God, I’m bad at relaxing. You know that feeling you get when you’re in an argument and someone says, “Calm down!” and you lose your mind and you’re like, “I am calm!”That’s what it feels like in my head every day. My brain is essentially a colony of endless voices screaming that I’m doing it wrong. ‘It’ being literally any action in that moment. Including relaxing.Especiallyrelaxing. I never feel more pressured to succeed than when my only goal is tonotfeel pressured to succeed. And while I love them with my whole heart, I’m afraid to say that cozy games are beginning to stress me out.
I’ve got no problem withthe massive, ill-defined umbrella genre known as ‘cozy’. I’m sure someone has a specific definition of what a cozy game is, but I don’t really care about that. They essentially fall into three different sub-categories. The first type of cozy game involves you doing some sort of banal, manual labor marking a transition in your life. You’re moving in with a partner, so the game is you have to choose all the drinks that go on the bar cart or something. The second type of cozy game involves contemplating the power of art through a character in the game making art. You’re a painter who doesn’t like painting! Have fun! The third type is having a job. I love job games, but it is a sign of the world that we’ve decided ‘cozy’ partially means‘I have to powerwash a playground for money’.
There is nothing wrong with these games. There is nothing wrong with this genre. Trust me, I own a lot of games where an anthropomorphic animal runs a restaurant that may or may not have supernatural elements. I’ve got my fair share of lawn and farm and archeology and home repair and arcade design titles to run with. All are cozy. All are meant to be played at a nice, easy pace designed to help you release the tension in your soul as you participate in calming, soothing activities. When they work - and they usually do for normal people - these games can feel like they’re giving your brain a massage. Unfortunately, right now it feels like they’re giving my brain the type of massage you get from someone who’s only seen a massage in movies and wants to try giving one for the first time.
To be clear, the problem is 100 percent me. Ilovejob games but maybe I’ve just been playing them for so long that they’ve started to feel like, you know,actualjobs.Stardew Valleyis incredible, but there are times when I feel like I might be carrying this whole town on my back. Cozy games often help you relax with simple actions that are supposed to soothe your mind, right? But that also means I need to keep track of which plants are coming in. It means I need to watch for the smelly guy in my video game trading card shop -which is a real challenge that comes up in a real game. These cozy games require me to pay attention.
Again, this is ameissue. When I bought Summer House, I thought, ‘Perfect. A little electronic toy where you can make a nice neighborhood and put it on your TV while you work’. But every time I play it, I feel like I’m getting it slightly wrong. There could be a better placement of houses. The geometry doesn’t quite add up. The residents would think I’m an idiot. I love an open-ended game with the goal of ‘see what you can do, and just have fun out there’. I do! It also fills me with so much stress as I try to figure out if I’m doing it right and having fun the right way. Nor does it help that I’ll then seeanothercornflower blue cozy game on Steam and think, ‘Yeah, this one will fix me!’ I swear to God, I either need a doctor to tell me to stop doing this or to pick out a game that will erase all of my self-imposed issues.
I don’t know, maybe it’s in the name ‘cozy’ that’s tripping me up. I have a few Steam titles that are more like interactive screensavers where you can set ambient music and watch somebody studying as their cat walks around. One of them, Kind Words, even lets you write and receive nice letters from strangers. Fortunately, the villains of the universe haven’t found that one yet and users are still extremely kind and extremely earnest in a way that too many people - including myself - have lost. Nowthat’scozy. I’m alright withthatbeing called cozy. Because, when I hear ‘cozy’ I think being wrapped in a nice blanket and being told everything’s going to be okay. I don’t always think ‘simple, repeated action that overtly represents the transition between college and adulthood’.
Oh! That’s the other thing. Look, I love a sad game, but it feels likea lotof these cozy, relaxing, scone-and-coffee games are about accepting death. Between Bear’s Restaurant andSpirittea, ‘cozy’ begins to feel like you’re operating a slightly nicer version of the waiting room from Beetlejuice. Which is exactly my thing!I love this sort of thing!Gimme that sadness! I was born into it. But perhaps it’s not relaxing? Possibly it’s even stressful? I don’t want to ruin someone’s afterlife! The idea of giving a doomed soul a nice meal or a good drink before God hits them with the final punchline isso taxingon my imagination. And while I really, really love the gameUnpacking, it just reminded me of how claustrophobic my home is. Oh, I bought it. Oh, I beat it. Oh, it reminded me that I’m 40 and have missed most of life’s significant milestones.
You get it. All of this is internal. I should change my viewpoint! These games are made to calm the spirit and verb the noun. Plus, it’s not like I’m going to stop buying them. I’m not smart; I don’t learn lessons from decisions that have hurt me in the past. But talking to NPCs in a bar or coffee shop is becoming as stressful in games as it is in real life to approach real people at a bar or coffee shop. Having to make the right drinks the right way or serve every meal on time or - I swear to God - find the one square centimeter of space I haven’t power washed around a mansion - gives me heavy agita. Like I said, maybe there’s just a point when a job game begins to feel like a job. And, honestly, if you showed that sentence to someone fifty years ago, they’d think it was a dire warning from the future.
Folks, I’m so tired. My soul is tired. My mind is tired. My body is tired. If there was another part of myself I knew about, that would be tired too. But I’ll continue to buy cozy games because, despite all my whining, I do enjoy them. I just need to find something that will actually help me relax. Something that will actually help me unwind. And perhaps something that doesn’t make me do manual labor as it reminds me that one day I’ll end up in Hell. Actually, now that I think about it, I think my request from cozy games is the same request as I have from normal jobs: I love the benefits of the experience, I enjoy the effort that goes into it, but I just wish I didn’t feel like I was doing it wrong while being reminded that I am worth nothing to the universe.
