I hope you're all doing well and keeping safe and welcome back once more.
Today's review we're going to be taking a look at cozy grove a live sim game where you play the role of a spirit scout who after being dropped onto a haunted island.
Must connect with the spirits there and help them to find peace through performing various tasks for them. Each successful mission not only brings the spirits one step closer to solace, it also restores light and colour backing to a growth and the longer you stay the more of a home it becomes to you.
As you decorate your campsite with crafted furniture, plant, harvestable bushes and trees. Tend to the needs of spirit animals now. If you're a fan of the animal crossing series of games then i have no doubt that cozy grove will prove very appealing to you.
So i'll start by admitting that, i myself have never played an animal crossing game. But my wife does own animal crossing new horizons. Although i don't know a lot about it, i know enough to get the general gist of the gameplay now.
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I'm not going to be stating the obvious comparisons between that game and cozy grove in this review. But one thing that i want to make very clear is that just like animal crossing, cozy grove's in-game timer is synced to your console's day and time saints.
It's meant to be played over several months which is evident by many of its gameplay mechanics now. As i said in the intro cozy grove's story focuses around you a spirit scout who has traveled to the island and has to convene with the ghosts though.
However on first arrival, there's nobody there to greet or welcome you and his stark landscape appears to be washed of all colour save for the orange glow of a few embers in a nearby campfire.
Upon approaching and interacting with a fire a small flame flickers into life introducing itself as flamie. This little chap is your go-to guy for discovering the spirits which inhabit cozy grove.
The first of these being a ranger called charlotte pine, like the rest of cozy grove's ghost population, charlotte is a bird.
I really enjoyed discovering new spirits. As the developers have done a good job at ensuring each one has its own unique appearance and personality.
You have characters like Captain Bill, Weather Snow, the seagull burr who frequently recounts tales of his time at sea. Francesca do claw the tree bird who appears to be just a little bit mental as she speaks to the trees of cozy grove.
Patrice Furback, the resident party of the island who actually has quite a dark sense of humor. When you first meet a bird, they have a ghostly blue appearance to them.
But they do reveal the true form to you. Once you've introduced yourself and completed your first task for them now. From what i've experienced the tasks themselves all revolve around you finding or retrieving one or multiple items for the requester.
These come in several different formats. One of the most
common turns the game into a kind of hidden object game, where you need to
scour the island and find the items based on the clues given to you in the quest
log.
They can be hidden behind bushes beneath piles of leaves, held by mischievous imps, who you've got chased down and catch or simply out in the open.
While they can occasionally be quite challenging to find. If you're really struggling then you can pay a small fee to your ranger friend who will tell you exactly where to find an item now.
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Acquiring items for other tasks usually involves you utilizing one of the many tools you obtain along the way. Which are also used for general foraging of materials.
You have your standard pickaxes for mining ores, shovels for digging stuff up and a fishing rod for fishing of course.
But you also have unusual tools like the dowsing rod with which you get to play a kind of hot and cold mini-game to identify where the hidden object
is buried. While the objective of tasks remains the same. I felt the means by which you had to obtain the required items had enough variety to them. So that things didn't become overly repetitive or stale cozy growth really sent us around offering a relaxing gameplay experience to players.
I felt the simplicity of these tasks echoed. This fact now upon completing a task the spirit burr will then reveal.
Its true form releasing a wave of light which transforms the surrounding landscape causing trees and bushes to sprout, harvestable fruit and forageable locations to appear more clearly.
You're also rewarded with a few different items such as currency, crafting materials or decorative furniture.
But most importantly you can acquire spirit locks which can be fed to flamey feed enough of them to him and not only will he locate a new spirit in need of your help.
He'll also expand the island opening up new areas for you to explore. At the time of writing, i still have 11 more spirits to unlock. But my island is already getting quite large now. Each of the game's burst spirits only offers you a single task per day and just to clarify this by day.
I mean a real life day returning to them. The next day,
we'll see them return to spirit form and completing further tasks for them
advances to the storylines and breathes even more life into the surrounding
landscape.
Causing its appearance to change over time now, while you're waiting for yourdaily tasks to reset there are plenty of other things that you can be focusing.
Your efforts on aside from crafting and building stuff which we'll get on too shortly. You can also work on earning badges which are this game's versions of achievements and filling up your collection which involves donating one of every item in the game to the captain.
Each time you accomplish one of these, you earn rewards such as currency and recipes and amongst other things items will have you foraging for materials, fishing, cooking u,p tasty treats at allison fisher's bakery and breaking down certain items to create new materials via the tree bird or flaming.
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I have a feeling that those who loved building up, the collections in animal crossings will enjoy this element of the game though.
Unfortunately there isn't a nice building to display them all in and some of them can take a while to obtain like the capturing of raw fish or cooking recipes which take a few hours to be delivered.
The last two things i'm going to cover off in this review are going to be the character customization options and the building mechanics looking.
First at character creation upon beginning a new game, you get to change up your physical appearance a little. Selecting your skin colour, eye colour, and the style and colour of your hair.
But there really aren't a lot of customization options available to you, while you can change your iron skin colour whenever you like by visiting Mr Kit, this happy fox who also runs the island shop.
I couldn't actually change the style or colour of my hair which i expect is something offered by a burst spirit that i've yet to unlock now. When it comes to playing dress-up as well as his item shop, Mr Kit also runs a clothing shop.
Both a stock of items and clothing changes every day. There
appears to be a nice selection of clothing on offer which include various
outfits hats and masks for you to wear though.
For some reason you're only able to have 42 pieces of clothing stored in your closet which to me seemed a little bit limited.
Moving on now to the crafting and building side of things, unlike animal crossing you're not actually able to manipulate the landscape of the island and instead.
You're limited to place in furniture and other objects into the world.
These are either bought at mr kit's shop earned from completing tasks or crafted from recipes using materials that you've foraged. From what i've seen so far, there appears to be a wide variety of items available to you. Including plenty of rare and unique decorations now.
While you have your standard tables chairs and ornaments and building parts such as fences walls and doorways. You also get to place things like trees, plants and spirit animals.
This is where one of the game's more unique and interesting gameplay mechanics comes into play now. Each of these forageable items has a list of things that it likes or dislikes.
Each placeable object in the game, has its own set of characteristics including its type rarity and theme placing decorations in the vicinity of animals which have characteristics that.
They like increases the heart rating which in turn increases the number of goods that they yield when you come to harvest them. I thought this was a pretty cool gameplay mechanic though it does force you into decorating your island with furniture.
You might not like the look of and things can become a bit messy if you're just trying to hit three hearts with them now.
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Another very important aspect of building is the placement of light sources which also come in a bunch of different styles and appearances placing something like a lamp or a lantern on the edge of an already lit area will expand the light around it.
This is necessary to light up trees or other furry jewels that fall outside of your camp or burst for its areas of effect. While i did think this gameplay mechanic was pretty interesting the light radius.
These objects provide is actually pretty small. So i had to litter the environment with randomly placed light sources which resulted in it looking pretty cluttered and unkempt.
Overall though i found that cozy grove's building mechanics
did offer plenty of options.
When it comes to decorating your camp and the rest of the island and while the process of placing decorations one by one can be quite fiddly and could really do with some streamlining.
There's still plenty of enjoyment to be had with it now. When it comes to the issues, i encountered while playing cozy grove. There are a couple that i feel i need to highlight first and foremost. While i thought the game was visually stunning and i love the art direction.
It'll probably come as no surprise when i say that the nintendo switch does struggle to keep up with the amount of on-screen sprites. While it's in no way a game killer. It does result in gameplay feeling a little choppy as you move through the world.
There is a lot of popping of sprites. Especially if you're running across the island or the camera happens to pan quickly to a new location. I found the game's collidable terrain could be a bit of a pain sometimes too.
As objects become near-transparent when you're behind them which makes it difficult to navigate around them. I also found myself trapped on a couple of occasions between npcs and the environment which required me to restart the game to spawn back at camp.
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Finally i'll touch on the topic of time traveling which if you've never heard of it before, is the process of changing the date and time settings of your console.
In order to progress the game to the next day without having to wait. This exploit is very much present in cozy growth and i do admit to using it in order to capture some additional footage for this review. But doing so means you can no longer quit to the main menu to manually save your game.
Unless your console's date and time settings are ahead of where the in-game timer expects you to be. So in all i really enjoyed my time with cozy grove everything from its soft visuals and acoustic soundtrack to the simple. I am hunting collection and building mechanics are all designed to cater for those looking for a relaxing and slow paced gameplay experience.
Its campaign promises to offer 40 plus hours of gameplay which if you play the game in the way. It's intended to be played that is without resorting to time travelling will provide players with several months of content.
Though there will undoubtedly be people who choose to use this exploit and then complain that they've got nothing left to do after only a few days of playing now.
Despite its visual hitches and the issues that i've
mentioned with its building mechanics cozy grove, still offers a really
enjoyable gameplay experience.
So when it comes to my own personal rating of the game, i'm going to be giving cozy grove 5 out of 5 stars.
If you're looking for an alternative to animal crossing which offers a similar gameplay experience.
While putting its own unique spin on things. One that is also available are only a fraction of the cost, then i highly recommend picking up cozy grove.
I upload new reviews every day and switch related content. Until next time take care of yourselves and game on you. Thank you for reading my article.
