Saturday Morning Gaming: Cozy Grove and Being Nice

In playing a bunch of video games, you can’t help but notice how often you’re running around killing things. Let’s just go back to January: Hades, Hand of Fate, Ruiner, Bloodlines 2, Troubleshooter, The Pedestrian, Portals 1&2, Dandara, Binding of Isaac, Guacamelee!, Crying Suns, and Cyberpunk. Out of those, only The Pedestrian and the Portals don’t have you shooting people. And, technically, you kill your Companion Cube in the first Portal.

That’s a lot of running around shooting things!

Now, of course, much of that is my own deciding what to play (and I appreciate that) but, seriously, look at the front page of Steam in an igcognito window. Of the 12 games up top, 9 of them feature shooting other people prominently (and of the three that don’t involve shooting people, one is an experimental game that uses your webcam to measure your blinks to move the story along, one is a racing game, and one is a puzzle game). That’s 75% games that involve shooting people.

Why can’t we have a game where people are just nice to each other?!?!?

Which brings me to Cozy Grove.

In Cozy Grove, you are a nice person who helps other people. Well, ghosts. Bear ghosts, bird ghosts… there’s a fox spirit… you’re helping other entities.

You are a Spirit Scout. You pick your skin tone and your hair style and then you’re off to make camp.

You start your fire…

And then you’re off to find people to help! You go around and you find a ghost bear and he tells you about Spirit Logs that you can use to make your fire bigger and the bigger the fire you make, the more of the island (and its inhabitants) you find.

You talk to them…

You hear their stories…

And they tell you what they need.

And then you go off to get it.

As you go around, you find stuff and bring it to the various ghosts and they do stuff like make you stuff that lets you bring them more stuff! It’s a fetch quest paradise.

Also, while you wander around, you have opportunities to fiddle with your environment… can you see the sea shell you might wanna pick up?

It’s right up here!

No fighting. You don’t get a sword. You aren’t out there killing things. (Well, you *DO* go fishing… so the game isn’t vegan.) You’re wandering around from ghost to ghost, helping them get settled down after years of being restless. It’s relaxing. Even soothing.

If you’re sick and tired of games where the expectation is that you’re mean to other people (or, at least, shoot them unsympathetically), you should pick this one up.

It’s nice.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a screenshot of opening screen of Cozy Grove. All screenshots taken by the author.)