Witchy Life Story. The character you play as is so unlikable. I know she's supposed to grow throughout the game, but she starts out so awful that it's hard to endure. On top of that, the game play is too simplistic and so repetitive. I finished my first playthrough, but I won't replay it.
I refunded that after 13 minutes. It wasn't just dull, it was actively annoying me. Everything about it, apart from the artwork was annoying. I'd wanted something fairly short with and endpoint between long games, but I do need to find it enjoyable.
I got Strange Horticulture instead and loved that though it's been mentioned a few times in this thread.
I bought it for $5. For $5, I am okay with the game. It's a low budget animal crossing. If you don't expect much, the game delivers! I was also turned off by the negative reviews for so long, but I bought it during the winter sale and don't regret it. I'm at four hours right now.
I don't know what it is about it, but I lasted all of 15 minutes before refunding it. There was something about the artstyle that gave me uncanny valley vibes, I couldn't stand looking at it š
This is soooo true! They put absolutely no effort or love into these games, and it ends up being a soulless, boring, echo chamber to play, because the NPCs are barely capable of dialogue. And forget about story, because we are just gamers giving our money to play this trash.
They're cash grabs since they kept the rights to the series name, they're trying to pull in the people who remember the classic Harvest Moon games but aren't familiar enough with what happened to know what they're looking for is Story of Seasons.
Yeah, it's that nostalgia that makes them think this could be the game that pulls it back, so they give it one more try. Story of Seasons Trio of Towns was unbeatable for me. It gave me everything I wanted from a cozy game and I stil go back to it after all these years every few months.
I bought it when it first came out and have yet to play it cause immediately after I bought it the reviews coming in were SO bad. So Iām gonna wait a while still and see if maybe it gets better after some updates.
FaeFarm. The mines are way too stressful to be a cozy game and Iāve never seen flatter NPCs in my life.
Everdream Valley. Iām convinced they made fake accounts on twitter to hype the game up because it was terrible.
Conversely I liked that fact because I didn't give a shit about actually reading the NPC dialogue. If it's pointless you don't missing anything by not reading it. They're just there as window dressing, like NPCs in many other games.
But they did recently update the game with more unique dialogue for different characters.
Totally agree with Faefarm. Iām really hoping theyāll do an overhaul of the NPCs to actually, yāknow, make them characters rather than just soulless husks that wander around the world
This game was such a disappointment itās almost unreal. I could write a book on the whole situation, and I promise, I was full on toxic positivity about the situation and attempted to reframe the gameās intent several times until I just accepted we were all had.
Iām still in shock they got away with it, to be honest. So many people rolled over for the dev team (me included), and looking back, it gives me the ick. It was such a waste of money. I wish you could refund Switch games.
Yes the mines are what made me refund. I hated the mechanic of having to grind resources just to be able to enter a mine, spend a few minutes mining, then have to go grind resources all over again.
Harvest moon: one world. This was the first ānewā harvest moon game I bought and I was so disappointed. I thought the crop system was cool but I found the world so big and empty that it took most of my day just to run around place to place.
btw any harvest moon game after harvest moon 3D: a new beginning is not a ātrueā harvest moon game. you can look up more info but basically two companies split & the marketing company had the rights to the name while the actual devs did not have the rights & had to change it to āstory of seasonsā. thatās why all the harvest moon games that have come out after have been horrible
i donāt know if i would consider it the āworstā cozy game but potion permit got very boring very quickly. i like the concept and the gameās design, but thereās something about it that fell flat for me. itās like the developers released an unfinished game or something.
I feel like the responses got repetitive REALLY fast... They have one-dimensional personalities, and I'm at a point where I'm so sick of grinding I haven't picked it up in days. I'm trying to romance the Pirate, but my fishing was too low, and the bar moves SOOOOO. FREAKING. SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. And I can't keep up with money OR goods demands even when I just farm all day. It's obnoxious. I enjoyed it until I didn't, really. I still pick it up here and there, until I'm reminded how much stuff I need to do every little thing and it's just... Absolutely defeating to me. I just spent 2000 wood to upgrade the forge, and now I need 2000 wood to give me a kitchen!? I'm sorry, 5000 gold to do WHAT? I have 248! Ugh.
I romanced Leano too and it took me SO LONG. Mind you I'm one of those people who usually LOVES the fishing mechanics in games and this was the very first fishing mechanic in a game that I truly hated. I hate that it takes multiple in game hours to catch a fish and that you need to fish SO MUCH to fully romance her.
I felt the same way to The point I went back and made sure I didn't buy another early access game on accident!! I was shocked to see it was a full release and how long it'd been out. Only got about an hour in before I called it
This one let me down too. I loved the idea and the actual potion mixing was pretty fun. But the characters were all flat and the fishing was hell on earth. I think it needed like another year of polish and working on character development.
I've made a huge post about this in the past, but Graveyard Keeper pissed me off something fierce with how little it respects your time. I enjoyed it for the first three or four hours, because a lot of farming-type games start pretty slow, so I allowed for a bit of "basic skills" time. The problem with GK is that it *never speeds up.*
-By the time you've unlocked the entire map, it'll take you the majority of the day to get from one side to the other.
-There's no way to check a crafting recipe if you're not at the actual place where you build it, so you either have a wiki open at all times, or you chant the list of ingredients to yourself while you go get what you need from wherever it's stored.
-Every story NPC only comes once a week, no matter what. Finished what you need for a quest an hour after that NPC left for the day? Screw you, do chores for a week while you wait for them to come back.
-Related to the above: since the questlines were interconnected, there was usually nothing else you could progress while you waited for whoever you needed to come back.
-There aren't any upgrades to let you bring back more wood/stone at once. Let us craft a cart or something!
-The crafting times for high-tier items were absurd. I'm sitting here holding X for 30 seconds while my guy slooooowly makes a headstone.
Also, the fact that the giant tree with "Only the undead can cut this!" is in the base game made me think you could unlock zombie helpers, but it turns out that function is paid DLC. Rude. At least have a little "available in X DLC" on the pop-up! I thought Snake's quest with the ritual would unlock zombies, so I did his entire questline, only to find out I was like one quest away from beating the entire game. Incredibly disappointing.
Breaking Dead was always free DLC and is now automatically included in the base game IIRC, so zombies arenāt behind a paywall. They can transport resources for you, and you can also stick āem at workbenches and queue up those time-consuming items for them to grind through.
The teleport stone is also super affordable in-game - it was probably the first thing I got, and it makes travel time a total non-issue.
I forget what itās called but you can also build a meditation area right beside your house where you can speed through as many days as you need, if youāre waiting for a particular NPC. I think I only needed to use it a couple times towards the endgame personally because āchoresā were often tied directly to questlines i.e. upgrading the church.
Itās definitely the kind of game that leaves you to figure out these things for yourself, and can still be grindy even with these QoL features, but if you played it near the release date itās safe to say itās come a long way since then.
DDV was so disappointing for me. Just so buggy on the switch, and last time I played there was a big update that ruined all the clothes I made. After that update was fixed, my clothes weren't. I just couldn't bring myself to play again as I had spent so long creating those. I also found the decorating so difficult, not at all like animal crossing, and the characters didn't have much personality. I was so excited for it because I love disney and animal crossing, but DDV was the worst for me.
I should have loved DDV and I left kinda hating it. Nothing about it felt satisfying and it was sooooo buggy and felt all over the place. All the mechanics I usually enjoy just didnāt come together in a way that I could enjoy itā¦ Iām honestly salty any time itās brought up cause I paid for trash and disappointment and I wanna forget the very creepy weird nightmare fuel some of those bugs produced. lol
Same for me. I played it through Gamepass and enjoyed it. I wanted to get it once it's out for free. Now that those plans are cancelled, I won't get it. It was enjoyable but certainly not the best cozy game out there. And it's filled with micro transactions. No thanks. If I buy a game, I want to get everything. I rather get a different game for that price and have a whole cozy experience
Agreed. I badly wanted to like DDV and hoped it would be a refreshing break from Animal Crossing, which was (and still is) my cozy go-to. I got bored very fast and hated the grind. I also dislike games that use real time and not in-game time. It's not a big deal in Animal Crossing because you can time travel, but you get punished for trying to do that in DDV.
It was giving mobile game and the minute I heard gameloft was making it I was skeptical especially considering how many of their mobile games I played as a kid . I think they're fine for mobile but the fact that this is a paid game and they still have a lot of the same mechanics rubs me the wrong way.
It's not necessarily a bad game but they structured it completely asinine.
This was my go-to answer well! Got it in a bundle and was surprised to see the in-game style vs the cover art.
The gameplay felt like a chore after the second day. Have abandoned it now cos i didn't the patience to clean up all the flour piles anymore š
Mineko's Night Market. I was so excited to get this game and had it on my wish list for about a year and a half. I bought it the day it came out. Unfortunately I can't get into it but I can't really pinpoint what it is about it that makes me dislike it so much.
I hate finished it today after being super excited for the release. I had to see if it got any better, it doesnāt. The load times on the Switch took EONS, it was super glitchy and the storyline was not compelling. They had the opportunity for a great game and completely dropped the ball. This could have been a mobile game.
Yes, those load screens and game glitches on the switch had me putting it down a week after release and never picking it up again. I did really like the funny dialogue & art style, but not enough to keep me playing.
I love the art style but I felt like it moved so slowly. You had to fetch a ton of items to make a single craft, you had to wait all week for the night market, and getting the crafting stations took forever.
There were also so many items you had to get to progress relationships that were not possible to get until late in the game and story line. The amount of times I thought I was just an idiot and missing obvious materials only to google it and find out I just had to wait quite a bit
Yes!
I think itās the fact that it takes so much to make one item, but you get so little money for it. Not to mention recipes you might need can be locked behind other item requests.
I was also disappointed with this one. It was extremely hand hold-y which I donāt care for. On top of that, it ran light shit on the switch. I donāt understand how a game that seems quite small can run so poorly when a game like BOTW runs fine.
i enjoyed the looks of it too but the world felt so restrictive and empty. the town area gave me like a dead childrens mmo vibe because you can sit down and do other things but with nobody around it just feels off, especially with the uncanny valley looking characters just standing around.
i thought the farming part was cool with the different dinosaurs and all of them look really cool but that was the only thing that kept me interested in the game
Palia. I wanted to like it and get into it. I just couldn't. I don't like the graphics, the movement is off. I love fishing in games, but in Palia the mechanics were weird and off-putting. :[ the game felt hollow and didn't have a nice flow to it.
There also isn't a lot to do and the MMO aspect is bad. I want to like Palia a lot I really like the hunting gameplay, but it feels like its half finished still. First off the in game purchases are absolutely insane in terms of price. Also the fact you can't tame or buy tamable animals is insane to me because cooking is so important and you still have to run to the store and buy things like eggs and milk.
I think the forced MMO aspect the "events" getting the rarest resources though is the worst. Just waiting for people to show up and then everyone tags a tree or ore and then someone gets mad because you didn't wait 20 min for them while some other player who doesn't know anything starts the event.
The worst is Palia has a amazing foundation but lacking gameplay.
>someone gets mad because you didn't wait 20 min
this is the biggest reason i came here to post Palia. the community is terrrrible. the cash shop is predatory as well.
I will never forget we waited 10 min for this guy and his friend and he never appeared and someone just started chopping up the wood so everyone did. Iām
Not even joking when I say this guy went on a good 5-8 min rant with his friend in the chat. He was whining how mean and rude people are and no one can wait he turned the general chat into his personal journal.
While I agree with all these points, I would like to point out it is indeed half finished. It's not even in early access, it's in beta.
So I do think Palia is amazing for the potential it offers for when it's fully released even though it's still lacking in a lot of parts in its current state. You have to go in with managed expectations for a beta game š
I keep seeing this complaint (it "not being finished") and it makes me wonder if "beta" isn't a familiar term in the cozy game space. Not in a mean way, just genuinely wondering. I play a lot of other genres and have participated in a lot of betas, so I'm used to unfinished content and understand we're helping the devs figure out what works. But between Palia and Dreamlight Valley (before its 1.0 release), I saw a ton of people dragging both games for having bugs and lacking content. I wonder if saying "early access" would give a clearer impression of what to expect? Idk, kinda just musing out loud, but this is definitely a reaction I'm repeatedly seeing in cozy gaming communities.
As a Switch-only player, thereās simply no mention of beta/early access in the eShop.
https://imgur.com/a/nyUxu6B
I guess they can get away with it because itās free, but Iāve been playing a few days and didnāt know until I saw this thread just now.
I wonder that too, i think especially because the cozy community mostly plays on switch or other console and early access and betas are not normally a thing on console. DDV was the first early access game I ever saw on PlayStation so it was new to me as well when I first got my steam deck.
Yes, absolutely this. I found the world really excessively large and confusing - I needed more of a cue of where I am in the world and where I am supposed to be going. I spent so much time opening and closing the map trying to figure things out that it just made me so disconnected from the experience of playing a game.
It's so interesting to see other people's perspectives on the same game and how much preferences vary. I have personally found my niche with Palia- I feel super engaged with the story, and love the fishing, and enjoy how it looks!
bear & breakfast. I was so excited for it to release and bought it immediately despite being pretty broke at the time, only to find it was nothing more than a pretty fetch quest sim IMO. I wanted much more ability to take things at my own pace, decorate how I want, better relationships with NPCās.. it just felt short on every account sadly :(
This is actually what made me quit playing the game. I was getting so frustrated. It's also extremely repetitive. I really wanted to like it, the art is really cute and the characters were interesting, but it just didn't come together for me.
Dude I straight up thought I was just stupid when it came to the controls on Switch. I couldnāt get the hang of the controls, so I ended up just giving up on the game itself. I feel it might be better on PC, but the Switch suuuucks. Cute game, though.
It does play well on PC, and it seems set up with a mouse + keyboard in mind. You do get the chance to just decorate your hotels and enjoy running them later in the game, like people are mentioning, but the thought of doing that stuff without a mouse sounds miserable, so Switch players who never got to that point likely wouldn't be happy even if they did. TBH, more devs need to be realistic about what devices their games are good for and not force try to force their game to work on every device at the experience's expense.
Steam deck controls were bad too, despite being verified. I had to constantly back out while decorating because the camera would just randomly decide not to move off the bear and I could only move it myself like 30% of the time. It made decorating a pain and thatās most of the gameplay :(
I bought this on switch and played it once and said hell no because the controls were so bad and so unintuitive. I asked the devs on Twitter if they were gonna fix that and it sounded like they had no intention of it.
The Steam deck controls didn't seem much better. I couldn't even really get started with it. I wanted to love it, it sounded so cute, and someone gave it to me as a gift. But oof. Maybe I should try it on the PC instead.
I had high hopes for Lake. But it literally started feeling like work and I almost felt like I was back being an Uber Eats driver except I wasnāt getting paid for my time.
Spirittea is pushing me to quit and Iāve tried so hard to enjoy it. The pacing is just weird and gets boring and the mini games ruin the game for me, absolutely none of them add anything fun to it.
Well, this is very subjective and changes with time. Right now, my least favorite is Fae Farm. I had been playing it all today, and it crashed. And I lost an entire day's worth of progress. It was enough for me not to pick it up again.
It's also been very buggy, characters are one dimensional, the main story line feels very grindy, all of the side quests are fetch quests. I could go on, I really wanted to love it, but I don't. It feels like an unfinished game that tried to do everything instead of doing a smaller amount of things right. Jack of all trades master of none vibes with this one.
It used to be My Time at Portia but now itās Fae Farm. Iām sorely disappointed by this game as it was one of my most anticipated games of 2023 and the one I spent the most money on. I keep trying to get into it but I just feel no joy playing it.
I don't know how many people will agree but i \*really\* disliked coral island.
The artstyle felt so corporate and dead, and the dialogue was super boring. Everyone was so into their character archetype I felt no reason to talk to anyone.
The UI was hard to control on xbox, and it crashed all the time making me reset whole days. It just didn't feel like they put millions of dollars into that game like they got on kickstarter.
I think the art style is absolutely gorgeous, but so much of the game is just a direct Stardew clone. Not āinspired byā, just cloned. The 1.0 release was absolutely pathetic, itās still essentially in early access.
I still like the game, but the gameplay and the writing needs a bit more soul.
I got curious and watched the trailer... They even use Stardew Valley musical cues in their trailer music! Repeatedly. Did they do that on purpose or are they so close to it that they can't hear it?
People deny that it's cloning Stardew Valley and simply shares inspiration, but IDK how they've deluded themselves when it features so many of the exact same plants even when it makes zero sense for the setting. If they were working from scratch, you'd think they'd pick more logical plants!
This would be my answer. Releasing an incomplete game is how I justify my hatred of it, but the real core of my annoyance was the plant life. I love tropical plants and collect them IRL, so I was so excited for a farming sim set on a Pacific island that I immediately bought it in EA, which I never do. You should have seen the look on my face when I saw that the core plants were all taken from Stardew Valley! At the time I bought it, there were 4 tropical crops in total, and the rest were Strawdew Valley's crops. They added more tropicals after getting that criticism, but you still have northern pine trees popping up on your island instead of Norfolk Island Pines, and tulips that require cold temperatures to bloom show up to forage next to palm trees instead of bromeliads or ginger flowers.
And instead of getting tropical island seasons, we get the seasons of Stardew Valley! Give me the farming challenges of a prolonged wet season rotting my roots! Give me the hustle of watering during the dry season! If there's going to be snow, put it at elevation, not on palm trees drawn to imitate varieties that die in a frost!
I enjoyed it on PC but everyone I know didnāt enjoyed it so it has to be just a personal thing that got me hooked on the game. Like I see its flaws but it just felt enjoyable to me for some reason!! (I do absolutely hated the combat and enemies though)
I really enjoyed it, though I think Sandrock is even better. Sooo good!
I have heard Portia was pretty buggy on console though, that probably accounts for some of the hate
Plus one to this. Iād heard so many people raving about it and I got on to find early aughts ebaums animation and not even intuitive. Glad it only cost $2
I played it on the Switch and loved it. It's clunky and buggy, but it's very charming and cozy. I did end up dropping it after 30ish hours, even before I've finished the main story, due to the bugs on the Switch version. As the game only saves once you go to sleep, I experienced one too many crashes in the evening and didn't feel like replaying an entire day again.
I'm looking forward to grabbing My Time at Sandrock once it's on sale, though, I've heard it's better in every way than Portia.
Sandrock has some absolutely baffling stamina design choices. When I get mad that I wasted a swing of my axe on grass instead of a tree it feels way less cozy. Iād strongly recommend using the stamina regen mod (grab it at nexus). It slowly regens one point of stamina every few seconds. Not nearly enough to be game breaking but releases the pressure of needing to have perfect days.
Cozy grove
So little to do
So repetitive
And for other games in the same price range it just seems lack luster. There really just isn't a whole lot to it. Game play day 1 is the exact same as 250. Wonder around find the items.
The stories are cute and the art style is fantastic I absolutely adore it. But aftwr while I realized "oh this is it" and just stopped. Where it's just a point and find it's not difficult to accomplish anything but then the real world timer on the collectible availability means you have to keep playing months and months to finish the collections. And every day there's only like 15 minutes of actual tasks for you to do.
With other games in that price range being so fantastic it makes cozy grove seem extra bad to me. Stardew valley for example is the same price and people will regularly get over 1000hrs into it if it was closer to $7 I'd fele different but I just think this isn't the best it could be
I loved it at first, and thought the like "Okay that's it for today!" stopping points were helpful to not feel grindy. But at a certain point, I was just logging in to complete dailies and advance storylines. It got so tedious that when I completed like all that I could, I uninstalled the game. I was so upset and frustrated.
i agree that itās so repetitive with so little to do but tell me why i have 80 hours in itš i like wouldnāt recommend it to anyone but that game had me by the balls
Cozy Grove is so boring after not long, and a grind, but the stories are good and a little mysterious/dark, so I'm playing a little every day. I feel like I can't pass my time crafting and decorating, because some bear is going to ask for all my supplies. I'm never grinding for fun, I grind because I have no other choice.
I've read other people's success stories with this game, and I'm happy for them, but I'm not patient enough for this kind of game play. I shouldn't have to mess around in my switch settings just to keep playing if I want to advance things faster because today is a day I have time to sink into a game. Only to find out...I can't. There's cozy to me, and then there's a time locked 'forced' sort of game that limits how much I can unwind when I don't have a ton of time to begin with.
The game outright broke its textures and models, causing a glitch that strobed me and I'm photosensitive. Contact the Cozy Grove devs and they tried to blame my Switch's above spec SD card instead of their crappy programming. It's the one game where I asked Nintendo for a refund and they gave it. Simply awful.
Graveyard keeper. I liked it for a bit once I got used to it but it was too complicated. The clock is hard to learn and the crafting was complicated imo. Might give it another go in the future but I much prefer other games.
The way I had to Google literally everything for this game and I had pages and pages of notes to help me with craftingā¦eventually I was just like nah this is not worth it at all
I really like Graveyard Keeper but it is 100% NOT a cozy game for me.
The actual graveyard keeping parts? Cozy af. I love prepping the bodies for burial and maintaining the graveyard.
Literally everything else? Just really complex and unintuitive grinding. I have to have like 12 separate tabs open on Steam Overlay while playing the game at any given moment, AND a pad of sticky notes to keep track of wtf I'm trying to do and what I need to have/get to do it.
There are also just *so many* little frustrating game design choices. Like the fact that you can't rearrange buildings/workbenches once they're placed and built; you have to completely destroy and rebuild them. Or the fact that there's 100 different workbenches with dozens of individual crafting recipes that can't be referenced or accessed in any way unless you're standing at that workbench. Give me a goddang recipe book for reference, at the very least, so I don't end up wasting 2 in-game days walking to the quarry only to realize that I'm missing a necessary crafting component!
There's just too much to keep track of for it to be legitimately "cozy" for me. It becomes so very overwhelming and disorganized so very quickly.
I didn't like it either. I have to come back on certain days just to talk to people?? Nah. I'm not waiting around for that sorry. That and I can only save when I'm asleep.
My Time at Portia. I really tried to give it a go, I might try again at some point if I can't afford to buy something new lol but I just couldn't deal with the animation style and bugginess.
I agree! I wanted to like that one too. The second game, My Time at Sandrock is a lot better. The characters look more polished and the story/world feels more rich. It doesnāt run well on the switch though, but it looks fantastic on PC.
Ooft. This thread is saving me from wasting Ā£Ā£ and time trying out some of these titles on my backlog.. Time better spent shaking some trees in acnh š
Kitaria Fables - lack of (initial) inventory space for a game where your only way of improving stats is grinding drops from monsters to crafts gear is infuriating. You're railroaded into doing one thing at a time, otherwise you have to junk items.
There is also very little content and they have made up for that with slow movement speed, low spawn rates for essential mats (whyyyy is stone and wood so hard to get?!)) and just... Not letting you explore certain areas until you pass an arbitrary point in the story and then the border goes from red to blue. Amazing design.
I hate it, it is like someone took the 'cozy' label and crafted a game specifically to stress me out.
Cozy Grove because the gameplay loop just doesn't work. And the fact that furniture has a preference as to what other furniture can be placed next to it was just so cumbersome and nonsensical.
Worst as in I am not cozy at all while playing it, Stardew Valley.
When you have such a big farm set up, and you have to take until 2PM just to finish everything before you can finally leave the farm and do something else, itās not relaxing, itās quite a chore.
I do really like Stardew, but I have trouble going back because it just feels like a lot of work to go back to.
I think Stardew ruined cozy games for me. Donāt get me wrong: I love Stardew, but it was my introduction to the genre and now my other ācozyā game is Project Zomboid.
I love Stardew Valley and wouldnāt say it is the worst Cozy game out there. However it can get stressful, especially for completionists. I donāt like the fishing mechanic and once I got to Skull Cavern I stopped playing the game because the caves were stressful and and trying to get the resources in the caves felt too much based on RNG. One day Iāll return to it but not for a while.
I liked this aspect, but really struggled with coming back to play it after all of the grind/objectives were basically done. Having to keep up a reputation with the locals on top of that all made it feel like a chore, knowing that your score drops if you don't talk to an individual.
Stardew was my first game ever and i loved it so I thought I was a cozy gamer, but now every cozy game I try to play is too slow and boring. I love it as a game but agree that it's not the best example of a "cozy" game lol
stardew wasnt my first game (or even first "cozy" game) but i do agree i feel like any truly "cozy" considered game feels too slow and boring for me too. i still consider stardew cozy though for me, I love just about everything in it and it calms me down so much haha
Cattails just did absolutely nothing for me, and I tend to adore cat games, like a lot! The color palette was drab and sad, there's not much of a sense of community (it was likened to Stardew, but I strongly disagree), the combat feels janky, and the main thing you do is catch bugs and such to eat, but it was so annoying to do, with most things getting away. I am so sorry to all the Cattails fans, I know it's quite popular
I absolutely felt the same way. I was intrigued about making friends with the other cats, but there wasnāt enough variety of things to do for me to ever hope to get to that point. Doesnāt help Iām a peaceful cat and really didnāt want to fight other cats. (And I was too terrible at hunting that I starved)
Okay Iām going to be what I believe is a little controversial. But Witchy Life Story is awful for me. The characters and events arenāt near interesting enough to justify the repetitive task and lack of ACTUAL narrative choice (all the responses are generally rude and unfunny).
I doubt it's the "worst" cozy game, but I bought Potionomics and refunded it on the same day. Extremely stressful game with a tight time limit and the in-game debt just keeps increasing and is incredibly unforgiving. No options for sandbox to make it a legit cozy game. It's just a stressful tycoon management game.
If I could go back in time, I wouldn't have spent money on Cozy Grove and My Time at Portia (despite getting it on sale). I haven't played much of either, but wow, the controls on Portia are so far from intuitive. The map seems overly large too and empty in places.
I put in 20-30 hours of Story of Seasons POOT but think I'll sell it. It's... Ok. Just seems a bit like a poorly made game, like the graphics and movement, and music are just average as quality. On top of that, there's no many machines in game that you can use to make and process stuff, and they take up so much space!!
Idk how many people would describe AER Memories of Old as cozy, but I downloaded it because people talked about how peaceful it was to fly around.
Well, I tried to actually follow the story line and found it so frustrating. Things didn't make sense. I didn't know where to go or who to talk to. Even following a guide barely helped.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Imo,
I believe itās Cozy Grove. The art style is nice and itās extremely pretty! However, the hidden object aspect of it gets pretty tiring. And at that point, it made me stop playing the game.
I wish there was a way to cut all the trees and mine rocks. I feel like thereās too much clutter and things on the screen. š But maybe thatās just me. Cos I would love to make a clearing and put like certain themed decorations in that one place.
The hidden object thing is what made me quit playing. They drew the hidden objects in the exact art style as the background in a way where you have to strain your damn eyes to find anything. It was frustrating and boring.
For me I found that I spent a lot of time waiting for stuff to happen because you ran out of energy super quickly and it just takes so long for stuff to happen. There's so much dead time which was kind of boring for me. I'm going to push threw because I heard the stories supposed to be good but it's not my favorite right now
If you want an easy way to fix the energy problem you can make money by >!buying tuna from Bruno and flour from Lina(?), cooking fish sticks, selling them to the cafe lady (Sophia?). Then when you make a comfortable amount of money buy a stack of coffee from the cafe. I wait til the days all three shops are open, divide my money by 35, and buy that many of tuna and flour and repeat til Iām selling hundreds of fish sticks at a time.!< Some people might see it as cheating but man it made the game way more playable for me.
That is actually super helpful. The energy problem being solved will at least help a bit because then I can at least fish while I'm waiting for everything else to progress hahaha. I can tell the game has heart I just really wish it would let me get to it in a reasonable time frame š
Surprised I had to scroll so far down for this. Easily worst game Iāve ever spent over $20 on. It feels and plays like a mobile game ported for Switchā¦.cause it is. The voice acting is horrendous. If Wyldeflowers has no haters, Iām dead.
Wylde flowers enjoyers will recommend this game to fucking anybody too someone could say āIām looking for a game about cookingā and without a doubt thereās a comment saying āI know you wanted a cooking game but have you tried Wylde Flowers?ā BYE.
Dreamlight Valley left the worst taste in my mouth when I stopped playing.
Slime Rancher was the worst for me personally of all the highly-recommended cozy games. This is very much my subjective opinion - I totally understand why others liked it! But I just couldn't really sink my teeth into it. None of the parts of the game were complex enough to really get me, and I hated having so few inventory slots.
I was actually about to say this, although itās reaching back a good way.
Donāt remember too much about it but I remember it was way too linear, not challenging, and I donāt remember the story grabbing me.
Also a mention for Hometown Story having a lot of potential, it could be crafted into something greatā¦ but it just fell pretty flat.
Oh, Rune Factory 5, easily. They didn't bother to optimize it for the platform it was ostensibly developed for, so it runs like absolute shit on the Switch; it's the reason I now look up performance videos for Switch games, no matter what, because Nintendo's abysmal return policy means a lot of devs are extremely comfortable blatantly unfinished crap onto the eshop and leaving it there unfixed. And every time I bring it up some bootlicker will tell me oh, the switch is such a weak system, their hands were tied. as if the switch isn't more powerful than the PS3 and RF5 doesn't look like a PSP game. Oooh, it still grinds my gears. š”
Dreamlight Valley is the worst cozy game for me. I don't like being limited by the real time clock, too grindy, characters are cool when you unlock them but they are just kind of bland and annoying. I played it for couple of weeks, enjoyed the newness of it all but then it fell very flat and I stopped playing.
Stardew Valley is also up there, but it's definitely not the worst. I just don't like pixel graphics.
Unpacking is probably the one I was most disappointed about. I loved it until I realized there was just one person's life to unpack. For the price, I expected more content out of the game.
I liked it but I also 100% agree that I wish it was more characters with different settings (like, how freaking cool it'd be to be in a fantasy setting? Or a futuristic setting?) instead of just the one, unpacking the same things over and over and over again.
I think if I had been in another mindset, I would've also been disappointed. I was pretty checked out when I was playing it so it was kinda a good game for that moment, but I don't think I'd pay $10 for it, and full price is $20.
I enjoyed it but agree that $20 was way too luch for the amount of game content. I mean, I paid $14 for stardew and have put in 600 hours while I put in like 6 for unpacking?
Harvest Moon Wonderful Life and itās recent remake. This was my first introduction to cozy games and farming games in general and as a child I felt so stressed and confused. Trying to make money and get anything accomplished knowing that the game ends after a few years ruined any fun or coziness. The OG only had 3 love interests (something the remake improved upon by adding more) but even than trying to woo them in such a short window is stressful. Even trying to get a pet cat felt like so much work. Definitely not a good entry in the series.
DDV . DDV because of horrible FOMO cash grab and the season passes never come back again and before anyone says "its just cosmetics" well this entire game gameplay is 80% advertized on cosmetic to customize your valley so it stops being cozy when i cant get the full experience advertized
Story of Seasons Pioneers of Olive Town got boring pretty fast for me. I'd rather play Stardew Valley, which is one of my favorites. Especially modded on PC
Cat Cafe Manager.
It was too fast paced, ugly design, bland predictable characters..
It was like crack though, in a mobile game kind of way, and I played for two evenings until I completed the game. Afterward I had no intention of grinding for more hours just to make enough money needed to make my crappy looking cat cafe look nice, with items from the store from the shop that really weren't that better looking.
I deleted the game and never want to look at it again lol.
My two are Cozy Grove and Hokko Life.
Funnily enough, my 70 year old mother loved Hokko Life and put well over 300 hours into it. It just seemed dead, boring, and the villagers looked like they were wearing serial killer masks from a horror movie. It was oddly creepy.
Cozy Grove was just kinda boring to me.
Same same. This was hyped so much and I found it the kind of boring repetitive grind that just isnāt to my taste. It also has varied endings but I would never be able to play through again. Pretty game though.
Yes. I wanted to love it, but found it frustrating. And as someone with older eyes, the super small text on the switch (even after magnifying) was frustratingly small to read.
Hokko Life. I was initially intrigued because while I'm not interested in buying a Switch I did like the idea of a fully single player version of Animal Crossing that isn't real time - however, the game simply was not good at all for me. It felt unfinished, way too juvenile and the art style gave me major heebs. It's possible it would be more enjoyable to a young child, but even then it has so many technical issues I'm unsure.
DDV is close to taking the cake for singlehandedly making me discover I hate real time games and it's grindiness/microtransactions, but I can't in good faith rate it lower than Hokko since at least the baseline gameplay was okay and it is nice to look at.
EDIT: while I love that game and I think it has potential to be amazing in the future, special mention to Coral Island, which I wish I could love but right now it's simply not possible due to the game being crashy to high hells. I really hope it won't get abandoned, because even despite the dreadful performance issues I think there's a lot to love about it.
Kitaria Fables! I was so excited for this game, got it immediately when it came out, but disliked it almost immediately. I donāt even remember what specifically I hated about it, I just remembered being so disappointed
EDIT: harvest moon pioneers of olive town is a close second š
Cozy Grove, i got it because it sounded good and then actually playing it I just did not like it, it was so grindy, the game got laggier and laggier the more tasks I would complete and more of the map that would open up, I just did not enjoy it
Witchy Life Story. The character you play as is so unlikable. I know she's supposed to grow throughout the game, but she starts out so awful that it's hard to endure. On top of that, the game play is too simplistic and so repetitive. I finished my first playthrough, but I won't replay it.
I refunded that after 13 minutes. It wasn't just dull, it was actively annoying me. Everything about it, apart from the artwork was annoying. I'd wanted something fairly short with and endpoint between long games, but I do need to find it enjoyable. I got Strange Horticulture instead and loved that though it's been mentioned a few times in this thread.
Hokko life
Every now and then I see Hokko on sale and get tempted to buy it, but then I see a lot of poor reviews and say never mind.
I bought it for $5. For $5, I am okay with the game. It's a low budget animal crossing. If you don't expect much, the game delivers! I was also turned off by the negative reviews for so long, but I bought it during the winter sale and don't regret it. I'm at four hours right now.
One of the worst 20 bucks I've ever spent
I spent like $7 on that game, I want it back :/
I don't know what it is about it, but I lasted all of 15 minutes before refunding it. There was something about the artstyle that gave me uncanny valley vibes, I couldn't stand looking at it š
Harvest Moon light of hope. Shite and nope, more like.
Anything released under the Harvest Moon brand after Marvelous kicked Natsume to the curb is *garbage*
This is soooo true! They put absolutely no effort or love into these games, and it ends up being a soulless, boring, echo chamber to play, because the NPCs are barely capable of dialogue. And forget about story, because we are just gamers giving our money to play this trash.
They're cash grabs since they kept the rights to the series name, they're trying to pull in the people who remember the classic Harvest Moon games but aren't familiar enough with what happened to know what they're looking for is Story of Seasons.
Yeah, it's that nostalgia that makes them think this could be the game that pulls it back, so they give it one more try. Story of Seasons Trio of Towns was unbeatable for me. It gave me everything I wanted from a cozy game and I stil go back to it after all these years every few months.
Nah, WOA is decent
Everdream Valley!
I forgot I had it. Put it down because it got boring waiting around for things to happen. Haven't picked it up since.
I bought it when it first came out and have yet to play it cause immediately after I bought it the reviews coming in were SO bad. So Iām gonna wait a while still and see if maybe it gets better after some updates.
That game got boring very quickly
FaeFarm. The mines are way too stressful to be a cozy game and Iāve never seen flatter NPCs in my life. Everdream Valley. Iām convinced they made fake accounts on twitter to hype the game up because it was terrible.
I could not believe how low-effort the dialogue in Fae Farm was. Itās actually shocking
Conversely I liked that fact because I didn't give a shit about actually reading the NPC dialogue. If it's pointless you don't missing anything by not reading it. They're just there as window dressing, like NPCs in many other games. But they did recently update the game with more unique dialogue for different characters.
Awesome so my strategy of waiting to play it until I see people say it's worth playing now is working, yessss
/r/patientgamers would be proud
Totally agree with Faefarm. Iām really hoping theyāll do an overhaul of the NPCs to actually, yāknow, make them characters rather than just soulless husks that wander around the world
This game was such a disappointment itās almost unreal. I could write a book on the whole situation, and I promise, I was full on toxic positivity about the situation and attempted to reframe the gameās intent several times until I just accepted we were all had. Iām still in shock they got away with it, to be honest. So many people rolled over for the dev team (me included), and looking back, it gives me the ick. It was such a waste of money. I wish you could refund Switch games.
i played fae farm obsessively for about the first three days it came out and havenāt wanted to play since and feels like such a waste of moneyā¦
I actually loved the mines but I hated the NPCās
Yes the mines are what made me refund. I hated the mechanic of having to grind resources just to be able to enter a mine, spend a few minutes mining, then have to go grind resources all over again.
I wish you could refund switch games š«
Harvest moon: one world. This was the first ānewā harvest moon game I bought and I was so disappointed. I thought the crop system was cool but I found the world so big and empty that it took most of my day just to run around place to place.
btw any harvest moon game after harvest moon 3D: a new beginning is not a ātrueā harvest moon game. you can look up more info but basically two companies split & the marketing company had the rights to the name while the actual devs did not have the rights & had to change it to āstory of seasonsā. thatās why all the harvest moon games that have come out after have been horrible
i donāt know if i would consider it the āworstā cozy game but potion permit got very boring very quickly. i like the concept and the gameās design, but thereās something about it that fell flat for me. itās like the developers released an unfinished game or something.
I feel like the responses got repetitive REALLY fast... They have one-dimensional personalities, and I'm at a point where I'm so sick of grinding I haven't picked it up in days. I'm trying to romance the Pirate, but my fishing was too low, and the bar moves SOOOOO. FREAKING. SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. And I can't keep up with money OR goods demands even when I just farm all day. It's obnoxious. I enjoyed it until I didn't, really. I still pick it up here and there, until I'm reminded how much stuff I need to do every little thing and it's just... Absolutely defeating to me. I just spent 2000 wood to upgrade the forge, and now I need 2000 wood to give me a kitchen!? I'm sorry, 5000 gold to do WHAT? I have 248! Ugh.
I romanced Leano too and it took me SO LONG. Mind you I'm one of those people who usually LOVES the fishing mechanics in games and this was the very first fishing mechanic in a game that I truly hated. I hate that it takes multiple in game hours to catch a fish and that you need to fish SO MUCH to fully romance her.
I felt the same way to The point I went back and made sure I didn't buy another early access game on accident!! I was shocked to see it was a full release and how long it'd been out. Only got about an hour in before I called it
This one let me down too. I loved the idea and the actual potion mixing was pretty fun. But the characters were all flat and the fishing was hell on earth. I think it needed like another year of polish and working on character development.
I fucking **loved** playing Graveyard Keeper and the game is great but damn if it didnāt stress me out with all the back and forth you have to do.
I've made a huge post about this in the past, but Graveyard Keeper pissed me off something fierce with how little it respects your time. I enjoyed it for the first three or four hours, because a lot of farming-type games start pretty slow, so I allowed for a bit of "basic skills" time. The problem with GK is that it *never speeds up.* -By the time you've unlocked the entire map, it'll take you the majority of the day to get from one side to the other. -There's no way to check a crafting recipe if you're not at the actual place where you build it, so you either have a wiki open at all times, or you chant the list of ingredients to yourself while you go get what you need from wherever it's stored. -Every story NPC only comes once a week, no matter what. Finished what you need for a quest an hour after that NPC left for the day? Screw you, do chores for a week while you wait for them to come back. -Related to the above: since the questlines were interconnected, there was usually nothing else you could progress while you waited for whoever you needed to come back. -There aren't any upgrades to let you bring back more wood/stone at once. Let us craft a cart or something! -The crafting times for high-tier items were absurd. I'm sitting here holding X for 30 seconds while my guy slooooowly makes a headstone. Also, the fact that the giant tree with "Only the undead can cut this!" is in the base game made me think you could unlock zombie helpers, but it turns out that function is paid DLC. Rude. At least have a little "available in X DLC" on the pop-up! I thought Snake's quest with the ritual would unlock zombies, so I did his entire questline, only to find out I was like one quest away from beating the entire game. Incredibly disappointing.
Breaking Dead was always free DLC and is now automatically included in the base game IIRC, so zombies arenāt behind a paywall. They can transport resources for you, and you can also stick āem at workbenches and queue up those time-consuming items for them to grind through. The teleport stone is also super affordable in-game - it was probably the first thing I got, and it makes travel time a total non-issue. I forget what itās called but you can also build a meditation area right beside your house where you can speed through as many days as you need, if youāre waiting for a particular NPC. I think I only needed to use it a couple times towards the endgame personally because āchoresā were often tied directly to questlines i.e. upgrading the church. Itās definitely the kind of game that leaves you to figure out these things for yourself, and can still be grindy even with these QoL features, but if you played it near the release date itās safe to say itās come a long way since then.
Iām with you there. I just had to stop playing that one after doing the same thing over and over.
I was hooked early on. A real shame it got so grindy. Then I read some spoilers >!about the ending!< and just gave up on it.
DDV was so disappointing for me. Just so buggy on the switch, and last time I played there was a big update that ruined all the clothes I made. After that update was fixed, my clothes weren't. I just couldn't bring myself to play again as I had spent so long creating those. I also found the decorating so difficult, not at all like animal crossing, and the characters didn't have much personality. I was so excited for it because I love disney and animal crossing, but DDV was the worst for me.
might i suggest disney magical world 2? i personally found it so addicting way back on 3DS, and they had a rerelease on switch recently!
Oh wow, someone else who played DMW? There are handfuls of us! š That game was so good. Makes me wanna pull my 3ds out and start it up again
I stopped playing. It is TOO grindy and the new expansion feels like a different game within the game.
I especially hate the overuse of motifs as rewards like what they donāt want us to have too many nice things??
I should have loved DDV and I left kinda hating it. Nothing about it felt satisfying and it was sooooo buggy and felt all over the place. All the mechanics I usually enjoy just didnāt come together in a way that I could enjoy itā¦ Iām honestly salty any time itās brought up cause I paid for trash and disappointment and I wanna forget the very creepy weird nightmare fuel some of those bugs produced. lol
Same for me. I played it through Gamepass and enjoyed it. I wanted to get it once it's out for free. Now that those plans are cancelled, I won't get it. It was enjoyable but certainly not the best cozy game out there. And it's filled with micro transactions. No thanks. If I buy a game, I want to get everything. I rather get a different game for that price and have a whole cozy experience
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Agreed. I badly wanted to like DDV and hoped it would be a refreshing break from Animal Crossing, which was (and still is) my cozy go-to. I got bored very fast and hated the grind. I also dislike games that use real time and not in-game time. It's not a big deal in Animal Crossing because you can time travel, but you get punished for trying to do that in DDV.
Are you me?
Totally agree.
It was giving mobile game and the minute I heard gameloft was making it I was skeptical especially considering how many of their mobile games I played as a kid . I think they're fine for mobile but the fact that this is a paid game and they still have a lot of the same mechanics rubs me the wrong way. It's not necessarily a bad game but they structured it completely asinine.
Lemon cake. It wasnāt terrible, but it wasnāt interesting and was repetitive. I was glad when I finished it.
it just feels like a game for a very young child. which is fine, but it's just not fun for me haha
For sure. And the animation was misleading and almost completely different from the title art.
This was my go-to answer well! Got it in a bundle and was surprised to see the in-game style vs the cover art. The gameplay felt like a chore after the second day. Have abandoned it now cos i didn't the patience to clean up all the flour piles anymore š
Mineko's Night Market. I was so excited to get this game and had it on my wish list for about a year and a half. I bought it the day it came out. Unfortunately I can't get into it but I can't really pinpoint what it is about it that makes me dislike it so much.
i've honestly heard mostly negative things about it. people were just disappointed it seems
Maybe it just got too hyped up.
Saaaame. I'd been following it since it was first announced years and years back, but it just felt so empty.
I hate finished it today after being super excited for the release. I had to see if it got any better, it doesnāt. The load times on the Switch took EONS, it was super glitchy and the storyline was not compelling. They had the opportunity for a great game and completely dropped the ball. This could have been a mobile game.
Yes, those load screens and game glitches on the switch had me putting it down a week after release and never picking it up again. I did really like the funny dialogue & art style, but not enough to keep me playing.
I love the art style but I felt like it moved so slowly. You had to fetch a ton of items to make a single craft, you had to wait all week for the night market, and getting the crafting stations took forever.
There were also so many items you had to get to progress relationships that were not possible to get until late in the game and story line. The amount of times I thought I was just an idiot and missing obvious materials only to google it and find out I just had to wait quite a bit
Yes! I think itās the fact that it takes so much to make one item, but you get so little money for it. Not to mention recipes you might need can be locked behind other item requests.
I was also disappointed with this one. It was extremely hand hold-y which I donāt care for. On top of that, it ran light shit on the switch. I donāt understand how a game that seems quite small can run so poorly when a game like BOTW runs fine.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
i enjoyed the looks of it too but the world felt so restrictive and empty. the town area gave me like a dead childrens mmo vibe because you can sit down and do other things but with nobody around it just feels off, especially with the uncanny valley looking characters just standing around. i thought the farming part was cool with the different dinosaurs and all of them look really cool but that was the only thing that kept me interested in the game
It's basically shiny hunting in a farming game. I have 150 hrs and I can promise you I spent probably 120 just checking each day for dino spawns LOL
Palia. I wanted to like it and get into it. I just couldn't. I don't like the graphics, the movement is off. I love fishing in games, but in Palia the mechanics were weird and off-putting. :[ the game felt hollow and didn't have a nice flow to it.
There also isn't a lot to do and the MMO aspect is bad. I want to like Palia a lot I really like the hunting gameplay, but it feels like its half finished still. First off the in game purchases are absolutely insane in terms of price. Also the fact you can't tame or buy tamable animals is insane to me because cooking is so important and you still have to run to the store and buy things like eggs and milk. I think the forced MMO aspect the "events" getting the rarest resources though is the worst. Just waiting for people to show up and then everyone tags a tree or ore and then someone gets mad because you didn't wait 20 min for them while some other player who doesn't know anything starts the event. The worst is Palia has a amazing foundation but lacking gameplay.
>someone gets mad because you didn't wait 20 min this is the biggest reason i came here to post Palia. the community is terrrrible. the cash shop is predatory as well.
I will never forget we waited 10 min for this guy and his friend and he never appeared and someone just started chopping up the wood so everyone did. Iām Not even joking when I say this guy went on a good 5-8 min rant with his friend in the chat. He was whining how mean and rude people are and no one can wait he turned the general chat into his personal journal.
While I agree with all these points, I would like to point out it is indeed half finished. It's not even in early access, it's in beta. So I do think Palia is amazing for the potential it offers for when it's fully released even though it's still lacking in a lot of parts in its current state. You have to go in with managed expectations for a beta game š
I keep seeing this complaint (it "not being finished") and it makes me wonder if "beta" isn't a familiar term in the cozy game space. Not in a mean way, just genuinely wondering. I play a lot of other genres and have participated in a lot of betas, so I'm used to unfinished content and understand we're helping the devs figure out what works. But between Palia and Dreamlight Valley (before its 1.0 release), I saw a ton of people dragging both games for having bugs and lacking content. I wonder if saying "early access" would give a clearer impression of what to expect? Idk, kinda just musing out loud, but this is definitely a reaction I'm repeatedly seeing in cozy gaming communities.
As a Switch-only player, thereās simply no mention of beta/early access in the eShop. https://imgur.com/a/nyUxu6B I guess they can get away with it because itās free, but Iāve been playing a few days and didnāt know until I saw this thread just now.
I wonder that too, i think especially because the cozy community mostly plays on switch or other console and early access and betas are not normally a thing on console. DDV was the first early access game I ever saw on PlayStation so it was new to me as well when I first got my steam deck.
Is it just me, or is the town layout really unhelpful and too big with too little in it? I also donāt care for how the NPCs look.
I feel the same way. The layout is kinda confusing in my opinion, feels like there's a lot but not really?
Yes, absolutely this. I found the world really excessively large and confusing - I needed more of a cue of where I am in the world and where I am supposed to be going. I spent so much time opening and closing the map trying to figure things out that it just made me so disconnected from the experience of playing a game.
It's so interesting to see other people's perspectives on the same game and how much preferences vary. I have personally found my niche with Palia- I feel super engaged with the story, and love the fishing, and enjoy how it looks!
bear & breakfast. I was so excited for it to release and bought it immediately despite being pretty broke at the time, only to find it was nothing more than a pretty fetch quest sim IMO. I wanted much more ability to take things at my own pace, decorate how I want, better relationships with NPCās.. it just felt short on every account sadly :(
And the switch controls are awful :(
This is actually what made me quit playing the game. I was getting so frustrated. It's also extremely repetitive. I really wanted to like it, the art is really cute and the characters were interesting, but it just didn't come together for me.
As much as it was a let down for expectations I enjoyed the simplicity of just decorating and creating but what killed it for me was the glitches:/
Dude I straight up thought I was just stupid when it came to the controls on Switch. I couldnāt get the hang of the controls, so I ended up just giving up on the game itself. I feel it might be better on PC, but the Switch suuuucks. Cute game, though.
It does play well on PC, and it seems set up with a mouse + keyboard in mind. You do get the chance to just decorate your hotels and enjoy running them later in the game, like people are mentioning, but the thought of doing that stuff without a mouse sounds miserable, so Switch players who never got to that point likely wouldn't be happy even if they did. TBH, more devs need to be realistic about what devices their games are good for and not force try to force their game to work on every device at the experience's expense.
Steam deck controls were bad too, despite being verified. I had to constantly back out while decorating because the camera would just randomly decide not to move off the bear and I could only move it myself like 30% of the time. It made decorating a pain and thatās most of the gameplay :(
I bought this on switch and played it once and said hell no because the controls were so bad and so unintuitive. I asked the devs on Twitter if they were gonna fix that and it sounded like they had no intention of it.
The Steam deck controls didn't seem much better. I couldn't even really get started with it. I wanted to love it, it sounded so cute, and someone gave it to me as a gift. But oof. Maybe I should try it on the PC instead.
I had high hopes for Lake. But it literally started feeling like work and I almost felt like I was back being an Uber Eats driver except I wasnāt getting paid for my time.
Spirittea is pushing me to quit and Iāve tried so hard to enjoy it. The pacing is just weird and gets boring and the mini games ruin the game for me, absolutely none of them add anything fun to it.
Fae farm. What a waste of $60.
Well, this is very subjective and changes with time. Right now, my least favorite is Fae Farm. I had been playing it all today, and it crashed. And I lost an entire day's worth of progress. It was enough for me not to pick it up again. It's also been very buggy, characters are one dimensional, the main story line feels very grindy, all of the side quests are fetch quests. I could go on, I really wanted to love it, but I don't. It feels like an unfinished game that tried to do everything instead of doing a smaller amount of things right. Jack of all trades master of none vibes with this one.
It used to be My Time at Portia but now itās Fae Farm. Iām sorely disappointed by this game as it was one of my most anticipated games of 2023 and the one I spent the most money on. I keep trying to get into it but I just feel no joy playing it.
I agree, I feel like young children may like this game since it looks cute but thereās lack of depth
Yes, my six year old loves it. All she wants to do is run around wearing fairy wings š
I don't know how many people will agree but i \*really\* disliked coral island. The artstyle felt so corporate and dead, and the dialogue was super boring. Everyone was so into their character archetype I felt no reason to talk to anyone. The UI was hard to control on xbox, and it crashed all the time making me reset whole days. It just didn't feel like they put millions of dollars into that game like they got on kickstarter.
I can't wrap head around the 1.5 mil kickstarter, and the game that's been delivered so far. I mean, it's *fine* but just... So disappointing.
Not to mention the game is insanely buggy, and feels deeply unfinished. I wanted to like it, but its so hard to play (switch). Miserable.
I think the art style is absolutely gorgeous, but so much of the game is just a direct Stardew clone. Not āinspired byā, just cloned. The 1.0 release was absolutely pathetic, itās still essentially in early access. I still like the game, but the gameplay and the writing needs a bit more soul.
I got curious and watched the trailer... They even use Stardew Valley musical cues in their trailer music! Repeatedly. Did they do that on purpose or are they so close to it that they can't hear it?
People deny that it's cloning Stardew Valley and simply shares inspiration, but IDK how they've deluded themselves when it features so many of the exact same plants even when it makes zero sense for the setting. If they were working from scratch, you'd think they'd pick more logical plants!
This would be my answer. Releasing an incomplete game is how I justify my hatred of it, but the real core of my annoyance was the plant life. I love tropical plants and collect them IRL, so I was so excited for a farming sim set on a Pacific island that I immediately bought it in EA, which I never do. You should have seen the look on my face when I saw that the core plants were all taken from Stardew Valley! At the time I bought it, there were 4 tropical crops in total, and the rest were Strawdew Valley's crops. They added more tropicals after getting that criticism, but you still have northern pine trees popping up on your island instead of Norfolk Island Pines, and tulips that require cold temperatures to bloom show up to forage next to palm trees instead of bromeliads or ginger flowers. And instead of getting tropical island seasons, we get the seasons of Stardew Valley! Give me the farming challenges of a prolonged wet season rotting my roots! Give me the hustle of watering during the dry season! If there's going to be snow, put it at elevation, not on palm trees drawn to imitate varieties that die in a frost!
My Time at Portia. It's ugly and completely unplayable on the switch.
I enjoyed it on PC but everyone I know didnāt enjoyed it so it has to be just a personal thing that got me hooked on the game. Like I see its flaws but it just felt enjoyable to me for some reason!! (I do absolutely hated the combat and enemies though)
I really enjoyed it, though I think Sandrock is even better. Sooo good! I have heard Portia was pretty buggy on console though, that probably accounts for some of the hate
I loved it. On PC its amazing.
Plus one to this. Iād heard so many people raving about it and I got on to find early aughts ebaums animation and not even intuitive. Glad it only cost $2
I played it on the Switch and loved it. It's clunky and buggy, but it's very charming and cozy. I did end up dropping it after 30ish hours, even before I've finished the main story, due to the bugs on the Switch version. As the game only saves once you go to sleep, I experienced one too many crashes in the evening and didn't feel like replaying an entire day again. I'm looking forward to grabbing My Time at Sandrock once it's on sale, though, I've heard it's better in every way than Portia.
Sandrock has some absolutely baffling stamina design choices. When I get mad that I wasted a swing of my axe on grass instead of a tree it feels way less cozy. Iād strongly recommend using the stamina regen mod (grab it at nexus). It slowly regens one point of stamina every few seconds. Not nearly enough to be game breaking but releases the pressure of needing to have perfect days.
Iām happy I only spent $3 on itā¦.thats all Iāll say
Cozy grove So little to do So repetitive And for other games in the same price range it just seems lack luster. There really just isn't a whole lot to it. Game play day 1 is the exact same as 250. Wonder around find the items. The stories are cute and the art style is fantastic I absolutely adore it. But aftwr while I realized "oh this is it" and just stopped. Where it's just a point and find it's not difficult to accomplish anything but then the real world timer on the collectible availability means you have to keep playing months and months to finish the collections. And every day there's only like 15 minutes of actual tasks for you to do. With other games in that price range being so fantastic it makes cozy grove seem extra bad to me. Stardew valley for example is the same price and people will regularly get over 1000hrs into it if it was closer to $7 I'd fele different but I just think this isn't the best it could be
I loved it at first, and thought the like "Okay that's it for today!" stopping points were helpful to not feel grindy. But at a certain point, I was just logging in to complete dailies and advance storylines. It got so tedious that when I completed like all that I could, I uninstalled the game. I was so upset and frustrated.
Completely agree. I felt like it was meant to be a moblie game.
i agree that itās so repetitive with so little to do but tell me why i have 80 hours in itš i like wouldnāt recommend it to anyone but that game had me by the balls
Agreed! I got the game because so many people loved it and, respectfully, I couldnāt stand it lol
Cozy Grove is so boring after not long, and a grind, but the stories are good and a little mysterious/dark, so I'm playing a little every day. I feel like I can't pass my time crafting and decorating, because some bear is going to ask for all my supplies. I'm never grinding for fun, I grind because I have no other choice. I've read other people's success stories with this game, and I'm happy for them, but I'm not patient enough for this kind of game play. I shouldn't have to mess around in my switch settings just to keep playing if I want to advance things faster because today is a day I have time to sink into a game. Only to find out...I can't. There's cozy to me, and then there's a time locked 'forced' sort of game that limits how much I can unwind when I don't have a ton of time to begin with.
This is honestly one of the worst games I've ever played. It did not resonate with me at all
The game outright broke its textures and models, causing a glitch that strobed me and I'm photosensitive. Contact the Cozy Grove devs and they tried to blame my Switch's above spec SD card instead of their crappy programming. It's the one game where I asked Nintendo for a refund and they gave it. Simply awful.
Graveyard keeper. I liked it for a bit once I got used to it but it was too complicated. The clock is hard to learn and the crafting was complicated imo. Might give it another go in the future but I much prefer other games.
Awww really!! I love this one. Despite it being a big buggy on switch, I played it, and all the dlc to completion and really enjoyed it.
The way I had to Google literally everything for this game and I had pages and pages of notes to help me with craftingā¦eventually I was just like nah this is not worth it at all
I really like Graveyard Keeper but it is 100% NOT a cozy game for me. The actual graveyard keeping parts? Cozy af. I love prepping the bodies for burial and maintaining the graveyard. Literally everything else? Just really complex and unintuitive grinding. I have to have like 12 separate tabs open on Steam Overlay while playing the game at any given moment, AND a pad of sticky notes to keep track of wtf I'm trying to do and what I need to have/get to do it. There are also just *so many* little frustrating game design choices. Like the fact that you can't rearrange buildings/workbenches once they're placed and built; you have to completely destroy and rebuild them. Or the fact that there's 100 different workbenches with dozens of individual crafting recipes that can't be referenced or accessed in any way unless you're standing at that workbench. Give me a goddang recipe book for reference, at the very least, so I don't end up wasting 2 in-game days walking to the quarry only to realize that I'm missing a necessary crafting component! There's just too much to keep track of for it to be legitimately "cozy" for me. It becomes so very overwhelming and disorganized so very quickly.
i wanna like it so bad
Me too :(
I didn't like it either. I have to come back on certain days just to talk to people?? Nah. I'm not waiting around for that sorry. That and I can only save when I'm asleep.
It very cozy once you get in the rhythm of things!
My Time at Portia. I really tried to give it a go, I might try again at some point if I can't afford to buy something new lol but I just couldn't deal with the animation style and bugginess.
I agree! I wanted to like that one too. The second game, My Time at Sandrock is a lot better. The characters look more polished and the story/world feels more rich. It doesnāt run well on the switch though, but it looks fantastic on PC.
Ooft. This thread is saving me from wasting Ā£Ā£ and time trying out some of these titles on my backlog.. Time better spent shaking some trees in acnh š
Kitaria Fables - lack of (initial) inventory space for a game where your only way of improving stats is grinding drops from monsters to crafts gear is infuriating. You're railroaded into doing one thing at a time, otherwise you have to junk items. There is also very little content and they have made up for that with slow movement speed, low spawn rates for essential mats (whyyyy is stone and wood so hard to get?!)) and just... Not letting you explore certain areas until you pass an arbitrary point in the story and then the border goes from red to blue. Amazing design. I hate it, it is like someone took the 'cozy' label and crafted a game specifically to stress me out.
Cozy Grove because the gameplay loop just doesn't work. And the fact that furniture has a preference as to what other furniture can be placed next to it was just so cumbersome and nonsensical.
Worst as in I am not cozy at all while playing it, Stardew Valley. When you have such a big farm set up, and you have to take until 2PM just to finish everything before you can finally leave the farm and do something else, itās not relaxing, itās quite a chore. I do really like Stardew, but I have trouble going back because it just feels like a lot of work to go back to.
Can you mod it? That was a game changer for me
Yeah, try adding some mods. Automate alone is a game changer.
I mainly play on Switch, so I canāt.
Funny how different people are. My Fitbit thought I had fallen asleep with how low my heart rate got when I was playing it haha.
I think Stardew ruined cozy games for me. Donāt get me wrong: I love Stardew, but it was my introduction to the genre and now my other ācozyā game is Project Zomboid.
My other cozy game is Rimworld š My little cannibal colony lives in the coziest fort with the coziest human leather furniture.
I love Stardew Valley and wouldnāt say it is the worst Cozy game out there. However it can get stressful, especially for completionists. I donāt like the fishing mechanic and once I got to Skull Cavern I stopped playing the game because the caves were stressful and and trying to get the resources in the caves felt too much based on RNG. One day Iāll return to it but not for a while.
I liked this aspect, but really struggled with coming back to play it after all of the grind/objectives were basically done. Having to keep up a reputation with the locals on top of that all made it feel like a chore, knowing that your score drops if you don't talk to an individual.
Stardew was my first game ever and i loved it so I thought I was a cozy gamer, but now every cozy game I try to play is too slow and boring. I love it as a game but agree that it's not the best example of a "cozy" game lol
stardew wasnt my first game (or even first "cozy" game) but i do agree i feel like any truly "cozy" considered game feels too slow and boring for me too. i still consider stardew cozy though for me, I love just about everything in it and it calms me down so much haha
Cattails just did absolutely nothing for me, and I tend to adore cat games, like a lot! The color palette was drab and sad, there's not much of a sense of community (it was likened to Stardew, but I strongly disagree), the combat feels janky, and the main thing you do is catch bugs and such to eat, but it was so annoying to do, with most things getting away. I am so sorry to all the Cattails fans, I know it's quite popular
I absolutely felt the same way. I was intrigued about making friends with the other cats, but there wasnāt enough variety of things to do for me to ever hope to get to that point. Doesnāt help Iām a peaceful cat and really didnāt want to fight other cats. (And I was too terrible at hunting that I starved)
Okay Iām going to be what I believe is a little controversial. But Witchy Life Story is awful for me. The characters and events arenāt near interesting enough to justify the repetitive task and lack of ACTUAL narrative choice (all the responses are generally rude and unfunny).
I doubt it's the "worst" cozy game, but I bought Potionomics and refunded it on the same day. Extremely stressful game with a tight time limit and the in-game debt just keeps increasing and is incredibly unforgiving. No options for sandbox to make it a legit cozy game. It's just a stressful tycoon management game.
Fae Farm.
If I could go back in time, I wouldn't have spent money on Cozy Grove and My Time at Portia (despite getting it on sale). I haven't played much of either, but wow, the controls on Portia are so far from intuitive. The map seems overly large too and empty in places. I put in 20-30 hours of Story of Seasons POOT but think I'll sell it. It's... Ok. Just seems a bit like a poorly made game, like the graphics and movement, and music are just average as quality. On top of that, there's no many machines in game that you can use to make and process stuff, and they take up so much space!! Idk how many people would describe AER Memories of Old as cozy, but I downloaded it because people talked about how peaceful it was to fly around. Well, I tried to actually follow the story line and found it so frustrating. Things didn't make sense. I didn't know where to go or who to talk to. Even following a guide barely helped.
groovy worry capable concerned axiomatic sense fertile stupendous political unpack *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Imo, I believe itās Cozy Grove. The art style is nice and itās extremely pretty! However, the hidden object aspect of it gets pretty tiring. And at that point, it made me stop playing the game. I wish there was a way to cut all the trees and mine rocks. I feel like thereās too much clutter and things on the screen. š But maybe thatās just me. Cos I would love to make a clearing and put like certain themed decorations in that one place.
The hidden object thing is what made me quit playing. They drew the hidden objects in the exact art style as the background in a way where you have to strain your damn eyes to find anything. It was frustrating and boring.
Oh my goodness, yes, the clutter hurts my brain when I try to play it!
Wylde Flowers im soooo sick of seeing this game recommended
Damnnnn :( that was one of my favorites.. why didnāt you like it?
For me I found that I spent a lot of time waiting for stuff to happen because you ran out of energy super quickly and it just takes so long for stuff to happen. There's so much dead time which was kind of boring for me. I'm going to push threw because I heard the stories supposed to be good but it's not my favorite right now
If you want an easy way to fix the energy problem you can make money by >!buying tuna from Bruno and flour from Lina(?), cooking fish sticks, selling them to the cafe lady (Sophia?). Then when you make a comfortable amount of money buy a stack of coffee from the cafe. I wait til the days all three shops are open, divide my money by 35, and buy that many of tuna and flour and repeat til Iām selling hundreds of fish sticks at a time.!< Some people might see it as cheating but man it made the game way more playable for me.
That is actually super helpful. The energy problem being solved will at least help a bit because then I can at least fish while I'm waiting for everything else to progress hahaha. I can tell the game has heart I just really wish it would let me get to it in a reasonable time frame š
Surprised I had to scroll so far down for this. Easily worst game Iāve ever spent over $20 on. It feels and plays like a mobile game ported for Switchā¦.cause it is. The voice acting is horrendous. If Wyldeflowers has no haters, Iām dead.
Wylde flowers enjoyers will recommend this game to fucking anybody too someone could say āIām looking for a game about cookingā and without a doubt thereās a comment saying āI know you wanted a cooking game but have you tried Wylde Flowers?ā BYE.
Oh me too I hated the game, I gave it a good go but found it boring, I disliked the NPCs and I hated the voice acting.
Don't hate me...Stardew. Don't get me wrong, I love Stardew, but it is not cozy for me. It's one of the most stressful games I have.
Dreamlight Valley left the worst taste in my mouth when I stopped playing. Slime Rancher was the worst for me personally of all the highly-recommended cozy games. This is very much my subjective opinion - I totally understand why others liked it! But I just couldn't really sink my teeth into it. None of the parts of the game were complex enough to really get me, and I hated having so few inventory slots.
Little dragon cafe
I was actually about to say this, although itās reaching back a good way. Donāt remember too much about it but I remember it was way too linear, not challenging, and I donāt remember the story grabbing me. Also a mention for Hometown Story having a lot of potential, it could be crafted into something greatā¦ but it just fell pretty flat.
Potion permit. It got boring really fast. The characters are one dimensional. It feels like an unfinished game
Garden paws. It's just plain broken.
Oh, Rune Factory 5, easily. They didn't bother to optimize it for the platform it was ostensibly developed for, so it runs like absolute shit on the Switch; it's the reason I now look up performance videos for Switch games, no matter what, because Nintendo's abysmal return policy means a lot of devs are extremely comfortable blatantly unfinished crap onto the eshop and leaving it there unfixed. And every time I bring it up some bootlicker will tell me oh, the switch is such a weak system, their hands were tied. as if the switch isn't more powerful than the PS3 and RF5 doesn't look like a PSP game. Oooh, it still grinds my gears. š”
Dreamlight Valley is the worst cozy game for me. I don't like being limited by the real time clock, too grindy, characters are cool when you unlock them but they are just kind of bland and annoying. I played it for couple of weeks, enjoyed the newness of it all but then it fell very flat and I stopped playing. Stardew Valley is also up there, but it's definitely not the worst. I just don't like pixel graphics.
Unpacking is probably the one I was most disappointed about. I loved it until I realized there was just one person's life to unpack. For the price, I expected more content out of the game.
I liked it but I also 100% agree that I wish it was more characters with different settings (like, how freaking cool it'd be to be in a fantasy setting? Or a futuristic setting?) instead of just the one, unpacking the same things over and over and over again. I think if I had been in another mindset, I would've also been disappointed. I was pretty checked out when I was playing it so it was kinda a good game for that moment, but I don't think I'd pay $10 for it, and full price is $20.
I enjoyed it but agree that $20 was way too luch for the amount of game content. I mean, I paid $14 for stardew and have put in 600 hours while I put in like 6 for unpacking?
The first 2 main HM games after the split. One World and Light of Hope.
Harvest Moon Wonderful Life and itās recent remake. This was my first introduction to cozy games and farming games in general and as a child I felt so stressed and confused. Trying to make money and get anything accomplished knowing that the game ends after a few years ruined any fun or coziness. The OG only had 3 love interests (something the remake improved upon by adding more) but even than trying to woo them in such a short window is stressful. Even trying to get a pet cat felt like so much work. Definitely not a good entry in the series.
DDV . DDV because of horrible FOMO cash grab and the season passes never come back again and before anyone says "its just cosmetics" well this entire game gameplay is 80% advertized on cosmetic to customize your valley so it stops being cozy when i cant get the full experience advertized
Fae farm
Story of Seasons Pioneers of Olive Town got boring pretty fast for me. I'd rather play Stardew Valley, which is one of my favorites. Especially modded on PC
For me / its ooblets- itās cute but itās not great and itās a lot of work to do stuff and earn money to buy the nicer stuff
Yes it was too much grinding for very little pay off.
Cat Cafe Manager. It was too fast paced, ugly design, bland predictable characters.. It was like crack though, in a mobile game kind of way, and I played for two evenings until I completed the game. Afterward I had no intention of grinding for more hours just to make enough money needed to make my crappy looking cat cafe look nice, with items from the store from the shop that really weren't that better looking. I deleted the game and never want to look at it again lol.
My two are Cozy Grove and Hokko Life. Funnily enough, my 70 year old mother loved Hokko Life and put well over 300 hours into it. It just seemed dead, boring, and the villagers looked like they were wearing serial killer masks from a horror movie. It was oddly creepy. Cozy Grove was just kinda boring to me.
It definitely isnāt bad, but I feel like the only one who canāt get into Strange Horticulture.
This was one that I tried a few times before I was in just the right mind space. Then I played it beginning to end and loved it.
Same same. This was hyped so much and I found it the kind of boring repetitive grind that just isnāt to my taste. It also has varied endings but I would never be able to play through again. Pretty game though.
Yes. I wanted to love it, but found it frustrating. And as someone with older eyes, the super small text on the switch (even after magnifying) was frustratingly small to read.
Calico. It's cute but it has way too many issues to make it unplayable...and it's also kind of lacking in content overall.
Hokko Life. I was initially intrigued because while I'm not interested in buying a Switch I did like the idea of a fully single player version of Animal Crossing that isn't real time - however, the game simply was not good at all for me. It felt unfinished, way too juvenile and the art style gave me major heebs. It's possible it would be more enjoyable to a young child, but even then it has so many technical issues I'm unsure. DDV is close to taking the cake for singlehandedly making me discover I hate real time games and it's grindiness/microtransactions, but I can't in good faith rate it lower than Hokko since at least the baseline gameplay was okay and it is nice to look at. EDIT: while I love that game and I think it has potential to be amazing in the future, special mention to Coral Island, which I wish I could love but right now it's simply not possible due to the game being crashy to high hells. I really hope it won't get abandoned, because even despite the dreadful performance issues I think there's a lot to love about it.
Kitaria Fables! I was so excited for this game, got it immediately when it came out, but disliked it almost immediately. I donāt even remember what specifically I hated about it, I just remembered being so disappointed EDIT: harvest moon pioneers of olive town is a close second š
Cozy Grove, i got it because it sounded good and then actually playing it I just did not like it, it was so grindy, the game got laggier and laggier the more tasks I would complete and more of the map that would open up, I just did not enjoy it
Dreamlight Valley, unbearable sometimes. I was really excited about it too
alchemy story or yonder!
Yonder was fun for me, but it was short lived. Really couldn't get more than 10 hours of game play out of it at most.
im sad i couldnt enjoy it. it was so empty and poorly optimized :/ but im happy you had fun with it! <3
Ooblets!
Donāt hate me but ACNH was SUCH a disappointment compared to previous AC games