Cozy Grove is, to put it simply, kind of like Animal Crossing, but with a greater emphasis on story.  You play as a Spirit Scout and must help out the ghostly bears that inhabit the island by completing various fetch quests for them.  Along the way, you’ll feed your sentient campfire Flamey with logs to expand the island, decorate both the outdoors and your tent (which can eventually be upgraded into a 5-room house), plant flowers, bushes, and trees, fish, catch bugs, and take care of animals!

Unlike Animal Crossing, whose villagers only have a handful of shallow personalities, every bear on the island has their own backstory, some of which can be rather touching (all of these guys are dead, after all) without being depressing.  This game limits how much you can do each day, which is probably for the best for obsessive people like me who could easily play the game for hours on end and potentially forget to eat or shower.  (Not that I’ve ever done that, ha ha…ha!)  Each day, every bear gives you a max of one quest and that’s that.  For me, once you start having a lot of bears on the island, it can take about two hours to finish everything for the day.  Which is more than enough, as this game can, frankly, get just a bit tedious if played for too long.

As I just mentioned, your primary concern are the quests for the bears, which typically includes bringing them certain items, which you likely either crafted, received from someone else, or found hidden in the environment.  A lot of this game is like a hidden objects puzzle, and it can be both fun and annoying tracking down all the things you need to find.  Luckily, you can always talk to Charlotte Pine, the first bear you meet, and pay her a small fee to point the item out for you.

And then you have a plethora of secondary tasks to complete.  One major thing you’ll be doing is harvesting material for crafting items, cooking recipes, etc.  Fruits and nuts from your bushes and trees (alongside foragable foods) can be cooked and used for recipes, while blossoms can either be recycled into flower pigment or sold for a huge profit (money is very hard to get in this game normally, so selling flowers or rare recipes is your best way to get rich quick).

But wait, there’s more!  There are also outdoor animals: birds, deer, and lagomorphs (rodents) that can also give you essence, alongside eggs, onions, and cocoa beans, respectively.  And how you maximize said essence will be discussed shortly.  There are also indoor cats that can give you hairballs (which can be used to trade for other types of essence you’re lacking).  Oh, and then there are the imps, who can also drop essence, which can be received in exchange for throwing them the food they’re thinking of.

Since this game feels so much like Animal Crossing, that might be why the game includes so many features to try and distinguish itself, some of which are unique, and some of which are a bit…weird.  One thing I liked was how the island starts out black and white, and you must help out the bears and place lamps around to illuminate it.  Not only does this make the world more colorful, but you can’t harvest anything from plants and animals until they’re in the light.  I feel like this feature helps to make the island feel just a bit more unearthly, which makes sense. Cozy Grove is quite haunted, after all.  In fact, you’ll often return the next day to find scenery has moved around entirely on its own (even if the items you placed remain stationary)!

And then there’s the negative changes.  This game is really, really controlling.  You can’t just place a tree and think that’s it.  No.  The tree has preferences for what types of items it likes, and you must place those items nearby in order to make it happier and increase your harvest.  Same goes for animals.  Some of which don’t like being near other animals.  And then you have the cats, which can only be indoors.  Not only do all the cats hate each other (except for the rainbow cat from the DLC), meaning placing more than one in a room is going to really bum them out, but they’re also picky about how you decorate your house!  So each room has to be carefully curated to your cats’ desires rather than your own.  Sure, this is certainly a unique feature, but it can be bothersome when you just want your house to look nice, and I don’t exactly appreciate feeling obligated to leave a bunch of junk outside just to please my outdoor animals.

Another rather irritating thing is the sheer amount of supplies you need.  I started the game lacking in so many necessary materials that I now hoard hundreds, if not thousands, of roasted fruit or eggs or whatnot.  Because you never know when some greedy bear is going to ask for a huge portion of your hard-earned supplies (I’m looking at you Lee Berry Dennings…).  And then so many items must be bought, not with cash, but with quartz or precious gems or essence, giving me even more reason to hoard!  You can increase your storage, sure, but it can be frustrating having 200 jars of flower pigment and being too scared to part with any of them.  On second thought, you think that’s even enough?  Maybe I need more!

As for a few assorted comments…  The game has a muted, but pleasant artstyle, and I find it interesting how many of the bears resemble an item that fits their personality, like the farmer bear who looks like an ear of corn or how the bear who crafts items for you looks vaguely like measuring tape.  The music is pleasant, but I do wish there was a bit more variety to the songs because I’ve spent the last 100+ hours with the game listening to pretty much the same two tracks!  I also find it bizarre that the game only lets you pick names for your animals from a list, rather than letting you name them whatever you want.  And lastly, I played the Switch version of the game, and the performance is not great.  The game autosaves every 5 minutes, which causes the game to freeze up quite badly.  You can reduce the frequency of autosaves or turn them off entirely, but it still feels like the game should be able to handle that better.

With that said, Cozy Grove is a fun and sweet little game, if not a bit repetitive if played for too long.  So far, I’ve sunk well over 100 hours into it, and I still have a handful of bears left to help.  I will say that the ending (after which you return to the island to keep playing) is quite disappointing, but it doesn’t detract too much from a fun and chill game that is made even more expansive by the New Neighbears DLC, which adds four new bears, butterflies to catch, and some new items and clothing, not to mention my sweet little rainbow cat, Molly, the only cat who doesn’t despise its feline companions.  Cozy Grove is available for $14.99 on all modern consoles and Steam, but I got it on sale for roughly $7, and the New Neighbors DLC is $6.99.

All screenshots from official Steam page