All Those Who Are Lost Deserve Kindness
As a ghost, it’s handy to keep a list of things that transcend the corporeal plane: birdsong. Affection. Loss. Time. And, for some reason, most caffeinated beverages.
— Charlotte Pine
Cozy Grove is an indie Life Simulation Game game released in 2021 by developer Spry Fox. You take on the role of a young Spirit Scout embarking on their first solo excursion into the wilderness. As the name suggests, Spirit Scouts partake in all the camping related activities of their real world inspiration, with an added supernatural twist—they’re also charged with helping any ghosts they may encounter, for, as the organization’s motto says: All Those Who Are Lost Deserve Kindness.
Rather than the safe and only mildly haunted site of Cozy Cove, however, your neglectful Scoutmaster accidentally sends you to Cozy Grove, an island positively teeming with lost souls with Unfinished Business. Having failed to properly secure your rowboat at the dock, you have no choice but to get comfy and start helping the island’s ghostly residents work through their emotional baggage.
The Iyashikei-esque atmosphere similar to Animal Crossing encourages slow-paced daily gameplay consisting of small, helpful tasks aimed at befriending your fellow island dwellers. Fulfilling their requests earns you Spirit Logs, which can be fed to Flamey, your sentient campfire spirit and guide, to expand the island and encounter new ghosts in need.
The game is still being actively supported and has an official discord
where bug reports and suggestions for balance alterations can be made. Also has an unofficial fan-run wiki.
Cozy Grove contains examples of:
- Anti Poop-Socking: The game is intended to be played in many relatively short daily sessions. After you have cleared that day's story quests, the main quest giver will tell you that no one needs helping, and try again tomorrow. You can still explore and gather materials.
- Beary Friendly: You play as a "spirit scout" on a haunted island, who brings peace to the restless spirits by finding out their backstories. They are all bear people. Some are friendlier than others, but none of them are dangerous.
- Comedic Sociopathy: Letters from Scoutmaster Blake — who is supremely unbothered that you, a scouts-age child under his responsibility, have been stranded alone on an island significantly more haunted than what he’d prepared you for — tend to fall into this.
- One letter cheerfully informs you that he’s been in contact with your parents, and they agree the waivers they’d signed means they can’t sue him.
- Another assures you that he’s so proud of your progress, “whether or not you’re still alive.”
- Cooking Mechanics: By way of Allison Fisher, who can process and combine your gathered ingredients into 112 different recipes across the categories of breads, salads, pastries, and pickled dishes. To a lesser extent, Flamey will cook fruit and veggies into roasted forms, and nuts into flour.
- Dead Person Conversation: The whole premise of the game, since the majority of characters that you interact with are either ghosts or spirits.
- Dowsing Device: One of the tools you can get is a dowsing rod. When held, you get a hot/cold indicator, with an increasingly bigger flame icon to indicate that you're getting closer. An "X" Marks the Spot will appear once you've found an artifact. If no indicator appears when holding it and it doesn't shake in your inventory, there's nothing left to find for the day. Fully-crafted treasure maps function just like one, except they're one-time use.
- Eldritch Location: A mostly benign example. The island rearranges itself at the start of each new day and has reportedly reacted in strange ways to attempts at gardening:Charlotte Pine: You might notice the island's topography rearranging itself some days. Don't worry, that's perfectly normal! Hm...maybe normal is too strong a word. But it certainly keeps happening.Ursula Pine: I've planted trinkets that have caused huge sustained storms. A buried piece of gold once caused the island to shrink.
- Flavor Text: Item descriptions in the menu are often more evocative than literal:Dahlia: Shall we dally? You and I, blushing. Alive.Demon Bird/Deer: In the great rotation of the spirits, some of us fall into the shadows.Infinity Mask: At the forbidden underground masque, a deer-like man held out his cloven hoof. Will you dance the Ten Thousand Steps of Ecstasy?Iris: The old gods’ eyes resembled this.
- Game-Breaking Bug: It is a Play Every Day game, and thus when you have finished one set of quests, the next set will not pop until the next real-time day. People who are keen to get on with the game sometimes fiddle with their system clocks to get around this. The loading screen contains a message saying that fiddling with your system clock can corrupt your save file.
- In-Universe Game Clock: If an NPC tells you that something will be ready in an hour, that's one real-time hour. If they tell you to come back tomorrow, then that's real-world tomorrow. Yes, this game does want you to Play Every Day. There are also cosmetic differences to the island depending on whether you're playing before or after dusk.
- Item Crafting: By way of Jeremy Gruffle’s workshop. The player can make furniture, decorations, and light sources, as well as transmute resources into other forms (e.g. softwood into hardwood or quartz gems to precious gems).
- Loads and Loads of Loading: Loading times are remarkably long. Early builds on PS4 required over six minutes to continue from your last save. Patches reduced this to four minutes. By way of comparison, Fallout 4 on the same platform takes less than two minutes.
- Ludicrous Precision: It gives its version numbers in more detail than the average player will need. For example, the version that the PS4 knows as 1.07 is "Version 1.7.1.s+210508-0128+5c7229c-E33" on the Options menu.
- Monochrome to Color: When a bear is in need of the player’s help, they and the world around them will be portrayed in a washed-out monochrome. Completing the task that they ask of you sends a shockwave of color out from them that also populates their area with personal effects, furniture, and other structures. These small bubbles of color can be spread to uninhabited areas by putting down and chaining together lamps. This is necessary to fully gather the island’s resources, as trees in unlit areas can’t be harvested.
- Play Every Day: There are Achievements for "playing on multiple days," specifically 7 and 90.
- Prophet Eyes: Allison Fisher nicknames the player “Bright Eyes” because of these. While not blind, Spirit Scouts are known for their “peculiarly unnatural pale” eyes that “see beyond” and allow them to help lost spirits. Seems to be an acquired trait/power, as one of Scoutmaster Blake’s letters notes that he’s been training a fresh batch of Scouts who “still have their normal eyes.”
- Scout-Out: The Spirit Scouts are functionally Girl and Boy Scouts with added ghostly responsibilities. The player even earns merit badges for their accomplishments around the island.
- Serious Business:
- Here is the description of the Potato Donut, which is a craftable item:
Favored in the northern reach of Maine. Lighter. Fluffier. Guaranteed not to breach the portals of the underworld. Sworn enemy of the abominable cake donut.- Likewise, the description for one craftable dessert notes that, under the rule of the first God Emperor, an insufficiently delicate panna cotta would result in “Death to the pastry chef!”
- Sliding Scale of Collectible Tracking: Generally at the easy end. Quests mostly involve finding items which are scattered across the island. These all have hints (e.g. "Near three skulls tied to a stake"), but if you can't find them, you can buy hints from an NPC for 100 Old Coins, which will bring up an arrow leading you to the exact spot.
- Unfinished Business: By upgrading your campfire, up to seventeen different ghosts can be encountered. All of them have lingering regrets or other problems keeping them bound to the island.
- Video Game Caring Potential: The entire game is centered around this. Your primary overarching goal is to help the often genuinely endearing ghosts around you make peace with the regrets binding them to Cozy Grove. You can also raise, feed, and pet the spirits of birds and deer, and even the little imps that frequently cause mischief around the island can be thrown food or gifts and guided back to each other when they get separated. As of the summer festival update, you can now also offer to hug ghost bears at any time. Some will decline, but others will gratefully take you up on it.
