When people think “gamer” they tend to think about Call of Duty or Fortnite. That is because those two franchises have a lot of foot traffic in the gaming community.

Games that tend to have themes of fighting, heavy weapon use, sci-fi or survival aspects have the highest rate of players around the world.

Now, I am not going to go into the whole “video games make people more violent” debate. Rather, I would like to talk about cozy games.

If you are a bit confused by what I mean by “cozy game,” let me explain. Cozy games refer to games that you can sit and play almost mindlessly. These games let you curl up and, well, get cozy.

I would consider myself a “gamer,” as I have been playing video games for essentially my entire life. For much of my childhood, I remember playing video games with my dad or watching game plays on YouTube when I could not afford games that just came out.

I personally like games with story lines such as The Last of Us or even ones that have stories but with more open-world capabilities like the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Lately, though, I have fallen down the rabbit hole of cozy games.

I, like many others, got really into cozy games during COVID-19. Mainly for the introduction of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which came out pretty close to the beginning of quarantine.

I had never played an Animal Crossing game before this one, and it changed my whole world. I put in well over 200 hours on the game in just the time between March and returning back to school in August.

I slowly fell in love with cozy games and put in more research into finding more games that I could just have fun with.

That is the beauty of cozy games. They are made to just allow you to have fun without the stress of fighting other players/enemies or playing to finish out a story line.

I realized that I had been playing cozy games for a lot longer than I had previously thought.

As a kid, I played Harvest Moon DS which came out in 2005. All you do is play a farmer who takes care of their farm and makes friends.

I remember playing this game for hours, taking my DS on road trips and even hiding my DS under my pillow when I heard footsteps in the hallway when I was up way past my bedtime. Sorry Mom.

The love for that game grew with me as now 22-year-old me sits and plays Stardew Valley, which is basically just the same concept but in the 2020’s. I love being a little farmer lady running around planting crops and petting cows, what can I say?

One of my favorite games that I have put way too many hours into over the past week has been the Sims 4, a game I have been playing since I was in high school that I still play as a grad student.

If you are unfamiliar, it is a life simulator. You make people and play them in a world where you create houses, families, pets, etc. Recently, I have tried to do a legacy challenge, which means I create one person and finish challenges set for them until they have children.

Once they have children, I play those children and finish their challenges until they have children. It is just a cycle, and while it sounds a bit bland on paper, it is pretty fun and quite difficult to finish some of the challenges given to me.

Look up any Sims legacy challenge, and you can see for yourself how difficult some of the tasks you need to finish before the next generation can be.

While these are just some of the games I have had the chance to try, there are hundreds of cozy games out there just waiting to be played.

If you like your standard first-person shooters or battle royales, that is completely fine.

Though I recommend giving a cozy game a try. You might just find yourself curled up taking care of animals for hours on end.

Kierstyn Budz can be reached at 581-2812 or krbudz@eiu.edu.