped after two neighbours have come to live on your island. Which conveniently, is just as I started to feel myself slip into the headspace of letting hours fly by as I carefully created my perfect island. You can't expand any further than the land you're given, and you will run out of furniture (if you don't run out of island first) if you keep playing past the wishlist screen. There's no denying that it has left me wanting more.

Unfortunately though, Twinklyby doesn't have a release date yet. The Steam page states a window of 2025, but it could be a while before I'm back to playing God and welcoming new friends to my gorgeously decorated islands in the sky. Sure, that gives me plenty of time to brush up on my feng shui knowledge to give myself a headstart on creating my next island. But until then, maybe I'll go back to my library of other games with a heavy emphasis on decorating to see if my skills have improved in any way.

The golden age of MMOs is no more—while it does still get new entries as a genre, we're long past the gold rush of the early 2010s, where it seemed like everyone and their mum was trying to make a new multiplayer world to jog around in. The handful of big boys remaining aren't relics by any means—they still have new, fresh expansions and bustling playerbases—but there's a reason why most popular current MMOs are at least 5-10 years old.

That's something that Raph Koster, an MMO designer vet who worked on the original granddaddy of MMOs, Ultima Online, has observed in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+. In it, he discusses his upcoming MMO, Stars Reach (there's not a missing apostrophe there, before you ask) and its place within the industry.

In case you're unfamiliar, Stars Reach seems poised to be one of them sandbox MMO jobbies—resurrecting the same kind of player-generated-content vibes that Star Wars: Galaxies had going for it back in the day, but with all the fancy modern tech and base-building stuff you'd expect from something like Minecraft.

That Star Wars: Galaxies thing is an apt comparison, too—since, as promised on its Kickstarter, there'll be lots of non-combat skills to level up. The promised roster of potential jobs includes (but is not limited to) things like explorers, crafters, botanists, merchants, and journalists. Finally, some representation!

This is important context for a quote I'm about to gently pick apart, wherein Koster states that MMOs have "been in a rut for a long time … We haven't seen a lot of innovation in the space. There haven't been that many major titles over the last decade or two. The template set by World of Warcraft continues to kind of dominate, and it's narrowed down what used to be a much more diverse genre."

Koster theorises that it's down to 'cosy' games (your Animal Crossings and such) giving players what they used to get out of more socially-driven MMOs. "We've seen [what] people want to do in Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley and all these other kinds of cozy games which are also an offshoot of sandbox MMOs, so all of those kinds of things are mostly absent these days from theme park MMOs."

Koster does have a point—the socially driven, sandbox-style MMO where players can properly carve out a niche for themselves has, indeed, given over to the theme park-style gameplay, where killing stuff is the focus and everything else is sort of secondary. However, I think it's a bit of a misnomer to say they're absent. The people who yearn for this stuff have just made their own second world. With blackjack, and night clubs.

Most MMOs have a housing system, one which allows them to create some pretty outstanding stuff. Even WoW, which has been dragging its feet on that front, is ramping up to do player housing in the future. Coming from FF14 primarily myself, I can say for certain that player housing is a huge part of the ecosystem—potentially even to its detriment.

While systems-driven roleplay classes have gone the way of the dodo, a lot of that energy has been funneled into roleplay communities. Games like Final Fantasy 14 still have night clubs, markets, and tournaments—go into the right server on World of Warcraft, and you'll see players emergently doing similar. It's just firmly in the realm of imagination (and interface addons) now.

In other words, the "fantasy of a more immersive parallel world" Koster cites is still very much alive and well and being held up by the genre's more dedicated digital LARPers, but as far as a game where the mechanics themselves support that kind of stuff? Player housing aside, it's true—no-one's modernised that old-school template yet. Koster's adamant, though, that he doesn't want to pull a Wildstar and try to rehash things "the way that they were 20 years ago". Stars Reach has already soared over its initial Kickstarter goal, and I'm keen to see if his team can pull it off.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure arrived this week as the newest and cutest in the genre of 'games where you're stuck on an island with those licensed property characters you love' but hold your darn Turfys just a minute. HKIA has kicked off its PC launch with a warning that bringing your cheater-pants system date changing strats to this game could muck up your save file. So don't do it!

If you check the "Sunblink mail" section of your in-game menu for notices from the developer, you'll spot one ominously titled "time manipulation breaks the game."

That will sound familiar to a lot of Animal Crossing players who are familiar with a cheat involving changing their Nintendo hardware's device time for a date in the future. Since Animal Crossing—and lots of games of a similar style like HKIA—involve tracking real-world time to control growth of plants, in-game seasons, or other time-gated content, players can often unlock those things early or just make progress faster by cheating their games into believing extra time has passed. The warning mail for HKIA reads:

"Many players may be used to time manipulation or 'time travel' from other cozy games, but in Hello Kitty Island Adventure, it can permanently compromise your save file. Here's what to know: You will lose access to multiplayer. Time-based functionality (daily items spawning, flowers growing, and events progressing) will not work retroactively. There is nothing we can do to restore a save file once it is in this state."

A week after launch, Sunblink has reiterated to PC Gamer that time-travelling can cause irreversible game breaking bugs and cause you to miss out on seasonal content. Here's what it said:

• Players will not be able to play with friends or complete multiplayer quests, even if the other players have also time-skipped
• Players will be unable to trade with other players
• No access to friend cabins
• Exclusion from future seasonal events and/or limited-time content, even if you engage with them in the future (such as birthdays or holidays), because their content is not yet released/implemented
• Resetting of event calendars when moving between years

"Note that these effects are per save file and kick in when the save file is accessed," Sunblink adds. "Normal travel through time zones and across the dateline should not trigger any of these. Adjusting the clock when the game is closed, as long as it is reset to real time, should not trigger any of these."

Although you can get away with this cheaty stuff in Animal Crossing: New Horizons—I had multiple friends who raced ahead to summer season within the week of its March launch back in 2020—doing so in Hello Kitty Island Adventure is clearly a big no-no. Losing an entire save file to corruption is not something you'll want to deal with.

So if you're jumping in thanks to the new PC release, make sure to try out some Hello Kitty Island Aventure multiplayer with pals and maybe cheat just a little bit by referencing our Hello Kitty Island Adventure gifts guide. But don't go time travelling: Or you won't be coming back.

Cozy games are spoiling me lately because there is now not just one, but a second little management game combining my two loves: books and little shop simulators. There may be nothing cozy about working retail in real life, but Book Bound boils the task of slinging paperbacks down to a pleasant little sim, with a demo that you can play right now.

Book Bound begins with taking over an empty shop by setting up a register, some shelves, and stocking them with a few books to attract customers. When you open the shop, passersby will wander in and peruse the selection, and apparently they appreciate thoroughness and organization. You get bonuses when you've stocked shelves dedicated to a single genre—Fantasy and Romance so far in the demo. You'll quickly make cash change for their purchases and then end the day by buying new furniture to decorate with and stocking the shelves with new books.

What I enjoyed is how realistically infuriating customers can be, even with a pretty small set of interactions. They'll often leave books in the wrong place (on the ground) and leave behind trash for you to clean. They'll also sometimes ask if you have a particular book in stock, meaning you've got to learn the pixelated covers for each title by sight, and of course they'll sometimes ask while standing directly in front of a shelf full of the book in question. Typical customers.

Unlike the other adorable book shop sim in the works, Tiny Bookshop, which uses real classic book titles as its store stock, Book Bound goes for made-up (but totally believable) titles like The Dark Queen's Secret, Nasty Creature, Dogs of Mystery, and Hot Ring. And yes, Hot Ring is in fact a fantasy book, not a romance. Maybe it's secretly a romantasy.

That's about all there is to Book Bound for now. Its developer Bit66 tells me that decorating the shop is the main goal—which as a decor and building fan in most games is totally good with me. There are different sized shelves to try out, plants and other comfy decor, and more. I was pretty pleased with my little fantasy-focused shop after about an hour.

Book Bound is planning a full launch in the first quarter of 2025 and will be participating in the Steam Next Fest at the end of February—but of course the demo's available now anyhow.

As for the future, there will be five total genres of books to stock and some additional features for the demo over time. Bit66 says "Players can expect post-launch free updates until I believe that Book Bound is complete." You can find it to wishlist and keep track of on Steam.

This year's crop of cozy games felt like it ran completely perpendicular to the trends in PC gaming as a whole. The main release calendar for this year was mostly lacking obvious blockbusters, leaving room for some really delightful surprise hits. Meanwhile, the best cozy games of this year mostly wound up being the ones that I'd been anticipating since last year and I wasn't as taken in by the surprise hits that this indie-infused corner of the hobby usually delivers.

I'm certainly not closing this year disappointed though. I've got at least one new entry on my list of best games like Stardew Valley and a lot of other good cozy contenders for the year.

Top 5 Cozy games of 2024

1. Fields of Mistria
2. Sky: Children of the Light
3. Infinity Nikki
4. Tiny Glade
5. Rusty's Retirement

Some other cozy games I liked that didn't quite make top five status: Minami Lane, Reka, Everholm, Neva, and Gourdlets.

Fields of Mistria

Style: Farm sim

Every year we're inundated with more cozy farm sim games but each year there's always one that manages to outshine the rest. Fields of Mistria harkens back to the Harvest Moon games of the '90s and magical girl anime of the same era wrapped up in very colorful Game Boy Advance-looking visuals. It is without a doubt a farm sim by farm simmers with tons of little ease of use features like jumping over fences or NPCs appearing on the map that Stardew fans have long handled with mods.

Mistria's real success is its fantastic cast and earnest dialogue. I don't think it's possible to play without falling in love with the townies' weekly tabletop RPG meetup at the inn or with all of the glorious anime-inspired outfits. Seeing several townies wear jackets draped over their shoulders with the empty arms hanging is pure nostalgia bait.

Even in early access, Fields of Mistria is an obvious new must-play addition to the farm sim canon of games like Stardew Valley.

Read more: Oh no, I can't possibly decide who to date in anime-inspired farm sim Fields of Mistria when I'm already in love with all of them

Sky: Children of the Light

Style: Social MMO platformer

A social MMO built on the back of 2012's flying adventure Journey shouldn't work. On principle, I want developers to stop pivoting beloved games into live service affairs but Sky: Children of the Light is the exception that proves my rule: It does work. Sky had already been around for nearly five years when it arrived on PC in April and since then I've already sunk another 130 hours into it. It's allegedly (still) in early access but this has been a complete game with seasonal content for years now.

Sky feels small initially: it's around three hours of a short main campaign in which you fly around meeting spirits who teach you new emotes. You'll encounter other players running about in a similar anonymized fashion as in Journey but it's easy to make acquaintances who are just itching to share secret shortcuts with you.

After your first run through the ending (an ascent to a mountaintop that also feels very familiar from Journey) Sky opens up massively. There's a huge map to explore, constantly being added to with new seasons of content that also drop in new questlines and spirits. As with all MMOs, fashion is the real endgame and the grind for outfits never ends. I'm still delighted by the secret platforming puzzles and hidden areas and spent the year making a whole constellation of new friends and acquaintances to meet up with in game.

Read more: MMOs still have so much room to grow

Infinity Nikki

Style: Open world adventure

Speaking of endgame fashion, the Nikki series of dress-up games debuted on PC this year with a huge open world adventure and I've been enthralled with it. I knew it would only take the right genre of game for one of these gacha joints to finally get me and Infinity Nikki is the one.

Nikki is nominally a dress up game where your goal is to collect clothes and compete in styling challenges but there's a lot more to it than that. It's also an open world platforming and collectathon adventure where you'll play agility minigames, do sidequests, and hunt for hidden treasures. It's the perfect mix of activities to make my evening hours disappear as I take on just one more styling battle against the Ebony Scissors before running off to climb the top of a tower where another collectible Whimstar is perched.

Infinity Nikki is a gacha game, a very specific style of freemium monetization that until now hadn't started making inroads to the cozy gaming genre on PC. The various currencies can be daunting to a newbie but it's still a great open world romp even if you guard your wallet and stick to playing for free.

Read more: Don't sleep on Infinity Nikki's stylist battles like I did—they're secretly one of the coolest parts of the game

Tiny Glade

Style: Building toy

Tiny Glade is a delight for anyone with a builder's soul. This is for everyone who plays The Sims entirely in build mode or lays out out their Stardew Valley farms in intricate aesthetic patterns. It gets compared to Townscaper a lot, for lack of a better touchstone, because its procedural system reacts to how you combine objects together. Walking paths drawn intersecting with fences will create archways in those fences while windows on a building placed at ground level turn into doors, and so on.

It invites so much creativity, always promising that when I try new combinations of its relatively small set of objects that I'll be able to find interesting ways to use them. I'm thrilled by little discoveries like creating sewer grates on buildings surrounded by water, for instance. It's also inspired the same maverick builders that do Sims speedbuilds or MMO housing to repurpose objects and push the system to its limits to create wild possibilities.

What I enjoy most though its how far this single game pushed forward a micro genre that Townscaper created. There are more procedural building toys incoming now, but Tiny Glade singlehandedly set the bar quite high for what's possible with the tech.

Read more: Tiny Glade won't stop delighting me with new discoveries

Rusty's Retirement

Style: Idler farm sim

Rusty's Retirement should be marked NSFW, not because of any adult material (it's adorable) but because it can destroy your productivity. It's an idle game farm sim that snaps to the lower quarter of your monitor and runs while you do normal tasks around it. Instead of wandering about the town like in Stardew, your expanding collection of little robots care for your growing farm while you decide what to play and which upgrades to buy.

Rusty gives just the right amount of control—letting me fiddle with the placements of all my fields and decorations and upgrades so that I have plenty of say in my layout. Be warned though that it does take quite a while to get to the point where your farm is fully automated because the robot who will replant seeds for you is pretty costly. So for a while you'll be manually replanting whenever bare fields catch the corner of your eye.

I wouldn't think a glorified desktop pet from the 2000s could be one of the best cozy games I played this year but it genuinely is. Rusty's Retirement brought something I never would have expected to a genre that's felt a little at risk of going stale and it did so in the most satisfying fashion.

Read more: Idle farming sim Rusty's Retirement allows you to pour hours into farmwork whilst still doing other things

Bonus sixth cozy game pick

The Garden Path

Style: Garden life sim

The Garden Path feels like a life simulator stripped from a storybook. In its dappled watercolour world, you'll meet a cast of whimsical yet slightly unsettling vegetable-headed characters, alongside some friendly animals. All of which are ready to send you out on a foraging quest or ask for your help on re-decorating an abandoned garden. If you want to slowly restore what could be a fairytale garden entirely at your own pace with no pressure, then The Garden Path is waiting for you.

Although it does have a lot of the more traditional elements of cozy games, such as fishing and gardening, the formula is shaken up slightly by the pacing. Like Animal Crossing, it follows a 24-hour clock, but you're not tethered to following a 365 day cycle. Instead, four seasons spread across 28 real-world days, which is slightly easier to manage than a whole year and also give you the chance to skip out on certain seasons you're not a huge fan of—no one likes winter in these sorts of games.

It's the epitome of a game you can pick up and put down when you fancy which is what I think makes the best kind of cozy game. Time passes slowly in the background but you never feel the pressure of meeting deadlines. Some days I've signed in and had a few jobs to do, other days I've had nothing to do so I've walked around picking up ingredients for tea. It's as laid back as you want to make it, and you'll never feel the consequence of stopping to smell the roses everyone once in a while.

Read more: Relaxing gardening simulator The Garden Path is the breath of fresh air I've been in desperate need of

For fans of cozy games, October may not be the time to pull out horror game classics like Amnesia but it definitely is time to pull out our best autumn vibe games. Now that we've been well and truly inundated in the cozy game trend, it gets harder and harder to figure out which games are worth spending time on, especially when you're looking for a particular theme. Whether you're in the mood for something a little witchy or slightly spooky, these are my absolute favorite cozy games to pull out in the month of October.

For an up-to-date list of year round recommendations you can also check out our list of best cozy games and best games like Stardew Valley.

Reka

Find it on: Steam (Steam Deck mostly playable, in my experience)

This witchy crafting game was one of my most anticipated for this year and now that it's released into early access it's a stellar October vibe. As a young apprentice witch you'll tour the countryside in a chicken-legged house with famous folklore witch Baba Jaga as your mentor. You'll spend your time putting spirits to rest, wandering the Slavic eastern Germany-inspired landscape, and decorating your creepy cottage on legs.

As of early access launch, Reka had some slightly finicky quest order bugs you can run into but even so this thing is all vibes and they are immaculate. The first hour or so of the game where you meet Baba Jaga and do a ritual to inherit her house is so much more intense with visual effects and music than I had expected.

Roadwarden

Find it on: Steam (Steam Deck "playable"), GOG

This classic illustrated text adventure game feels just like curling up with tea and a brand new fantasy book and it's got a distinctly creepy, mysterious story. You're the new warden in a countryside where the wildlife is eerily dangerous and the townspeople are wary of your presence. It's your job to help clear out obstacles, be they fallen trees or stubborn mayors, and report back to your superiors within a time limit to assess the area for new trade opportunities.

You'll have to manage your travel times, food supplies, and rest as you explore several towns and try to wheedle information out of the locals. But you'll likely wind up embroiled in unexplained magic, missing people, and ancient rituals. In classic text adventure style, Roadwarden relies on you to explore by typing in commands and questions at key moments, while others are handled with dialogue options. It's a perfect adventure when you're in the mood for mystery.

Kynseed

Find it on: Steam (Steam Deck verified), GOG

It may look like Stardew Valley initially, and in some ways it is, but Kynseed is as much like a spooky sort of Fable as anything else. After your first idyllic season caring for a family farm with your uncle and brother, things get weird very fast. This world is full of capricious gods and dire consequences and unsettling scenery which is all perfect for fall.

Kynseed is a farming and trading game where you'll live through generations of family farm inheritance and occasionally stumble off into some combat. Unlike the very recognizable casts in other farming sims, though, this one's more of a social sandbox of making friends and enemies in each lifetime as you become a rancher or a store owner. If you've ever drooled over clips of Studio Ghibli characters making food, you're going to love the cooking minigames in Kynseed.

Potion Craft

Find it on: Steam (Steam Deck verified), GOG, Nintendo Switch

Imagine a shop sim where you don't really want to have to run a shop and instead just want to stay locked up brewing new recipes every day. That's basically Potion Craft. Sure, you barter with customers and sell them your brews every day, but the best parts of this game are grinding ingredients, discovering new recipes, and designing the perfect label for each of your custom named potions.

The bit of Potion Craft that I'll always gush over is the very manual action of tossing herbs in a mortar and pestle, grinding them up, stirring your cauldron, and cranking a bellows to seal the process. It just feels like a quintessential alchemist witch experience. Finding new recipes involves using your ingredients' unique properties to explore a map of possible effects, which makes experimenting all the more fun.

Wytchwood

Find it on: Steam (Steam Deck verified), GOG, Nintendo Switch

Just in case that wasn't enough witches for you, here's one more. Wytchwood is a crafting adventure game with an emphasis on the adventure part. You aren't hoarding crafting ingredients and making money in this one, instead you're collecting bits and bobs to solve puzzles as you explore the countryside.

Like Reka and Kynseed, this one is dripping with folklore elements and grim fairytales. Wearing a cauldron like a helmet, you'll travel around cursing bandits, tricking wolves, and harvesting ingredients from mythical beasts in a very autumnal, storybook world.

Beacon Pines

Find it on: Steam (Steam Deck verified), GOG, Nintendo Switch

Beacon Pines is a narrative adventure game where instead of collecting items you're collecting words in conversations and playing them like Mad Libs to unlock new parts of the story. It's a classic horror movie setting in an idyllic rural town that used to revolve around a factory that's since shut down. Now folks are disappearing and it's up to some young animal protagonists to figure out what kind of creepy plot is eating away at Beacon Pines.

It's a bit like an old "choose your own adventure" book where half the fun is finding the choices that will get you killed and end one of the story branches only to go back and explore other paths. By the end, you'll fill out the whole story book and solve the mystery of the old factory town.

Whether or not action RPG Dungeons of Hinterberg can be considered a cozy game is definitional. The traditional cozy game is relaxing, pastel-hued, and likely centered around quaint, repetitive gameplay that reassures and calms the player. Stardew Valley for farming; A Short Hike for strolling; Dorfromantik for tile-laying.

Hinterberg's dungeon delving and monster slaying do break the mold a bit, but you'll be doing both with a gentle, cartoonish art style swaddling you. And with a significant amount of the game dedicated to solving puzzles in picturesque environments, the comparison inevitably presents itself.

There’s no gore in Dungeons of Hinterberg, and the violence is stylized, taking place against gooey, inhuman mobs that feel more like the creatures from Jeff Smith’s Bone than wild animals. Protagonist Luisa spends her evenings making friends, shopping, and wandering the village. It is many ways exactly what it says on the tin: a vacation sim, where Luisa is able to relax away from the stresses of her daily life in the city. So that's it: Open and shut cozy, right?

But development studio Microbird’s aspirations aren’t quite that simple.

"When you run into someone you don’t quite vibe with, that’s where the cozy game label might not quite apply to us," says Philipp Seifried, cofounder of Microbird. "I feel like most cozy games pamper you in this way, where everyone is nice to you, or even if they’re not nice to you [...] they’re so over the top in their grumpiness that you just laugh at them."

Dungeons of Hinterberg doesn’t lock its characters into that simplistic of classifications. "There are a couple of characters that we expect people to not necessarily [want to] hang out with," says Seifried, mentioning Gertrude, a rich older widow who’s disdainful of the changes made to Hinterberg since she began vacationing there as a younger woman, and Thea, a local teen whose attitude is abrasive verging on disrespectful before she warms up to Luisa. 

Dungeons of Hinterberg also stretches the cozy game classification with its approach to complicated topics like tourism, professionalism, and burnout. There’s almost a metagame element to it: Luisa is trying to relax, destress and reorient herself by escaping to Hinterberg to challenge the dungeons, but life keeps getting in the way—in this case the reality of what the massive influx of unregulated tourism from the dungeons has done to Hinterberg.

"It has an effect on the place you are visiting," says Regina Reisinger, cofounder of Microbird. "There are people who profit immensely [from the tourism] but if you are a schoolteacher your life is not necessarily going to be improved if there are hundreds of tourists to walk past each day." 

It’s a remarkably apt metaphor for cozy games as a genre, which have been criticized for the romanticization of things like agriculture, food service, and gig work. In order for a game to be cozy, the argument goes, it has to make labor or work unilaterally fun, stripping it of its real-world context and presenting an idealized version in which the inconveniences do not interrupt the experience. Dungeons of Hinterberg embraces these inconveniences, tying them into the narrative of Luisa’s vacation.

By interrupting the comfortable routine that might define a cozy game, it gives Hinterberg texture and definition—but still lets Luisa catch her breath in the woods, when she needs it. And as I dive into in my review, it balances these themes with a deft hand. 

Though "cozy" may be one of the more difficult genre trends to pin a definition on, there are ever more of us looking for the next game that's chill, creative, cute, or some mix thereof. And in response to that growing audience, our choices for best cozy games just keep multiplying. This year looks like it's going to be even bigger, so here are the 10 cozy games I'm most looking forward to in 2024.

In addition to the below, I'm rather looking forward to serial killer farm sim Grave Seasons, frog rescue game Kamaeru, and vampire farm sim Moonlight Peaks, though none of them have committed to a 2024 window yet—I'm just having wishful thinking on those.

Reka 

I've been seriously psyched about Reka since last year. It's a building and witchcrafting game infused with slavic mythology, its developers told me. As the apprentice to Baba Jaga, you'll build your own chicken-legged cottage to follow you around the world as you collect ingredients, craft potions, decorate your home, and pacify ghosts or the spirits of animals. I'm fully ready for a witch game that's not about a cute girl in a pointed cap but a woman practicing her craft in the woods.

Fields of Mistria 

But let's be real, I still also do want cute farm sims with pastel colors and Fields of Mistria is exactly that. Inspired by magical girl anime and RPGs of the '90s, Mistria looks like it's following the Stardew style of fishing, farming, ranching, marriage, and property ownership that many of us still have an appetite for. Mistria looks intensely adorable and I've already caught myself humming that catchy theme song. Looking at the cast though, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to choose just one potential spouse.

Tales of the Shire 

Private Division says "your cosy Hobbit life awaits" and calls this a "heart-warming" game. We don't know much about Tales of the Shire other than sketchy clues and conjecture from its reveal trailer: some hobbit homes, foods, highland cows, and signposts. The most recent Lord of the Rings games haven't been all that great, between Return to Moria and Gollum, so I'm really hoping that Weta Workshop nails this cozy take on Middle-Earth. 

Nivalis 

The studio behind well-liked Cloudpunk is taking us back to its cyberpunk city Nivalis not as a driving simulation, but as a life sim. This time we'll be able to own and manage businesses, buy and decorate apartments, go boating and fishing, and pursue romance in the highly vertical, neon city. This is definitely going to be on the darker side of "cozy" but I can't wait to hit the streets of this city.

Europa 

This Ghibli-inspired adventure is obviously lovely to look at, and I've got a good feeling about the exploration by gliding and surfing. It's set on Jupiter's terraformed moon Europa where your little android child Zee jetpacks through the sky to solve puzzles and uncover the history of the last human. This one actually has a demo available on Steam now, and it's planning to launch in April 2024.

Tiny Glade 

This adorable game is for the folks who just love building. Like Townscaper, this is a lovely digital sandbox that responds to the way you build, but with way more detail and control. You can construct provincial little hamlets or rustic castles, drawing walking paths and walls, plopping in windows, terrain editing, and aging your builds into ruins. Even more than playing it myself, I think I most want to see all the creative builds that others create with it.

Lightyear Frontier 

I didn't realize that farm sims needed mechs until I saw this space-y take on crafting, and now it seems so obvious. What are mechs but personified tractors? Honestly the customization of mechs looks just as fun as plotting out fields. Oh, and Lightyear Frontier is going to have multiplayer as well, which is a big plus in a crafting game for me. It will start off in early access in March, 2024. 

Sky: Children of the Light

I've already played plenty of this online social puzzle game from Journey's developer but it's finally, finally coming to PC in 2024 after several years on mobile and console. It's got all the heart and goosebump-inducing soundtrack of Journey but in an MMO-lite type experience and I'm very ready to share it with PC players. Thatgamecompany has done a lot of adding new areas and events to Sky since its launch, meaning there's going to be plenty for new players to chew on when it shows up. 

Echoes of the Plum Grove 

There's a special place in my heart for the Paper Mario-inspired aesthetic Plum Grove has. As with other farm sims, it begins with inheriting a property you'll need to fix up as you learn the lay of town, cook, farm, and forage. This one is all about leaving a legacy though, as your character will eventually die and pass on the farm to future generations. It seems to have a shade of Fable to it also, with the option to insult and make enemies of your neighbors and not just friends.

The new Story of Seasons 

OK, so Marvelous hasn't actually revealed a name or release date for the next Story of Seasons game yet, but I'm feeling really optimistic about it. The Story of Seasons farm games (formerly known as Harvest Moon before that name was taken on by different developers) are what we have to thank for inspiring our modern crop of cozy farm sims and Marvelous is working on two new games in the series. 

Marvelous showed just a few quick scenes in a summer reveal for the next game and it seems that the "extra effort into the visual presentation" it references is paying off. It recently did a much better job than I expected with a remake of Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, so I'm really hoping that these efforts to modernize the series will give us a classic cozy game in the near future.

This year I made cozy games my entire personality. It wasn't hard. Partly that's because I was already a lover of farm sims and puzzle games, but also because the popularity of "cozy" gaming grew exponentially in 2023. Every week there was a new cute or chill game about gardening or decorating or moving to a pastoral village in the hills. Despite drowning in cozy games (and picking my four favorite cozy games of 2023) I don't think this trend has even peaked. I'm confident that 2024 is going to be the year of cozy conversion.

Unlike so many other game subgenres, "cozy" defies definition a bit because it really isn't about the style of gameplay so much as an overall vibe. Here are just a few things that might make a game one you'd see on a cozy games list:

• It involves gardening, farming, or anything else with plants, really
• The color scheme is pastel
• Its protagonist is a cat or a bunny or any other cute animal
• The gameplay is slow-paced and doesn't demand reflexes
• You're managing a cafe or pretty much any other kind of shop

Games like Stardew Valley have been on the rise for years at this point, and players looking for these chill, creative experiences had already started to branch out past farm sims. In years past I'd have described the vibe as "casual," and I may have pointed someone to the narrative games we referred to as "walking sims" for a while. In 2019 the Wholesome Games account started sharing updates from games in development, and these days has its own showcase too. In 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons made even more converts of players returning to or first joining the gaming community—and enticing those of us who just want a mood change now and again. So this vibe-based non-genre has been in the works a while.

What changed this year was the full dedication to the unifying word: cozy.

As an animal for analytics, I feel compelled to make my case with graphs and numbers. Here's some Google search history data showing the relative number of searches for cozy games versus wholesome and casual starting in 2020, from the United States alone and then globally. Apologies to the British spelling "cosy" which doesn't have a strong enough presence to include for comparison.

The cozy takeover is pretty clear in the US but you can see the effect from a global view too. Cozy has been on a steady rise since 2021, surpassing "casual" games in the middle of 2022. December of 2022 marks a sharp increase that set the new normal for interest in cozy games and that normal is: a lot.

I can't pin down precisely who or what caused the shift to the "cozy" nomenclature, other than to point at a loose grassroots movement. Independent studio Thunder Lotus revealed Spiritfarer in 2019, which it self-described as "a cozy management game," and was the first time I'd seen the word act as a genre modifier so widely. Though she may not have been the very first, cozy gaming and lifestyle influencer Kennedy started posting videos in January 2021 with the "cozy.games" username, joined by tons of other cozy game accounts since then.

Over the last year and a half farm sims and farm simfluencers have been hopping on the cozy bandwagon in droves. By the beginning of this year, the word was widely used enough that I too made a list of the best cozy games.

I've been following content creators who play a mix of Stardew and The Sims for years now, and I really felt that early 2023 shift to "cozy." It's not all game recommendation lists and let's play videos either. It's also aesthetic videos for cute PC cases, Steam Deck skins, and cottagecore desk setups. I'm not the only one who made cozy a personality trait this year.

As we well know, marketing chases demand, which means that "cozy" games haven't actually peaked yet. I've only received 15 emails from this year that include the term and I'm expecting that number to rocket in 2024 as developers, publishers, and press teams all learn the magic word. 

What that means for us, the cozy gamers, is that things are going to start getting weird. No longer dominated by just farm sims and puzzles, an even wider range of games will start declaring themselves "cozy" to capture our attention. It may get a little overwhelming at times, but we'll be spoiled for choice. At worst, we'll need to have a reckoning with what we believe cozy games to be. But from the community that I've seen unironically calling Skyrim cozy, there may never be a consensus anyway. 

Cozy games are whatever we want them to be, and in 2024 we're going to get more than we can possibly choose from.

This year, I did a bit of personal respeccing of my gaming habits and focused hard on cozy games. Like so many of us, I still love games like Stardew Valley and have given plenty of other farm sims or life sims or "casual" games a try in between Stardew sessions. But the label "cozy" really took off this year—video content creators are using it in their recommendation videos, players are using it amongst ourselves to search for new games to try, and marketing teams are starting to catch on too. So I planted myself in the cozy corner more officially than I had in the past.

There were dozens of self-styled cozy games this year, big and small, packing this new catchall vibes genre with new choices. I tried more than 30 throughout the year and I've narrowed it down to the four I really don't think you should miss if you too are in your cozy era.

Coziest puzzles: Chants of Sennaar 

This very lovely puzzle adventure is easily my top cozy game of the year. It's the one I stretched out into 15 hours over five weeks, constantly thinking about it between play sessions even as I rationed myself so I could enjoy it for as long as possible. Chants of Sennaar is all about dissecting language, but in the most brain-tickling way that never feels like a chore.

As you explore each level of the tower, you'll translate the language of the people who live there, eventually translating between them to help each culture reconnect. Their words are all around you: in dialogue, signposts, clocks, and shops. Each symbol is noted in the phrasebook you're assembling from scratch where you'll note down your guesses for each symbol's meaning. By picking apart lever puzzles and mazes and stealth sections, you'll eventually see each symbol in enough contexts to correctly translate it, building towards your completed translation. 

It's a really engaging process with a nice story threaded through the background, and this won't be the last time you hear me talk about it this year.

See also: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, which is not a puzzle game but is all about a vibe, and that vibe is modern day witches building a tarot deck.

Coziest platforming: Jusant 

I'm still astounded that the studio behind Life Is Strange went totally off-genre for a platforming game and it rocks. It's all about climbing up the side of a huge mountain that was once underwater, taking in the evidence of an abandoned civilization that once riddled the cliff faces.

This is one of those rare cases where a game completely tunnel visions on one single mechanic, and it works beautifully. You just climb. And sometimes you rappel, or zipline, or double jump, or activate weird magical plants that have funky nodules on them that are also handholds. But really you just climb. You steer one hand at a time to your next handhold, solving the puzzle of how to complete each section grip by grip. It's got a lovely soundtrack to boot.

Jusant does highly encourage you to use a gamepad, which I'll second. Pressing and releasing your left and right triggers to grip each rock while steering your next grip with the analog stick just doesn't feel as natural on a keyboard—I tried. It has some good accessibility options too, and in particular I'd point folks to the simplified climbing that saves you from constantly squeezing your triggers. I don't normally feel the need to use control accessibility options, but my hands started to feel a touch of the carpal tunnel after a couple hours of climbing.

See also: Planet of Lana, which hails from the school of children doing perilous platforming and is more towards the cozy horror end of the chill game spectrum.

Coziest building: Fabledom 

Fabledom nails the cozy vibe in form and function both. It's super cute to look at, of course, and you can zoom in to watch your citizens go about their day. But its lighter management load is what makes it cozy to me. I suspect there are people who find all city-builders to be relaxing, but most of them stress me out with overly granular control. 

In Fabledom I have to manage my country's funds, population, overall happiness, my nobility score, and the total of different produced resources—wood, vegetables, coal, grain, bread, iron, and so on. Which for a city builder feels pretty breezy. There are building factors to consider too, like how stone quarries and sawmills affect the desirability of nearby residences and whether that can be offset with decorative structures or community buildings like inns and guilds. And though I've got to manage the distances that people walk from home to work and the distance it takes to carry coal to heat homes in the winter, I don't feel like I'm bogged down in menus all the time.

Fabledom is just challenging enough as a city builder to keep me busy with problem solving without pulling me away from the city design and beautification I want to do too. It's still in early access, but I've already lost more than one weekend to playing it.

See also: Palia, which is a life sim MMO, with a pretty big focus on decorating and customizing your home property as you unlock new tools and resources.

Coziest farming: Roots of Pacha 

If you didn't know better, it would be easy to mistake Roots of Pacha for the next farming sim from Stardew Valley's developer. Its color scheme, character designs, animations, and relationship archetypes all feel extremely familiar. It doesn't stick to imitation all the way through though, introducing lots of its own ideas about collectivism, animal taming, technology discovery, and other themes consistent with its stone age setting. It doesn't have combat at all, which is a plus for me, but may be a con for those who enjoy diving down in the mines outside Pelican Town.

There have been so many new farm sims since Stardew's unexpected success revitalized the genre, but Pacha is the first that really felt like going back to play Stardew for the first time again. If you miss that feeling and have never really recaptured it, Roots of Pacha is the place to go.

See also: Fae Farm, a super cute farm and town sim that's quite easy to get into and with co-op, though less focus on the personalities of the townsfolk.

As part of this week's big summer showcase schedule, Wholesome Games hosted its yearly event to share tons of cute and cozy upcoming games. We saw a release date for the lovely family cooking game Venba and caught up with cat teahouse sim Pekoe coming this month too. Both of those are arriving in short order this summer.

Even though I'm trying so hard to stay true to my cozy game roots this year it can be so difficult to keep track of them all when Wholesome manages to stuff so many into a showcase. You can watch the full Wholesome Games Showcase for yourself to find more, but here are eight games and trailers we think you should really have your eye on.

Lakeburg Legacies 

Launches: July 20, demo now on Steam

Forget laying power lines and sewer systems, Lakeburg Legacy is a city management sim where you're performing the ultimate civic duty of matchmaker. You need to pair up your citizens to optimize resource production and produce excellent progeny. Despite its pastel and pretty visuals, Lakeburg Legacies looks like a pretty deep strategic management game in which Ishtar Games says "everything" is simulated. This is screaming cozy Crusader Kings to me with all that character info to crunch for the perfect match.

Station to Station 

Launches: 2023, demo now on Steam

The beautiful voxel worlds and realistic lighting in Station to Station are cozy enough, but managing train routes is even more pastel and pastoral. You'll connect areas of a small rural world to encourage them to grow and expand. You can just relax and poke at the world or go for optional challenges while building. Station to Station is expected sometime this year but you can give conducting a go in a free demo right now.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge 

Launches: TBA on Steam

This beautiful picture book-style farm sim is about taking care of a frog sanctuary and restoring the wetlands. And just look at all the frogs, hundreds of colors and combinations to create while you decorate their wetlands home and document it all with photographs. There's no release window for Kamaeru yet but it's so lovely I don't want to lose sight of it.

Fields of Mistria 

Launches: 2024 on Steam

Fields of Mistria is channeling a lot of '90s vibes with its bright pixel style and character designs that would look right at home in the sailor scouts. It's a super cute farm sim with all the usual crops, animals, and romance in the village. Mistria showed up to Wholesome Games with another trailer and even though it isn't coming until next year I've absolutely wishlisted it already.

Everdeep Aurora 

Launches: TBA on Steam

I love when a game just nails the vibe of a classic GameBoy game but at modern resolution, and Everdeep Aurora certainly does. It's a puzzle platformer about Shell the cat diving into the depths of the Everdeep finding sidequests and secrets while looking for her missing mother. Truly I could ride on visuals and vibes alone with this one but the interface with a growing map on the right panel and quest items and tooltips on the left just has this cozy old game quality to it.

Moonstone Island 

Launches: 2023 on Steam

Life sims and creature collecting feel like they're holding hands more often lately and I'm happy to see another contender. Moonstone Island has over 100 procedurally generated islands to explore, spirits to collect, and crops to farm, which are all pretty much catnip to me. There are dungeons and turn-based battles too, all while you undergo alchemy training. It really doesn't get better than Pokemon/Stardew/Wind Waker/Witches for me. Oh, and it looks like your home has chicken legs. When did everyone get so into Baba Yaga references?

Mineko's Night Market 

Launches: September 26 on Steam

Long in the works and finally arriving, you don't want to miss Mineko's Night Market when it debuts this fall, just in time to be mildly spooky. In this little life sim you'll explore a Japanese-inspired island that's got a lot of cat lore, all while collecting materials for your handcrafted goods to sell at the titular night market. Get ready for minigames too: There's woodworking and flower snipping and ring tossing and so many more tiny activities on the island.

KarmaZoo 

Launches: TBA on Steam

There are lots of ways to help your friends in co-op platformer KarmaZoo. Spit on them to make them sticky so they can climb walls. Kill yourself so your tombstone gives them a place to stand on a row of deadly spikes. I know that sounds a bit grim and gross, but it's not: KarmaZoo is an "altruistic cooperative platformer" you play with a crowd of complete strangers, using the unusual abilities of the game's 50 different characters (including trees, whales, spiders, and singing dogs) to triumph. It looks like a hoot.

Cozy gaming has never been so popular. Each showcase and announcement offers a plethora of wholesome, heartwarming games that stray from the traditionally competitive nature of video games which means they are never in short supply. However, this does give us more titles to wade through outside of the big hitters like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing.

Although the term "cozy game" doesn't have just one set definition, the consensus is that the experience offers everything from soft visuals to gameplay that doesn't demand too much. Because of this, lots of cozy game recommendations echo the Stardew Valley farming formula, but there are hundreds of games that fall into the cozy game category that stray from yard work and raising livestock. But, if you do want something that replicates the farming experience, we've got a list of the best games like Stardew Valley too.

If you're looking for a new bunch to shake up the old favorites, we've pulled together a list of equal parts cute and chill games that won't have you tilling the soil until the sun comes up. If you want something driven by narrative, simple puzzles that put your mind at ease, or pastel-colored rhythm games, we've got something that is bound to suit you.

Tiny Bookshop

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: neoludic games | Steam

Tiny Bookshop sets you the challenge of abandoning your normal life to open a tiny mobile bookshop by the sea. You'll manage your stock and cater your shelves to your customers' needs, while advising what novels they should lose themselves in next. You even get to decorate your little trailer for added aesthetic points, which is definitely a plus. Tiny Bookshop is an incredibly sweet and simple game to sink hours into, which lets you live the life a lot of us cozy gamers dream of.

Tiny Glade

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Pounce Light | Steam

Sit back and doodle castles, cottages, and landscapes until your heart is content in Tiny Glade. There's no pressure to unlock tools or skills, and no need to prepare for combat. Instead, you're just encouraged to let your creativity run wild with whatever you fancy building. Whether you're creating something entirely new or trying to recreate a scene from your favorite Studio Ghibli movie, Tiny Glade makes it incredibly easy for you to slip hours into without realizing it.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: Sunblink Entertainment | Steam

Scratch the itch of having Animal Crossing on PC, but replace all of its well known characters with Hello Kitty and her friends. You'll explore all sorts of environments with a variety of quirky characters as you make your way across Friendship Island. Quests, timed challenges, and seasonal events are ready to keep you entertained too. Who doesn't love a Sanrio bestie?

Once Upon a Katamari

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: RENGAME

Because what could be more relaxing than frantic, bite-sized levels that set you one simple challenge: rolling up as much as you possibly can? Once Upon a Katamari is the first mainline Katamari game in 14 years, and it certainly lives up to the expectations. It's silly, fun, and incredibly moreish. It might not be your traditional pastel colored cozy game, it's got a sense of familiarity everyone is sure to love.

Jusant

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Don't Nod | Steam

Jusant is all about climbing to the top of a world that was once underwater with your tiny magical companion. It's hyper-focused on the rock-climbing system that Don't Nod developed but it's not nearly as intense as that makes it sound. This is akin to a puzzle platformer where you're always trying to figure out how to access the next area by combining the maneuvers you've been taught: belay climbing, swinging, using magical plants or wind to your advantage, and more. This is one that just feels so physical as you grip the left and right triggers on your controller (which Don't Nod recommends, as do I) to move your left and right hands steadily up to each new handhold.

Chants of Sennaar

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Rundisc | Steam

Chants of Sennaar is an adventure game about learning languages and it was my personal favorite game of 2023. Each area of the tower you're ascending is occupied by a different group of people with their own language. By talking to people around you, examining murals and shop signs, and all the other clues hidden in the environment, you begin to piece together the meanings of each word. Taking notes in your sketchbook is a great record of how your thought process changes as you puzzle each language out while you uncover the truth about the tower and how all these people stopped communicating.

Mineko's Night Market

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Meowza Games | Steam

If you want a new way to explore Japanese culture cutely, then Mineko's Night Market will appeal. This narrative-driven social sim will ask you to craft various enchanting items to sell at the night market and befriend a cadre of cats to help you on the journey. You'll also have to complete various quests and challenges which help add a little more structure to the game but maintain the relaxing atmosphere.

Summerhouse 

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Friedemann | Steam

Summerhouse is the epitome of channeling creativity through cozy gaming. It's a small-scale building game that asks you to create a neighbourhood of beautiful homes in various settings, but with no rules or restrictions, so you are free to let your imagination run wild. We all know that the best part of games like The Sims is building the house, and fortunately this game is just all about free building.

Journey

Release Date: 2012 (2020 on PC) | Developer: Thatgamecompany | Steam

Journey is an old classic that predates the cozy game trend but it holds up incredibly well after getting ported to PC. It's a wordless adventure from a desert up to the top of a mountain accompanied by an incredible soundtrack that was the first from a videogame to ever be nominated for a Grammy Award. Journey will make you experience the full spectrum of emotions with a silent protagonist as you sand surf through ruins, fly with magic carpet whales, and eventually brave the snowy peaks.

Toem

Release Date: 2021 | Developer: Something We Made | Steam

For a game all in black and white, Toem has so much personality. This is an adventure game where you solve puzzles and riddles by using your camera to photograph things around you. The stamp book challenges are really nice classic adventure game stuff that force you to pay attention to all the world's surroundings. It's also a pretty short game which you can complete in three or four hours.

Donut County

Release Date: 2018 | Developer: Ben Esposito | Steam

Donut County is colorful, funny, and just a joy to play. It's like Katamari Damacy in reverse: Instead of rolling increasingly large objects into a ball, you swallow increasingly large objects into a mysterious hole in the ground that grows ever bigger as it devours the town. Each level has its little part of the story as Mira and her raccoon pal BK try to control the hole.

Melatonin 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Half Asleep | Steam

Rhythm games don't really have a reputation for being chill, but Melatonin is definitely low key and cozy. With its muted colors and lo-fi beats, Melatonin is nearly as relaxing as its name implies. Instead of throwing bars of beats at you, you'll play along via visual cues that help you complete the beat in each of its levels.

A Short Hike 

Release Date: 2019 | Developer: adamgryu | Steam

For those that want a cozy game that won't consume 100+ hours, this super cute adventure can be completed in around four hours. Explore an island mountain park while helping out the folks around you and uncovering small secrets on your journey to the peak. The park is lovely enough from the ground, but your main character can fly down too, so don't forget to hunt for hidden areas and unseen new friends.

Lil Gator Game 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: MegaWobble | Steam

If you want a game that scratches an almost nostalgic itch, Lil Gator Game is worth picking up. Inspired by The Legend of Zelda, you will quite literally create your own adventure through arts, crafts, and an overactive imagination alongside your animal friends hiding around the map. But even though it wears its Nintendo inspirations on its sleeve, the dry humour and adorable characters that accompany the adventure as you try to get your sibling to play with you make this an incredibly easy game to lose yourself in.

Dorfromantik

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Toukana Interactive | Steam

Strategy games don't normally strike me as cozy, but Dorfomantik really lets you take the pressure off. I lost an entire weekend to this hex-based tile game the first time I tried it. In its standard mode, you'll use a deck of hex tiles to match up stretches of fields, cities, waterways, and railroads to complete quests and grow your deck until you run out of tiles. For even less stress, creative mode lets you just build a lovely stretch of tiles any way you like from a neverending deck.

Beacon Pines 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Hiding Spot | Steam

Another cozy game that will only ask several hours of you, Beacon Pines is an adventure inside a story book with a super chill narrator. You'll earn new words as you explore the town, allowing you to unlock new branches on the story tree in a Mad Libs-like puzzle. This is one I'd consider cozy horror: a mystery about an old factory town where folks are going missing. There aren't jump scares though, just a creeping sense of dread as young pals Luka and Rolo dig themselves deeper and deeper into the town's history.

Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Hyper Games | Steam

In an attempt to restore peace to Moominvalley, you will have to help the citizens of the valley complete short but sweet requests like helping a frightened dog evade a spider and helping creatures get around the valley. For those familiar with the Moomin series, the characters you meet will be instantly recognisable which gives it a cozy, nostalgic atmosphere. For those who aren’t, this is a fantastic way to get familiar with its eclectic cast in a beautiful watercolour art style.

Unpacking 

Release Date: 2021 | Developer: Witch Beam | Steam

Moving house is stressful, but Unpacking is a very chill, light puzzling experience. You'll start small, organizing toys in a bright kids' bedroom, later unpacking multiple rooms worth of possessions as the implied main character grows up and the things they've kept over the years accumulate or change. That pink stuffed pig deserves your loyalty, to make sure to put it someplace prominent.

A Little to the Left 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Max Inferno | Steam

Is your house too overwhelming? Has the junk drawer in your kitchen been bogging you down for months? Great, A Little to the Left can help you continue to ignore all these real life issues while still providing you with the satisfaction and pride of cleaning up your space. This puzzle game takes you through cupboards, drawers, sewing kits, and every other nook and cranny to restore peace to your virtual abode in the most simple format.