When Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out in March 2020, it provided people escapism from lockdown and the pandemic. Cozy games always had their niche even before, but the pandemic made a lot of people yearn for those cozy experiences. Since (and before) then, we have seen a massive amount of cozy games being released, with the term becoming a mainstream genre of game used to describe many games. There have been lots of articles and content made about cozy games, and it now needs little introduction.
Cozy games as a reactionary genre
Cozy games are themselves often coming from a reactionary place, rejecting the standards and expectations of mainstream gaming. You’ve all probably seen this (and I’m not posting it to make fun of it, but it shows the motivation behind cozy games pretty well):
The gain in popularity of cozy games allowed lots of creators, and players, to experiment with new ways of presenting games, and to redefine what sort of things a game is expected to be. It allowed a whole new genre of games with slower pace, more freeform objectives, less punishment, more relaxation, and so on.
The backlash
Since then however, I have seen more and more backlash to cozy games. Any genre or idea becoming very popular and mainstream will slowly have more and more people tire of seeing it and its tropes over and over again. It doesn’t necessarily mean that cozy games are bad, but simply that as an idea resonates with people and the market gets saturated with it, that idea has been explored enough for a lot of people and they kind of want to move on.
The tweet above is a good example of this. It is now used by a growing amount of people as a way to make fun of cozy games, as some people get a visceral reaction to the idea of a cozy game and claim that it’s cringe, and that they want their games to be mature, dark, and to represent the reality of how ugly the world can get.
Maybe this is also a product of the times. It looks a bit like during pandemic times a lot of people wanted a bubble in which they could pretend nothing was happening, whereas now a few years later we have reached such a terminal point in the state of the world that it has become impossible for a lot of people to pretend that everything is fine and that they can just happily do gardening in a peaceful world. The idea of escaping to the countryside and living a simple life is now naive and absurd.
If you look around, it’s easy to find so many Reddit posts about cozy game saturation (and also pointing out that the market if full of slop, which is definitely true in some cases).
Anti-cozy games
There are now more and more “anti-cozy games” being made. Games that take the mechanics or aesthetics of cozy games, but in some way reject the sanitised no-negativity-allowed world that comes with them. In this way we have sort of gone full circle, with cozy games as escapism from the negative aspects of life and existing game genres, being now reframed as a way to better examine or highlight this negativity. Some random examples:
- Cozy games are getting darker by Polygon
- This recent trailer for Neverway, a horror game taking some of the mechanics and aesthetics of cozy games
- Cozy games that deal with not-so-cozy subject matter
You can even see the official release date trailer for Wanderstop, on the Playstation channel, with the creator talking directly about the game being an intentionally negative cozy game:
Or those threads of people looking for dark cozy games:
Anti-anti cozy games?
Culture moves fast now, and every reactionary trend will inevitably get its own reactionary trend pretty quick. We are already seeing backlash to anti-cozy games for all sorts of reasons. While researching this article I even found another article somewhat hitting similar points, with mention of “cozy horror” and also the following screenshot of a tweet thread which is already reacting to anti-cozy games:
Or this “What’s wrong with cozy games?” article reacting to backlash against cozy games.
We live in fun times where information moves fast and everyone can be into hyper-specific niches. Trends, aesthetics and cultural norms are born and die in the blink of an eye. That combined with the development cycle of the game industry often creates situations where something resonates with a lot of people. Then of course a lot of studios want to make their own but it takes years of development for games to release, and by the time they come out, sadly, the world sometimes has simply moved on. It is probably a dangerous idea to chase trends in games these days.
