Cozy Caravan

There are no shortage of cutesy life-sim projects that look to take advantage of the rabid Animal Crossing fanbase. With these fans increasingly eager for a new chapter in Nintendo's series, any spinoff and alternative project becomes immediately more attractive, and it's in this vein that we find 5 Lives Studios' Cozy Caravan.

For starters, if you've played any adorable life-sim game, the kind that uses chibi-like characters and is set in a world of anthropomorphic creatures, you will be instantaneously familiar with what Cozy Caravan presents as well. There's a small world that is populated by creatures who simply go about living a rich and admirable life without stress, where you slot in by taking on the role of a young character with the grand ambition to become one of the top-rated caravan traders. Achieving this goal is also rather straightforward, as you wander around the world, talk with locals, pick up ingredients and items, cook tasty food, and otherwise complete basic quests (that could include providing a taxi service for a local between two locations in the world). With this in mind, each time you do a good deed or open your market stall and sell items, you earn kindness that is a source of progression tied to collecting Guild tokens used to improve your caravan with new items like an oven to bake pies, a wardrobe to change your character's appearance, and so forth.

So, long story short, if you were hoping that Cozy Caravan would rewrite the script of what these games can be, it truly does not. But that's ultimately okay because it both doesn't need to and doesn't try to do so either. This is a game for fans who enjoy cutesy adventures and life-sims and when you judge it on these parameters it's difficult to say anything other than that it doesn't excel.

But looking more at the gameplay, as someone who perhaps appreciates a little more depth, Cozy Caravan does feel a tad one-dimensional. The loop is incredibly rudimentary, seeing you circle the world, picking up resources and completing minor tasks to ultimately improve the caravan. Again, it works, but after a few hours you start wishing that there'd be something more, something extra to keep you logging in. There's only so many carrots you can harvest or apple pies you can bake and sell before you wish something extra would appear. There is the ultimate goal of helping the locals prepare for the anticipated Whizz Bang Fair, but it takes a while before you start getting near to this and the journey does start getting a tad tiresome as the hours roll on.

But again, this game knows what it is and what it wants to be. If the endless cycle of fishing, collecting resources, completing minor and irrelevant mini-games, existing in a world that is furiously cutesy, if you see this and start getting excited, then Cozy Caravan is certainly a game to check out. And it should be said that it does have Animal Crossing: New Horizons beat in one key area; there's no daily limit. You can play this game to your heart's content and the in-game days will roll on and new opportunities and tasks will make their appearance at a steady rate. That's a huge positive when compared to Nintendo's genre titan.

Beyond this, we're talking about a game that plays incredibly smoothly on the Nintendo Switch 2, and has all the charm and charisma one would expect from something in this genre. Cozy Caravan perhaps lacks variety and ambition to elevate what we expect from the genre, but it also does everything it needs to do very well, so it's hard to say much else other than you will have a lovely and charming time with this delightful indie.