Please ghosts with crafting in the chill Cozy Grove
The best grove since Byker?
Cozy Grove is a chill life sim set on a haunted island, which you restore to its colourful best by crafting, fishing and performing jobs for a growing menagerie of harmless ghosts. It looks wonderfully pleasant - and it's out now.
There's a bit of Spiritfarer to it, in that you're performing your tasks for the departed, but its hand-drawn isometric art also reminds me of Don't Starve - only, like, Don't Starve if it got really into Cbeebies instead of Tim Burton movies.
It has a a dose of Animal Crossing to it, too: the events on the island occur in real-time, and your dead chums will only give you so many tasks to perform in a given day. The developers - SpryFox, makers of Alphabear - say that it's a 40 hour campaign but "designed to span months of playtime".
I don't want to solely describe Cozy Grove in relation to other games, so let me also note that the trailer shows a seagull who wears a sea captain's hat. Is he one of the ghosts? Is he just a local ferryman? I do not know, but I'm already fond of him. I'll do whatever he tells me.
I am deeply in the mood for something pleasant and unthreatening to play on this grey, exhausting weekend/month/year, and so I'll be jumping into the Grove later this weekend. If you want to join me, you can pick up Cozy Grove now from Steam and the Epic Games Store for £10.25/$13.50/€11.24.