I appreciate Cozy Grove holding its hands up and saying ‘look, we know you have a life, just dip in for 20 minutes’, but on a Saturday morning with nothing else to do, it would be nice to be able to sink in a couple of hours just pottering about. The ghosts have nothing new to say, the resources have run dry, and the customisation features are pedestrian. Once the spirit logs have all been found that day, you cannot play anymore. The island is small, and many objectives boil down to ‘walk around and find three of this thing’, so you naturally complete them quite quickly. There seems to be between two and four a day on offer, and the tasks don’t take particularly long to complete. When you speak to the fire, it will either tell you that someone has a spirit log they want to give you, or that nobody has one. In fact, it often deliberately stops you from grinding, and that’s where Cozy Grove’s biggest flaw comes into play.

In Cozy Grove’s case, the grind ramps up after a few days, but never to unbearable levels. It’s not exciting, but games like this are supposed to be for chilling out - it literally has cozy in the name - and a better measurement would be how grindy they are. You need to scurry around the island picking up sticks, digging in loose patches of dirt, or hammering away at rocks in order to earn precious resources. The activities themselves can be dull too, although I would actually argue that’s a good thing. The game tells you you’re further along in the story, but it doesn’t often feel like it. You don’t often get any actual story, they just say “thanks” and chuck a spirit log your way. You collect the sticks or the rocks or the lost pieces of paper for them, and a row of hearts above their head slowly fills up while an on screen message tells you that you’ve made some story progress. Each character feels less like an actual person (or anthropomorphic ghost) and more like a walking to-do list.

Their dialogue kind of embodies these tropes, but only in the case of minor inflections - there’s never much personality. All of the characters seem to fit into vague tropes - the artsy one, the no-nonsense sailor, and so on - but none of them really commit to the bit.

Perhaps it's not because of the burden of its role that the fire lacks depth though perhaps it's because Cozy Grove is understated to a fault. If you’re expecting something like Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle, you’ll be disappointed. Oh, and if you’re wondering “does that mean the fire is a ghost too?” then the answer is “yes, but it’s way less fun than you’d expect that to be.” The fire has to act as the narrator, the exposition giver, and constantly pushes you to go and talk to the other ghosts, so there’s not much room for the fire to actually be a character in itself. You earn these by completing collections for the various ghosts and repeatedly feed them to your fire to level up your island. The main way to improve your island is with spirit logs.

Cozy grove gameplay