3.5/5 ★ – soulfulgamer19's review of Cozy Grove.

Cozy Grove is a fantastically relaxing game that is sadly ruined by a couple of structural issues. The cozy vibes are all I ever wanted out of this kind of a game though. With its gentle guitar-based soundtrack, hand-drawn aesthetic, cute cuddly bears that you can hug (!), and simple, feel-good, no stress gameplay, Cozy Grove’s ambience is absolutely perfect for winding down after a long workday. But ambience does not make a full game, and after you play for a while, a couple of issues pull this down from being a perfect experience. First, there is what I call “time-gating,” in which the game arbitrarily restricts how many activities you can complete in a single real-time calendar day. Perhaps because Cozy Grove has its roots as a mobile game, it’s as if the devs only wanted you to play 30 minutes a day, every day, and no more. That works if that happens to be your play tempo, but for me, that is definitely not how I play. Instead, I play longer sessions, for fewer times per week. Once I hit the daily limit on my tasks though, I couldn’t do anything more to advance my progress, which was really frustrating. You can’t even fish or something to pass the time to turn day into night because the calendar is based on real-time days, not in-game days. This effectively forces you to stop playing even if it’s all the time you have that week. Sigh. The second issue is that after you play for a while, the grinding requirements and convoluted nature of the tasks becomes a huge mountain of tedium. Once I started Googling how to farm resources more efficiently, I knew that it was over, since the game started to feel like work rather than play. This is all a pity, because underneath these flaws, Cozy Grove has absolutely perfected the ambience and aesthetic of a feel-good, relaxing, wind-down game. If I had to rate this based on the vibes alone, it would be a 10 out of 10. But as an actual game, there are definitely ways to smooth out the experience so that the progression is more satisfying. This search for the perfect cozy game continues...