Cozy Grove: A New Horizon?
I’m a big fan of two big genres: Cute and Horror. So when I saw the gameplay and aesthetic for Cozy Grove on Twitter one night, I knew I had to play it. On the surface, it presents itself as an indie Animal Crossing with a twist. With this easy comparison in mind, it bears the question: Does this new island adventure do enough to pull in the passionate Animal Crossing fanbase? Well with my experience thus far, overall I have not been disappointed. Yet, I’m not sure I’ll be playing it any time soon. Here’s why:
Cozy Grove sets the stage as you, a girl scout (that Tim Burton could have drawn), arrives on a deserted island with nothing but a campfire and tent. Your boat is gone. While trapped on the island, you might as well get to spirit scouting! However, this small, dark, muted island grows bigger and more beautiful when working through set tasks given to you by ghostly bears. Now you might be thinking “But Lily, didn’t you say it’s like Animal Crossing: New Horizons?” Yes totally, in its island-like simulator. But that, to me, is where most of the similarities end.
Cozy Grove, developed by Spry Fox, provides players with structure in terms of daily tasks that you have to carry out for the bears to bring color and life back into the world. Furthermore, doing these tasks will increase your friendship with the bears and unlike Animal Crossing, where you have to guess how much your friendship has grown with a villager, Cozy Grove provides a heart meter that increases as you do more tasks per bear. These tasks are very simple; there’s a bear that needs to find lost mail or another bear that wants you to buy them something from a traveling fox named Mr. Kit. Cozy Grove is made to be played in little bursts. I think overall, I’ve played this game at least 20 - 30 mins a day depending on how quickly you gather all the spirit logs for the ghostly bears. So if you like to add a game to your list of “head empty, work is over” wind down games, this is the perfect game to add to your list.
Now, for the community of people who loved Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Cozy Grove does have an element that you might enjoy. Each ghostly bear really has a like and dislike for items that you will have to take into account in order for their heart meter to increase. You have to be very aware of where to put each item, animal, plant, etc. This all might sound really weird to some people, but my fellow Pocket Campers know what I’m talking about (never forget the frog chair). Anyways, adding a plant in the wrong area or near the wrong bear will decrease their happy meter. The importance of their happy meter helps with learning more about their stories and truly Spry Fox put in effort so that each bear is unique and thus this encourages you to want to keep playing.
Just like in Animal Crossing, there are many little elements such as personal design that come into play. The more you help out the bears, the more crafting items you will learn to do such as bake, mine, fish etc. You also are able to enhance your campsite, style your little spirit scout, and earn money for selling the goods you gather. There’s even this bear that’s part seagull that reminds me a bit like Blathers because he will catalogue things you donate to him. So if you’re a big fan of that in AC: NH, then Cozy Grove still has that element for you.
Now onto its pain points and why I can’t see myself playing the game any time soon. Something I found difficult and a bit frustrating was the difficulty in finding items in the world. I recall attempting to find missing mail, and being unable to find it in the woods. I searched long and hard, and eventually I was able to find it within the muted colors of the wilderness. There is a way you could pay with in-game currency to get hints, but what’s the fun in paying for hints?!
Resources early on in the game seem lacking. It was incredibly tough to continue progressing many of my characters’ stories because I needed more of a specific resource that I was missing. It takes days to get certain resources and I feel like many players (especially ones who aren’t patient) will be over Cozy Grove before the game becomes less punishable with resource gathering. Once again, you could easily purchase all of the items through Mr. Kit, but what’s the point in wasting your hard earned money when you can easily gather resources if they were easily attainable.
Transitioning to console performance, I did find that my Switch lagged or had frame drop issues during the transition from muted tones to colorful tones in the world. It seems like the Switch would chug extra hard to look seamless and each time, and it failed unfortunately. I did often wonder if my game would crash, and because of this mentality, I would save often. Even saving came with its own issues. My character would sometimes get stuck. I remember shouting “Oh Dear god no!” because I had done so much work and hadn’t saved recently.
*It’s worth noting that these issues seem to be contained to the Switch version.
Cozy Grove set a familiar gameplay tone for me through its lovable characters and gameplay. I found myself really enjoying the characters’ overall design from the main spirit scout to the ghostly bears. I loved that it was very reminiscent of Animal Crossing, but still had a uniqueness in story and gameplay that provided a refreshing element to the island simulation genre. I don’t know if I would recommend this game on Switch as of writing this. I was very concerned that my game would crash during important moments. I really hope the performance issues I’ve encountered get addressed, as Cozy Grove is a perfect “on the go” game. Once patched, I’m looking forward to revisiting my little island very soon.
Launch Note (4/8/2021): Cozy Grove’s developer Spry Fox did release a pre-launch patch addressing several issues including load times, general performance improvements, and bug fixes. It seems the game doesn’t stutter as severely when the colors change from muted tones to colorful, but I still had moments where the game suffered severe frame drops and felt like it might crash. As stated before, normally, I would highly recommend this game on Switch since it's the perfect game to play on the go, however, due to console performance issues, I wouldn’t pick it up right now until more patches come in.
Written by Lily Zaldivar