On paper Cozy Grove seems right up my alley. I really enjoyed Stardew Valley and other RPG life-sims in the Story of Seasons/RuneScape lineage. Give me a colorful cast of characters I can care about, throw in some menial side tasks, and I’m all set. Unfortunately, Cozy Grove doesn’t capitalize on its unique premise, instead focusing on tedious fetch quests over interesting characters. It all falls a little flat and never justifies its unusually strict time constraints.
To set the scene, you are dropped onto a mysterious island and asked to help ghosts “move on” to whatever this world’s afterlife is. You do this by talking to them and completing their requests. They then reward you with resources and spirit logs you can feed to the ghostly campfire that acts as your guide. I was hoping to get the know the folks I was helping a lot more than I did. While they all have unique personalities, their stories unfold so slowly that it’s easy to lose track of who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish. It also doesn’t help that Cozy Grove only lets you complete a finite amount of tasks each real-world day.
There are only a handful of things to accomplish each day in Cozy Grove before the game literally tells you to quit and come back tomorrow. And this isn’t like a “your character goes to bed and wakes up the next morning, but it’s really only 2 mins later” tomorrow, it actually means your real-world tomorrow. Your current local time is always on screen as part of the game’s HUD. If you’re playing at 9:16pm it will say “9:16pm” on the screen and the island will be dark. If you play at 9:16am the sun will be out, which is actually a detail I really like. It also means that if you only play at night then you’ll never see what the island looks like during the day.
Each inhabitant only has one or two tasks to complete each day, so once you’ve completed them the list of things to do becomes very short. You can always spend time scrounging around the island looking for resources or go fishing, but eventually that wears thin. And considering the only way to progress in the game is to get the spirit logs from the ghosts, it’s usually best to follow the game’s advice and come back tomorrow. This means you only play the game for about 20-30 minutes each day, and if you can’t play every day progress can be extremely slow. It also means you’re more likely to forget details about the characters or even how to accomplish certain tasks. Thankfully the game isn’t too complicated, but I did completely forget about the island’s merchant at one point.
None of this would be an issue if I could just play as much as I want to in a single sitting. Almost every time I played I wanted to put in more time than the game really wanted me to, and I was always disappointed when I had to put it down. It’s odd because the time limit seems to be there as a way to make Cozy Grove a little more casual, but in practice it just made me forget about it completely.
