Cozy games are getting darker
Cozy games are hard to define. There’s no one aesthetic line that’s threaded throughout the entire genre. There are qualities we’ve come to associate with cozy games, sure — soft colors like in Little Witch in the Woods, farming or life simulation as in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and very little violence, like how Potion Craft is mostly brewing potions. But those qualities aren’t actually requirements; cozy games are more about how they make you feel. You know it when you see it.
And now, the subgenre of cozy games is delving into new territory: the dark cozy game. Cozy game expert Kennedy Rose, who goes by Cozy K online, sees the burgeoning subgenre as a response to an increased interest in coziness in gaming. “[It] allows for the subgenres within cozy games to blossom even more,” she told Polygon. “Yes, we want to unwind with some cozy task management mechanisms, but maybe we also want to uncover a horrifying mystery while we do so.”
It may seem like a cozy dark game complicates the idea of a cozy game: How could a game like Dredge, which delves into psychological horror, be considered a cozy game? But Dredge is much more than the mangled, grotesque fish that players pull up from the depths and the red-rimmed eyes of the fisherman protagonist from his nights without sleep. It’s in the slow, methodical pattern of Dredge’s gameplay and the nature of fishing itself. These qualities fit in between the game’s other themes — the mysteries and horrors of the sea — to different degrees throughout the game. There are monsters to be found — or to find you — and consequences for spending too many nights without sleep. Hallucinations can do actual damage; unknowable sea monsters can tear your ship apart. Almost in spite of
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