SNUG LIFE

Cosy games have escaped the farm to become a huge-selling genre of their own

- Ian Evenden

The phenomenon of cosy gaming really took off during 2020-22, after the success of following daily routines, making connections with nature and in-game characters – games that offer their players lower amounts of stress than Elden Ring, has been around for a lot longer.

You could go back to 1996, which was a pretty good year all round, but specifically saw the launch of Harvest Moon on the SNES. Known as Farm Story in Japan, and now the first game in a series called Story of Seasons. The farming-life-sim has expanded beyond Nintendo consoles to PlayStations, Xboxes, and PC. In the Seasons games, you restore an old farm, grow crops, tend livestock, meet townsfolk and maybe even marry.

And if you've played a certain 2016 life-sim, that will all sound very familiar: Stardew Valley. It’s consistently been still getting updates and selling new copies - it was up to 41 million in sales by the end of 2024, 26m of them on PC, which means it has been a huge success. It’s been nine years after launch, and which has seen a revival in games with similar mechanics. While creator Eric Barone has never made a secret of the games that inspired Pelican Town, his game's influence on those that came after can't be denied.

There is a lot more to cosy gaming than farming sims that allow you to date NPC villagers. And as a subgenre - the boundaries between games are as grey and porous as to barely exist at all - it's gloriously broad. More of a vibe than a set of guidelines, all it takes for a game to be cosy is whether you can imagine yourself playing it by a fire on a winter's day, or if it makes you feel like you are, even in the midst of summer.

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