Cozy Grove is delightfully wholesome and, well, cozy. As a Spirit Scout, you interact with ghosts, help them work out why they haven't been able to move on and help them on their way. There are small quests, trees and flowers to plant, critters and fish to catch, weird cats, and a sentient campfire. It is also designed not to be binged. After a half hour or so of play, the Ghostbears will no longer have anything for you to do. You can still decorate, buy and sell items, and craft, but essentially, you are done for the day. Stopping in daily to check in on the island was essential to my self-care routine during the pandemic.
When I inevitably caught COVID, Cozy Grove and the 1980s Price is Right channel on Pluto were as much as my fever-addled brain could handle. I was sad when I finished the game, but I knew a sequel was on the way. Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit was just released, and it is essentially the same game but better. It has everything I loved about the original game, with lots of little improvements to the gameplay. The sequel also allows you to send and receive gifts from other players. My favorite addition to Camp Spirit is power washing, which you accomplish by squeezing a fish. Everything is adorable, wholesome, and cozy.
So, what's the caveat? In October 2022, Netflix acquired Spry Fox, the developer of Cozy Grove. So, while the original game is still available on PC and consoles, Camp Spirit is only available to Netflix subscribers on Android and iOS. The original game was removed from Apple Arcade earlier this year, which made mobile-only players mad. Now, everyone else is unhappy. The developers at Spry Fox are well aware of this, and they are sympathetic.
…Netflix has given Spry Fox more support and encouragement than we've ever experienced before. We now have the resources to make the games we want to make, on the timetable we want to make them, with very few compromises. And speaking of "compromises"… we don't need to put advertisements or in-app purchases in our games! This is wonderful because, over the years, we never stopped struggling with how to ethically monetize our mobile games while also surviving as a studio. It was always a painful, time-consuming process that ate up a shockingly large percentage of our development time and energy. Now, we can put all that energy into simply making our games as good as they can be. If you've never made a free-to-play mobile game before, you cannot imagine how wonderful this feels for us.
Spry Fox
So, without Netflix, there might not be a Camp Spirit or Spry Fox.
I'm a Gen X PC gamer, so playing on mobile feels clumsy. I tried playing on my TV by connecting a controller and mirroring to my TV, which works, but this kind of kludge is the opposite of cozy. Regardless, it's a wonderful game, so I recommend it if you subscribe to Netflix and don't mind mobile games or messy mirroring. If not, definitely check out the original Cozy Grove. The bears will thank you.
Previously:
• Mobile game of the week: Alphabear
• Mobile game of the week: Spider, Rite of the Shrouded Moon
• Mobile game of the week: Zoombinis
