Cozy Grove (2021)

• Playtime: 5,5 hours (day 5)

• Played: 2026

• Context: I was browsing my Epic giveaways, i like some farm life sims and this looked cute.

The Good

• Not the usual "you inherited a farm" story.
• Automatically picks the right tool for gathering.
• Freely move buildable objects, including trees.
• Cute artstyle that looks very pretty in colour.

The Bad

• The gameworld starts out black and white and you have to complete an NPC's quest every day to make them colour things near them.
• And by days i mean real-life days. You can only do 1 quest per NPC per day, then you have to wait for the next day.
• Quest rewards sometimes take a day to arrive, slowing progress.
• Increasingly often you can't complete a quest on the day you get it, slowing progress and leaving the world black and white.
• Most of the quests are basically hidden object puzzles except you have to look on the entire island (it's small, but still) and everything is usually black and white so it's hard to spot some items. I've played dozens of HOGs but i still bought hints (at least you can do that) because this aspect is so obnoxious.
• The island is tiny and expands only slightly. There is no exploration or mines or something.
• Using fishing poles, bug nets, etc. requires you to drag the icon above your head like a mobile game.
• Objects are 2D so you have to click/stand in the small gathering zone in front of trees, rocks, bushes and such or they go transparent and can't be interacted with.
• One time i got a tree as quest reward. My inventory was full so it dropped to the ground, where it was instantly built. But because the NPC who gave it kept standing behind it i couldn't pick it up due to transparency.
• The game wants you to put items close to each other because they get bonuses depending on tags. Combined with the transparency issue this makes harvesting very tedious.
• Moving placed items requires you to interact with each item individually. Which is incredibly tedious and made much more difficulty due to the transparency thing.
• The flimsy story is fed to you piecemeal. Same with NPC backstories. There are only a handful of generic lines (used by everyone) outside of quest dialogue too.
• Claiming rewards for bringing a newly discovered object to the "museum" NPC is incredibly tedious. You have to click through several menus to claim money from every singly object.

The Ugly

Cozy Grove may actually have the worst inventory and storage limit i have ever seen. Your backpack can hold very few items and you can't just build chests to dump items - you have to grind a substantial amount of money to "improve your tent". On day 4 or 5 i managed to free up 7 of my 28 backpack slots and they filled up again within minutes. I constantly had to exchange items with my storage, which filled up very quickly too. The game also gives you quest items that you can't even use yet but still take up space. The inventory limit is far worse than in any other farm life sim, it's bizarre.

Conclusion

Cozy Grove is a game where you can only play for an hour, then have to wait until the next day. When you come back all the progress you made making the world colourful is reset and every singly NPC wants you to find items based on vague hints in a black and white world. Also you inventory is full, so have fun dealing with that. Nothing says "cozy" like inventory management.

Après 30 jours, je pense pouvoir donner mon avis complet sur Cozy Grove. En effet, Cozy Grove se joue en temps réel à la manière d'un Disney Dreamlight Valley ou d'un Animal Crossing dont il reprend les codes.

Comme dans AC vous débarquez sur une île et vous devez aider les habitants, récupérer des matériaux et crafter des outils et des meubles. L'originalité vient du lore du titre puisque vous y incarnez un jeune scout envoyé par erreur sur une île hantée. En effet, vos voisins sont des fantômes d'ours dont les regrets les maintiennent de notre coté. C'est à vous que revient la responsabilité de les aider à trouver le repos éternel.

Le parti pris le plus fort du jeu est d'avoir un contenu "fini" par jour. En effet, il vous sera impossible de speedrun votre aventure sans trifouiller votre horloge interne. Chaque jour, votre objectif sera d'alimenter Flam, votre feu de camp doté de conscience. Plus il grandit, plus il éclaire l'île et en dévoile de nouvelles zones. Votre map évolue donc jour après jour et de nouveaux esprits viendront la hanter. Quand il n'y a plus de bûche disponible, le jeu vous demande texto de revenir demain.

Ainsi, nous sommes obligés de nous réfréner. Le meilleur moyen d'épouser le rythme de Cozy Grove c'est de jouer une ou deux heures par jour. Et d'accepter de prendre le temps.

Les quêtes sont variées, objets cachés, pêche et capture d'insecte, prise de photo, cuisine et crafting...Quand vous réussissez une quête vous faites monter la jauge d'amitié que vous avez avec le fantôme et vous pouvez alors obtenir un souvenir de sa vie, de la monnaie, une buche ou une recette de craft. La lumière se fait autour du fantôme et aide a propager celle de votre feu de camp.

La direction artistique du jeu toute en dessin et en aquarelle et la musique toute douce aident à se plonger dans l'ambiance cozy du titre même si l'humour noir est omniprésente. Chaque ours a vraiment un chara-design unique qui met en avant sa personnalité. Le seul problème c'est que cet aspect crayonné rend parfois difficilement discernable les objets cachés.

De manière générale, Cozy Grove semble avoir appris des erreurs d'animal crossing: la constitution de collections est valorisée, il est possible de crafter plusieurs items d'un coup...

Malheureusement le jeu a aussi ses propres défauts. Celui qui est rapidement le plus usant est le stockage: En effet, Cozy Grove multiplie les types de ressources, les différentes monnaies, auquel s'ajoutent les meubles qu'on vous offre en récompense de vos quêtes et les objets des dîtes-quêtes qu'il vous faut parfois conserver plusieurs jours. Avec tout ça vous serez toujours en galère de stockage et, contrairement à un Dreamlight Valley, les coffres sont particulièrement onéreux à crafter. Les dialogues des personnages sont peu variés. J'ai l'impression que c'est les trois mêmes phrases qui bouclent. Enfin, le système pour placer les objets, et pour les sélectionner est un bazar sans nom. Plusieurs objets peuvent se superposer dans la même case. Sur switch il est parfois compliqué de sélectionner l'item avec lequel on souhaite interagir, je me retrouve souvent à utiliser l'écran tactile qui s'avère plus précis. Le bestiaire est aussi limité. Au contraire d'un animal crossing où chaque espèce est unique, il y a une certain nombre de créatures déclinés en couleurs communes, insolites et rares.

Je pense tout simplement que ce jeu a été rattrapé par ses ambitions et commençait à manquer de place. Pour cette raison, le studio a dors et déjà annoncé la suite de son jeu pour le printemps 2024 ! On le découvrira avec beaucoup de plaisir.

Cozy grove is a pretty enjoyable game with the signature alphafox art style that while playing i was like wow this looks like alphafox and then realized it was, overall it is a good game that has some pretty enjoyable story and dialouge with good hidden object search, fishing, cooking, and more.

However this game relies on day to day mechanics and has many time locked aspects, i enjoy games more when everything is possible from the beginning or based on an in game timer that or a timer that is a few hours long, i do not have the patience to come back to something everyday, and it would take me way too long to progress in this game. If you have the patience for daily quests, i would highly suggest this and can see how hundreds of hours can go in and how this game can easily be a top 10, or a 5 star game, it has the premise but is just not for me.

Honestly this aspect could also come from me playing on the switch, if you have an iphone, i think it is on the ios store and would probably make more sense as a ios game, however i have an android and prefer gaming on the switch even if it is a mobile game, when played on the switch it does not feel like a mobile game and is well implemented, however i just do not have the patience

I said this game was frustrating but here I am still playing it everyday, so obviously it has enough magic to keep me coming back. I’m starting to get into the birds and making them happy with decor. I don’t usually care about decoration but I like how it serves kind of a purpose in this game. Although it’s so hard to put the birds together because one likes common things and the other hates common things. Or this one likes rustic decor but not spooky decor so it can be really tricky!

Also I’m finally getting a deer tomorrow so stay tuned.

I’m still playing this game despite my frustrations with it. Items are getting easier to find and I don’t mind paying the “finders fee” of 100 coins now that I figured out how to actually earn some money in this game.

The storage is a pain. I’ve upgraded my storage TWICE and I’m already running out of room. Also there are a lot of things not clear in this game so I’ve had to look it up. The doc on this game on the internet is pretty good I just wish some aspects were more intuitive.

The music is getting on my nerves because it’s pretty repetitive but that’s an easy fix. I’m also noticing some quests will take me many days to complete. I’m guessing that’s normal? For instance the dowsing rod apparently only can find so many relics a day.. and I need 4. So I guess that means I check back tomorrow.

There are things I like in this game, too. The fishing mechanism is so much better than Animal Crossing. I like how I actually get stuff for donating to the collection (unlike AC). And I like the supporting characters a lot more too.

So yeah.. I mean it’s definitely meant to be a boot up and play for a while and then put down kinda game. I wish it was a little meatier per day, but it’s at least something different.

Not quite a year, but I did it.

More like 10 days of playtime over 125 days.

Proud of my extensive but simple camp expansion. That effigy too.

Selling the majority of these (if you made the mistake I did) and committing to aging the adults into mature animals is my best CG tip.

It's been heartbreaking.

It's been hilarious.

In conclusion, come to me for all your Cozy Grove tips.™

I've only got about 6 "days" on this game, but my thoughts on it are pretty much all positive!

I honestly never thought that I would like the fact that there's only so much for you to do each day, but it's quite refreshing. Sure, dig spots and leaf piles respawn, and you can likely fish for a while each day, but there's a limit on your quests. Quite simply, there just won't be any more available until the next day. And that's worked out well. I can explore and do what I need to do each day in 30-45 minutes and then move on to something else. Considering the fact that I'm juggling two Animal Crossing islands and DQXI right now, it's nice to be able to add something else in that I can count on taking up less than an hour but still being a pleasant experience.

My only real complaint is the pocket space. The map is pretty small so it's not that big of a deal to go sell/donate/store items, but you're always picking up so much at once that it can get a little tedious.

I really enjoyed my time with this game. It became a part of my daily routine. I did not feel rushed at all even though I know that my access to this game is limited. It did not matter that I had to wait several days for resources to regrow or for something that I need to pop out. I'm still wondering why that is, why I approached this game so casually. All the time playing it, I wished I could have had accurately positioned objects on the ground more easily but even with items all over the place, which normally bothers me tons, I did not care much. Is it the lack of social pressure? Is it because I genuinely can't do anything about some things but to wait or just accept it for what it is?

My Apple arcade free trial ended now though, and I'm not in general in a gaming mood these past weeks (maybe that's why I didn't care) so I haven't bought the Switch game version yet even though I intended (and still intend?) to do that. Or maybe it would be best to just cap my gaming experience with this now and consider it a sweet fleeting early spring fling haha