Unlike the brown bananas waiting on your kitchen counter or your high school crush, the aging Nintendo Switch only becomes more synonymous with cuteness as it grows up. We have, in part, puffy-cheeked mascots like Mario and Kirby to thank for that — they may deliver pain in their games, but they’re also as stout and charming as a warm glass of milk. So, when you’re searching for cozy, you can reach for a chocolate chip cookie, or you can pick up your Switch.
While we kill time anticipating the handheld console’s successor, rumored to release later this year, tons of cozy games are currently vying for your attention. Familiar favorites like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing have already had plenty of it, so we’ve packed more underrated options into a narrow list for gamers in need of casual, comfortable fun. Want to melt into a buttercream-frosted cooking sim? Lemon Cake is for you. Do you only zone out under a crystal blue sky? Lonely Mountains Downhill will hand you a bike and gust of cold air. Other types of relaxation, you’ll find in between.
Venba
With understated charm, everything faintly glowing oven red, the short narrative cooking sim Venba helped define 2023 cozy games. Its premise is simple: player character Venba works through her mother’s smudged cookbook in an attempt to connect her family’s present in Canada with its abundant history in India. And its cooking mechanics are relaxingly routine — pour the oil, frizzle the onions, drizzle with saffron milk — but Venba is tender in the way few games leave space for, examining its family’s overlapping ties to love and loss around meals. It’s both an energetic puzzler (some recipes are completely inscrutable) and a candied ode to the Desi diaspora; you shouldn’t miss it.
A Space for the Unbound
Playing A Space for the Unbound is a lot like looking at the stars. The 2023 adventure game is romantic, and it seems like it’s persisted across a thousand lifetimes, unrolling like a fairytale. Living in a vibrant pixel daydream of ‘90s Indonesia, protagonist Atma must prevent his vengeful and magical girlfriend Raya from turning his town into a hell pit. A Space for the Unbound mostly consists of humble point-and-clicking on environmental elements to solve puzzles, but it also has more fantastic gameplay mechanics, like the “Spacedive†that lets you descend into agitated characters’ internal battles. As the game continues, you find that omnipotent-but-depressed Raya only fractures her reality to cope with the waves crashing in her heart, and, caught in her roiling water, you can’t help but be overcome by emotion, too.
Gris
Lonely girl Gris knows that she has the power of the world within her. She collects starlight to reintroduce color to her deserted skyworld in eponymous Gris, the 2018 platform-adventure game about confronting grief in heaven. Despite the melancholy that encloses every Gris environment, from the depths of its midnight blue oceans to the tips of its crumbling marble palaces, it’s so soothing to guide Gris to acceptance. Her long dress and cloak always billow around her like a runaway umbrella, and as her speckles of light grow and glisten on your screen, you notice what pure beauty there is in always pushing forward.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill
Just you and your bike, promises 2019 game Lonely Mountains: Downhill. Just you, your bike, and whatever unhurried thoughts you let float in and out of your mind like leaves on a lake. Because Lonely Mountains has no mandatory pathways or terrain — you can speed, scrape, and hop your bike down mountains, like the title says, or over bare forests, deserts, and other strips of unsullied nature — it’s perfect for zoning out. To raise the stakes, you can unlock cosmetics for your squoval-shaped cyclist or do competitive speed runs through online leaderboards, but Lonely Mountains is best faced in peaceful solitude.
Mineko’s Night Market
Saucer-eyed Mineko, the tiny protagonist of 2023 business sim Mineko’s Night Market, is the cutest little capitalist. Under spoon-shaped green trees and across snow-crowned mountains, Mineko must perform typical life sim stuff (foraging, decorating, honoring her bed time) in addition to crafting items to gift and sell at the weekly night market she’s trying to refresh. The game has a bizarre B-plot that involves a cat god and suited secret agents looking to rein it in, but if you can look past its awkward narrative, you’ll be left with one of the most visually soothing business sims ever.
Lemon Cake
In Lemon Cake, the 2022 baking sim, being haunted is a good thing. The chirpy ghost living in your abandoned bakery helps you restore her old greenhouse, sweep up the kitchen, and start cranking out candy and dessert to sell in her snug storefront. It’s a predictable business sim in many ways — farming elements, like raising a cow for fresh milk, make your bakery feel quaint, but you ultimately need to satisfy customers in order to earn money — its graphics, stained with an inviting deep orange, can easily soothe a sour mood. Its indulgent recipes like marshmallow twist, chocolate croissant, and strawberry ice will make you into nostalgic Proust in no time.
Yoshi’s Crafted World
In a perfect world, we’d all be homeowners equipped with healthcare, and I like to think that we’d also be made of felt and five-inches-tall. Yoshi’s Crafted World at least makes the latter part true, serving it up on a paper plate as white as the sun. For that reason, the 2019 side-scrolling platformer is exciting to look at, with its fuzzy 3D Yoshi dinosaurs that lick, split, and hurl enemies in a 2.5D world made of popsicle sticks and other craft materials. Sweet music twinkles in the background as you clear low-stakes levels. Pass a JoyCon to a friend for two-person co-op and double the fun.
Lil Gator Game
Open-world adventure Lil Gator Game is a sunny playground adventure. It’s difficult to summarize how adorable the 2022 game is — its adorableness is best understood in vignettes. Main character Lil Gator’s feet wiggle happily when they use their hat as a hot air balloon across mountain peaks. They waddle like an empty swing when they walk, like they could never imagine toppling over. In your island travels, you get to assist all kinds of animal friends like frogs, sheep, stubborn bulls with their problems and earn a rain of cardboard money. With this money, you can craft items to unlock new places to bounce around in, and, since the main goal of Lil Gator is to be a toddler-age reptile, there’s no shortage of time to sink in and enjoy all of it.
Night in the Woods
2017 adventure game Night in the Woods is and will likely always be indie royalty. Its striking art, which turns the moon into a spotlight and a forest into oblivion, is inimitable. Mae, its kitty cat protagonist and 20-something-year-old wanderer, returns to her strangely changed hometown. As Mae, you reconnect with old friends and endure bad dreams to essentially solve the mystery of the Rust Belt which, flanked by Night in the Woods’ mist and demons, isn’t “cozy†in the usual sense. But playing it often feels as introspective as journaling by candlelight, and though Night in the Woods might not always make you feel safe, it will allow you to wade purposefully toward peace.
A Highland Song
You can find yourself in all kinds of secret places, from your warm home to the rained-on crags of the wilderness. A Highland Song protagonist Moira McKinnon had a feeling this was the case, so she leaves her mom behind and plans to run off to her uncle’s lighthouse. But first she needs to endure unwelcoming cliffs, bullying rains, and the ancient myths that gather around the tips of Scottish mountains. The 2.5D sidescroller brightens Moira’s arduous journey with folk-y rhythm minigames and, even when it’s pouring, Moira’s faith in herself and her culture are heartening.
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley (upcoming)
Any friend of the Moomin cotton ball creatures — Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson’s mischievous trolls, born in 1945 — is a friend of mine. But I think even cozy gamers unfamiliar with the cartoon series will relish the pretty and impish Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. The musical adventure game, scheduled to release early this year, features lovely watercolor-style art and an uncooperative main character, Snufkin, who messes with cops in an effort to save resplendent Moominvalley from being corralled into ugly, manicured parks. A little ecoterrorism goes a long way.
A Good Snowman is Hard to Build
You: a gumdrop-shaped shadow monster. Your friends: well, you don’t really have any. That’s the puzzle part of the winter wonderland A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, which drops you in a white and green garden with a limited quantity of good, rollable snow. But if you manage to navigate around trimmed hedges and obstacles, like bird baths and feeders, and successfully stack a snowfriend, they’ll reward you by coming to life and giving you a hug. It’s an endearing brain-teaser, and maybe exactly what you need.