This year’s crop of cozy games felt like it ran completely perpendicular to the trends in PC gaming as a whole. The main release calendar for this year was mostly lacking obvious blockbusters, leaving room for some really delightful surprise hits. Meanwhile, the best cozy games of this year mostly wound up being the ones that I’d been anticipating since last year and I wasn’t as taken in by the surprise hits that this indie-infused corner of the hobby usually delivers.
I’m certainly not closing this year disappointed though. I’ve got at least one new entry on my list of best games like Stardew Valley and a lot of other good cozy contenders for the year.
Top 5 Cozy games of 2024
Fields of MistriaSky: Children of the LightInfinity NikkiTiny GladeRusty’s Retirement
Some other cozy games I liked that didn’t quite make top five status: Minami Lane, Reka, Everholm, Neva, and Gourdlets.
(Image credit: NPC Studio)
Fields of Mistria
Style: Farm sim
Every year we’re inundated with more cozy farm sim games but each year there’s always one that manages to outshine the rest. Fields of Mistria harkens back to the Harvest Moon games of the ’90s and magical girl anime of the same era wrapped up in very colorful Game Boy Advance-looking visuals. It is without a doubt a farm sim by farm simmers with tons of little ease of use features like jumping over fences or NPCs appearing on the map that Stardew fans have long handled with mods.
Mistria’s real success is its fantastic cast and earnest dialogue. I don’t think it’s possible to play without falling in love with the townies’ weekly tabletop RPG meetup at the inn or with all of the glorious anime-inspired outfits. Seeing several townies wear jackets draped over their shoulders with the empty arms hanging is pure nostalgia bait.
Even in early access, Fields of Mistria is an obvious new must-play addition to the farm sim canon of games like Stardew Valley.
(Image credit: Thatgamecompany)
Sky: Children of the Light
Style: Social MMO platformer
A social MMO built on the back of 2012’s flying adventure Journey shouldn’t work. On principle, I want developers to stop pivoting beloved games into live service affairs but Sky: Children of the Light is the exception that proves my rule: It does work. Sky had already been around for nearly five years when it arrived on PC in April and since then I’ve already sunk another 130 hours into it. It’s allegedly (still) in early access but this has been a complete game with seasonal content for years now.
Sky feels small initially: it’s around three hours of a short main campaign in which you fly around meeting spirits who teach you new emotes. You’ll encounter other players running about in a similar anonymized fashion as in Journey but it’s easy to make acquaintances who are just itching to share secret shortcuts with you.
After your first run through the ending (an ascent to a mountaintop that also feels very familiar from Journey) Sky opens up massively. There’s a huge map to explore, constantly being added to with new seasons of content that also drop in new questlines and spirits. As with all MMOs, fashion is the real endgame and the grind for outfits never ends. I’m still delighted by the secret platforming puzzles and hidden areas and spent the year making a whole constellation of new friends and acquaintances to meet up with in game.
Read more: MMOs still have so much room to grow
Infinity Nikki
(Image credit: Infold Games)
Style: Open world adventure
Speaking of endgame fashion, the Nikki series of dress-up games debuted on PC this year with a huge open world adventure and I’ve been enthralled with it. I knew it would only take the right genre of game for one of these gacha joints to finally get me and Infinity Nikki is the one.
Nikki is nominally a dress up game where your goal is to collect clothes and compete in styling challenges but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s also an open world platforming and collectathon adventure where you’ll play agility minigames, do sidequests, and hunt for hidden treasures. It’s the perfect mix of activities to make my evening hours disappear as I take on just one more styling battle against the Ebony Scissors before running off to climb the top of a tower where another collectible Whimstar is perched.
Infinity Nikki is a gacha game, a very specific style of freemium monetization that until now hadn’t started making inroads to the cozy gaming genre on PC. The various currencies can be daunting to a newbie but it’s still a great open world romp even if you guard your wallet and stick to playing for free.
(Image credit: Pounce Light)
Tiny Glade
Style: Building toy
Tiny Glade is a delight for anyone with a builder’s soul. This is for everyone who plays The Sims entirely in build mode or lays out out their Stardew Valley farms in intricate aesthetic patterns. It gets compared to Townscaper a lot, for lack of a better touchstone, because its procedural system reacts to how you combine objects together. Walking paths drawn intersecting with fences will create archways in those fences while windows on a building placed at ground level turn into doors, and so on.
It invites so much creativity, always promising that when I try new combinations of its relatively small set of objects that I’ll be able to find interesting ways to use them. I’m thrilled by little discoveries like creating sewer grates on buildings surrounded by water, for instance. It’s also inspired the same maverick builders that do Sims speedbuilds or MMO housing to repurpose objects and push the system to its limits to create wild possibilities.
What I enjoy most though its how far this single game pushed forward a micro genre that Townscaper created. There are more procedural building toys incoming now, but Tiny Glade singlehandedly set the bar quite high for what’s possible with the tech.
Read more: Tiny Glade won’t stop delighting me with new discoveries
Rusty’s Retirement snapped to the bottom of my monitor with Steam on a browser behind it. (Image credit: Mister Morris Games)
Rusty’s Retirement
Style: Idler farm sim
Rusty’s Retirement should be marked NSFW, not because of any adult material (it’s adorable) but because it can destroy your productivity. It’s an idle game farm sim that snaps to the lower quarter of your monitor and runs while you do normal tasks around it. Instead of wandering about the town like in Stardew, your expanding collection of little robots care for your growing farm while you decide what to play and which upgrades to buy.
Rusty gives just the right amount of control—letting me fiddle with the placements of all my fields and decorations and upgrades so that I have plenty of say in my layout. Be warned though that it does take quite a while to get to the point where your farm is fully automated because the robot who will replant seeds for you is pretty costly. So for a while you’ll be manually replanting whenever bare fields catch the corner of your eye.
I wouldn’t think a glorified desktop pet from the 2000s could be one of the best cozy games I played this year but it genuinely is. Rusty’s Retirement brought something I never would have expected to a genre that’s felt a little at risk of going stale and it did so in the most satisfying fashion.
Bonus sixth cozy game pick
(Image credit: carrotcake)
The Garden Path
Style: Garden life sim
The Garden Path feels like a life simulator stripped from a storybook. In its dappled watercolour world, you’ll meet a cast of whimsical yet slightly unsettling vegetable-headed characters, alongside some friendly animals. All of which are ready to send you out on a foraging quest or ask for your help on re-decorating an abandoned garden. If you want to slowly restore what could be a fairytale garden entirely at your own pace with no pressure, then The Garden Path is waiting for you.
Although it does have a lot of the more traditional elements of cozy games, such as fishing and gardening, the formula is shaken up slightly by the pacing. Like Animal Crossing, it follows a 24-hour clock, but you’re not tethered to following a 365 day cycle. Instead, four seasons spread across 28 real-world days, which is slightly easier to manage than a whole year and also give you the chance to skip out on certain seasons you’re not a huge fan of—no one likes winter in these sorts of games.
It’s the epitome of a game you can pick up and put down when you fancy which is what I think makes the best kind of cozy game. Time passes slowly in the background but you never feel the pressure of meeting deadlines. Some days I’ve signed in and had a few jobs to do, other days I’ve had nothing to do so I’ve walked around picking up ingredients for tea. It’s as laid back as you want to make it, and you’ll never feel the consequence of stopping to smell the roses everyone once in a while.
