Happy New Year! I hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Mine has mostly consisted of nursing a "Steam Sale Hangover." The Winter Sale just wrapped up, and let’s just say I may have gone a bit overboard buying games for my new Steam Deck.
Consequently, I’ve decided that one of my resolutions this year should be to actually finish the games I own before clicking "buy" on anything else1. So, I’ve been playing a lot2 of games lately. While I love action-packed adventures and graphics-intensive games that turn my Steam Deck into a portable furnace, I mostly like to absorb my nightly blue light through cozy games.
What Makes A Game Cozy?
Before we begin, I have to clarify what a cozy game means to me, seeing as I went through this list with my dad, and he disagreed on a lot of them fitting his own description. For me, a cozy game is one that never overwhelms me. It can be challenging, even emotional, but it always feels gentle in its persistence. I should be able to keep going without hitting a wall, without realizing too late that I missed something essential hours ago. Cozy games feel patient. They let me slip into a character, wander a little, imagine more than what’s strictly on the screen. They don’t rush me, and they don’t punish me for taking the long way.
Unfortunately, the cozy game world has been completely overrun by farming sims. Don’t get me wrong! Stardew Valley is a masterpiece, but after the tenth game asking me to abandon my entire life, move to a crumbling farm, and romance the local blacksmith while optimizing my turnip harvest, I’m over it. There’s nothing cozy about managing crops to me.
So, I’ve put together a list of my actual favorite cozy games; the ones that don’t require me to water a single pixelated tomato plant. Here’s what I reach for when I want comfort, charm, and zero agricultural responsibility.
Love, Ghostie
If you’re the kind of person who sits in a cafe inventing tragic backstories and three-album character arcs for strangers who just wanted a latte, Love Ghostie is your digital playground. It is essentially a “make-believe” simulator for those of us who never quite outgrew making our dolls kiss. You play as a resident ghost in a mansion full of charming, quirky creatures like Beepo the robot and Ollin the frog prince3, tasked with orchestrating their love lives. You get to send characters on dates, gift them presents from each other, and sing haunted love songs to strengthen their bonds.
I spent an entire weekend obsessing over an enemies-to-lovers arc, genuinely convinced I could engineer a “meant to be” romance that would make a 2014 AO3 writer weep. It is a “soft girl” game in the truest sense: there are no racing timers, no punishing mechanics, and no consequences for letting everyone date everyone else. It’s a short, sweet experience that wraps up in about 6.5 hours, ending exactly when it needs to before the charm runs out. If you’ve ever wanted to meddle in fictional lives with zero consequences, this is your game.
Death and Taxes
Death and Taxes answers the question: what if being the Grim Reaper was just a desk job? You clock in, review files, stamp "live" or "die" on paperwork, and try not to get fired by Fate, your passive-aggressive boss who definitely CC's everyone on emails. There's no timer pressuring you. Death can wait while you agonize over whether to spare the doctor researching a cure or the activist organizing protests. I spent entire evenings deliberating, refreshing my little in-game phone to see how my choices rippled across the world. Kill someone who seemed evil? Surprise! They were secretly funding orphanages. Spare the "good" guy? Oops, he just started a cult.
The game lets you experiment freely, though stray too far from your quotas and you'll get a warning before Fate fires you (which is its own darkly funny ending worth seeing). For a game about deciding who lives and dies, it's shockingly light. The satirical humor keeps things from feeling heavy, and the water color office aesthetic makes existential dread feel cozy. I'd close my laptop each night feeling oddly relaxed. If you've ever wanted to play a sad sort of god with excellent work-life balance, this is your game.
Date Everything
Have you ever looked at your bed and thought, “You know what? We should take this to the next level.” No? Just me? I’m kidding! I’m more of a refrigerator girl myself. Date Everything is a sandbox dating sim that gives you a pair of magical pink glasses, turning your mundane household furniture into dateable humans. It sounds weird, and that’s because it is!
You spend your days sweet-talking household objects to land a rating of Love, Friend, or Hate. With 100 characters to discover4, it’s a massive, absurd social experiment. While some personalities are definitely more “nails on a chalkboard” than “soulmate,” the humor keeps me hooked. Plus, there’s a subtle, darker plot simmering in the background that I’m currently digging into. I’m not finished yet, but I’m crossing my fingers that the mystery goes as deep as my newfound feelings for the kitchen appliances.
Dave the Diver
This is easily one of my all-time favorite video games. You play as Dave, a guy who spends his days deep-sea diving and his nights slingin’ sashimi at a local sushi joint. The art is this “modern pixel” look that I’m genuinely obsessed with. It’s crisp, colorful, and every underwater cavern feels like stumbling into a living painting, all saturated blues and glowing sea life.
What really keeps me hooked is the sheer variety of gameplay they managed to cram into one title. One minute you’re managing your oxygen and dodging a Great White, and the next you’re playing a high-speed service simulator trying to get tea to a grumpy customer. Then, just when you think you’ve got the rhythm down, the game throws a whole hidden mermaid civilization at you. It’s three games in one, and somehow, and they all work.
Strange Horticulture
If you’ve ever wanted to be a “plant mom” but your actual vibe is more “reclusive occultist selling poisons to strangers in the rain,” then welcome home. In Strange Horticulture, you inherit your late uncle’s plant shop, a strange little place that sells botanical remedies with mystical, and occasionally dangerous, effects. At first, it feels like a peaceful puzzle game: identifying fictional herbs, matching them to your customers’ needs, maybe helping a traveler find a cure or an artist seeking inspiration.
But Strange Horticulture doesn’t stay cozy for long. The requests get stranger. The customers get more desperate, more secretive. Which plants you sell and which secrets you uncover in your dusty herbarium start to have real weight, steering the story toward one of eight endings, some of which are genuinely dark. I won’t spoil them, but the game knows how to make you feel complicit.
Night in the Woods
Whenever someone asks for my favorite game, this is always the answer. It’s the game that made me fall in love with gaming in general, tied forever to a very specific memory of my junior year of college during COVID—just me, my pen, the Evermore album, and this story. You play as Mae, a young cat who drops out of college and returns to a hometown that didn’t wait for her.
The actual gameplay is pretty simple. You run across power lines, jump over trash cans, and explore the liminal spaces of a place you used to belong to. It’s a rhythmic loop of waking up, checking your AIM-style messages, and choosing which friend to go “do crimes” with.
Also, I’m starting to realize there’s a recurring theme in my library; I can’t do just cute. My version of cozy always has a heartbeat of sadness or a shadow of the macabre running through it. This game nails that “sad-spooky” sweet spot perfectly. It’s a quiet investigation into the dark things hiding in the woods and the complex things hiding within ourselves.
Tiny Bookshop
I just started this one, and it’s the ultimate guilty pleasure for any fellow bibliophile. You leave the big city behind to run a mobile bookshop out of a charming trailer perched in a sleepy seaside town. The whole game feels like stepping into a Hallmark daydream. Imagine opening your little shop windows each morning, the ocean breeze carrying in customers who are hungry for their next great read. It’s a low-stakes management sim where you curate your shelves with genres like fantasy, drama, and crime, then play literary matchmaker for the locals. And the books are real titles! Romeo and Juliet, The Hunger Games, Snow Crash—the game asks you to draw on actual literary knowledge to pair the right book with the right person.
The gameplay loop does get a bit repetitive after a while. You’re essentially doing the same actions over and over: stock, recommend, sell, repeat, but that’s where your imagination gets to do the heavy lifting. I find myself inventing little stories for each customer, imagining why they need that particular mystery novel or what made them finally pick up poetry. Suddenly, you’re the protagonist in a slice-of-life novel where nothing dramatic happens, and that’s exactly the point. Fingers crossed they add more gameplay in the future!
The Secret of Monkey Island
This 1990 point-and-click adventure is my love letter to a genre that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in cozy gaming circles. You play as Guybrush Threepwood, a wannabe pirate navigating a fictional Caribbean during the golden age of piracy. It’s all beautifully rendered in 2D pixel art, and you interact with the world through classic verb commands like “talk to,” “pick up,” and “use”.
What makes this cozy for me is the complete lack of pressure. You literally can’t die…well, technically you can drown if you hold Guybrush underwater for a full ten minutes, but that’s an Easter egg you’d have to actively pursue. There’s no timer, no combat stress, just you, a dialog tree full of witty banter, and a series of delightfully absurd puzzles to solve at your own pace. It’s one of the first games to use branching dialogue, and the writing is sharp enough to make you laugh out loud. I desperately wanted to include King’s Quest IV on this list, but my dad vetoed it as “not cozy.” So if you’re like me and crave that nostalgic point-and-click magic without the stress, Monkey Island is your gateway drug to a whole world of adventure games that let you take your time and savor every ridiculous moment.
At the end of the day, my version of cozy might be a little gloomy and weird, but that’s the beauty of the genre. It’s not always about sunshine and sunflowers; sometimes, it’s about the quiet comfort of a rainy afternoon, a complex mystery, or a conversation with a sentient refrigerator. If you’re tired of the agricultural grind and want a game that respects your pace while tickling your brain, I hope these titles give you a place to land. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a mobile bookshop to organize and a few more existential crises to manage.
<3 brooklyn
Notes from the Tavern Keeper:
Hi everyone! I hope your New Year was everything you hoped it would be. I spent my day watching Stranger Things and eating grapes under a table (#iykyk). I wanted to share a quick update on what’s brewing here at the tavern for 2026.
Last year, my goal was simple: commitment. I promised myself I wouldn’t give up, even when it felt like I was shouting into the void. Well, I stuck with it, and it turns out I absolutely love blogging. However, I’ve realized I have a habit of making every post a long, deep, and exhausting to produce “epic saga”. This year, I’m giving myself permission to be silly. I love recommending things and creating lists, so expect to see more short-form posts like this one. Thanks for being here!
honestly very difficult for me rn
and I mean a lot
my otp. i love them sm
many voiced by actors you’ll actually recognize
This reminded Mustard to give Dave the Diver another go. Like you they love the visuals of the game.
Mustard is currently hooked on:
- Ball x Pit (their current obsession)
- Balatro (former obsession)
- Hades II
- Pokemon Legends: Z-A
Tiny Bookshop is a game that really stuck out to them but have not played yet. Going to make sure they got it on their wishlist!
have you heard of Papers Please? its kinda like Death and Taxes but youre a border agent in the soviet era