Cozy Caravan is a feast of little cooking minigames and collectathon fest quests

In a game called Cozy Caravan, I'd have expected more focus to be on the actual driving. Buzzing around in my giant bee-drawn wagon is pretty adorable, and many of the chores I've got do encourage me to develop a little route of regulars around the map, but the cooking minigames are really where it's at in this one.

I've played more than my fair share of cozy life sims, managing everything from farms to convenience stores, but a caravan was a new one that I'd been itching to try. Cozy Caravan launched into early access on Steam last year and just rolled out its 1.0 update this month. It's not the deepest life sim by a long shot, but it's cute and approachable. The rest of my thoughts are down below, but here's a quick pros and 'less pros' chart:

There are four main activities that occupy my time in Cozy Caravan: driving between points of interest on the map, collecting ingredients at each stop, cooking up recipes, and hustling to deliver food in its wait staff minigame. On Saturday and Sunday each week I can set up my market stall to sell the goodies I've been cooking and collecting. To work my way towards the annual Whizz Bang Fair, I've got to unlock new areas of the map by buying caravan upgrades and completing recipe quests for the locals in different areas.

Each day feels pretty short, even by life sim standards, so I've really got to prioritize my chore list and be as efficient with my planned route around the map as possible. I might start out my day buying a mortar and pestle station for my caravan from the guild representative in Basslebrook. Then I head up the road to pick some wild strawberries and harvest corn at Buzzington Hills.

While there, I pick up a hitchhiker headed to Fellowood Acres, stopping at Dairy Me Milk Bar along the way to work a shift delivering milkshakes, earning a new recipe for my trouble. After that I've got just enough time to whip up an apple pie in my kitchen that I need to complete a quest. First order of business for the morning? Hitting up the sprawling Hershey's Homestead to pick produce because potatoes are scheduled to be a hot item for the market back in Basslebrook this coming weekend.

Most of those chores aren't inherently challenging—harvesting ingredients means just plucking them from fields and trees with a button press while driving involves holding the accelerate button while steering—so the joy here is the mental work of optimizing how I want to go about getting all that busywork done. Between the cooking there's a lot of other collecting to do like bringing home Mr. Jumpy's froglets and finding all the missing library books from Yas' cart. As a farmsim regular, I do love a good helping of time management hustling so that's not a criticism.

Markets happen on the weekends only, so each week is capped by the opportunity to set up my tables in whichever little village on the map I'd like to stop in at. There's no actual money to manage though. I just earn hearts for making sales, completing quests, and participating in minigames, which unlock guide tokens for me to spend on caravan upgrades. So it's more like an experience system than a currency.

After ringing my caravan bell to set up shop, I just need to grab ingredients from my inventory and set them on display, replacing each individual item that gets bought and then running to my register to make the sale. Customers mill about the square thinking of what they might want to buy, often influenced by whatever my intel suggests is going to be most desired, so I come prepped with a wide selection and a deep stock on those hot potatoes specifically.

The real joy in Cozy Caravan is its many little minigames for cooking and serving food. Inside my caravan I've got to check my recipe book, grab ingredients from my chest, and take them to the right station to chop, stir, roll, and bake different pieces of the recipe. Chopping is a 'press A at the right time' game, stirring is a 'use your joystick to follow the rotating line' test, and the rolling pin is a particularly tricky task where I've got to use both joysticks simultaneously which takes more coordination than it seems.

Working shifts at the milk bar and other restaurants around the map are the other standout minigame. Orders get placed on the counter at the front and it's up to me to get them to the correct customers while also collecting and returning empty dishes. The activity isn't timed so the only punishment for poor performance is getting less hearts for my effort than I could have, but it's a fun one to bustle through even without pressure.

Cozy Caravan has just rolled out of early access and into a full launch this month with some extra backpack and Rigby the caravan bee customization choices on top of all its past updates. You can find Cozy Caravan on Steam where the developers are teasing some additional updates still yet to come.