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How the Cozy Game Industry Evolved
& How a dress-up game marked the beginning of a new era
Last year, I wrote a few articles about the cozy game genre. In one of them, I wrote that the market appears to have an oversaturation of cozy games.
Having reignited my passion for gaming through cozy games and JRPGs, I think I felt as strongly as others who hated mainstream companies that utilised the same, familiar game mechanics to create another same, familiar farming game. While I gave those games a chance, they ended up as another version of Stardew Valley, so I wrote the piece, hoping to call out to anyone in the industry to reflect the value of cozy games as a comfort blanket, not as a cash grab.
In that particular article, I ended on a hopeful note. I said that finding a good game is akin to sifting through sand for gold. I said that I believed there were developers out there who held a passion for cozy games, and that there was potential for the cozy genre to expand beyond its typical farming mechanics; we just had to look for them.
Just this past December, I started seeing ads for a new game. An open-world gacha, like Genshin Impact, but... fashion? I wasn’t sure if I was interested, but was influenced by my favourite Genshin streamers (typical) and decided to give the game a try.
