The elevator pitch for Cozy Grove, a new life-sim from Spry Fox is really quite simple. It’s Animal Crossing without the capitalism. Instead of spending your life on an isolated island working to pay off a debt that never goes away, your time here is spent doing tiny acts of kindness to momentarily bring colour and life back to an island that’s as lifeless as the ghosts that haunt it. Don’t worry if that doesn’t sound like your jam, I’m going to tell you exactly why it should be.

In its opening moments, Cozy Grove has little to no interest in explaining what’s going on. You create a character, find a talking campfire named Flamey who reminds you that you’re a Spirit Scout and your job is to help out spirits. From then you find the vaguely bear-shaped specters that inhabit the eponymous island and get them whatever they need. Completing these tasks returns these spirits to a corporeal form and restores colour and life to the little piece of the island they call home. It also gives you spirit wood to feed into Flamey to further spread his light and reveal more spirits in need of your help.

The tasks themselves are fairly simple and mostly involve minor fetch quests. Someone might need you to catch some rare fish, get them a few branches, find a lost object, etc. This turns Cozy Grove into something more closely resembling a hidden object game where you scour the cluttered map to find the exact cluster of pixels you need for the job. If you get tired, you can pay a paltry amount of coins to an NPC who will show you the exact location of the hidden items.

It’s an inherently compelling gameplay loop for multiple reasons: I like helping people and I like watching colour return to an otherwise ‘dead’ landscape. But what has made Cozy Grove my favourite game of its kind, and an inextricable part of my daily life is the way it forces the player to abandon their gamer habits. What differentiates Cozy Grove from most other games in its genre is that there is a set number of tasks you can do each real-life day (taking about 20-30 minutes), after which the game will politely inform you that you’re done for the day and should come back tomorrow.

This may seem like a small change but it keeps Cozy Grove away from the optimisation grind that most life sims inevitably turn into. A game like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing is characterised by what I’ve come to call self-centered progression where the point of the game is always to play how you want, do what you like, get the things that make you feel good. Cozy Grove on the other hand entirely prioritises the well-being of its NPCs. You are here to help them, so if they don’t need any more help for the day, you have no reason to keep bothering them. After a point they’ll even stop saying new voice lines and tell you to go away because they’re busy.

This turns Cozy Grove from just another slow life game into something much more mindful. You’re not surviving a deserted island, you’re not rebuilding a farm to get away from an old life, you’re not gentrifying a paradise island to pay off a home loan. You’re just here to help people. The developers at Spry Fox understand that a game built entirely around looking after others requires slightly more mental energy because your only reward for helping people is to help them some more. So it’s perfect that the game tells you to stop after a while to look after yourself. Whether that means collecting shells, catching fish, or turning the game off to go play something else is totally up to you.

The gameplay loop is helped along by some excellent character writing that makes the denizens of Cozy Grove people you actively want to help. Captain Billweather Snout is all about formality and keeps you at arms length, which I’m sure has nothing to do with his drinking problem. Jeremy Gruffle, who helps you with crafting loves making bad puns, while Francesca DuClaw is a bear who thinks she’s a tree?!?! Valentina Oso-Fisher is the charmingly incompetent monocle-sporting mayor of Cozy Grove. Kit the fox runs the store that refreshes each day, selling useful items as well as new outfits for you to wear.

All of this is brought to life with a stunningly gorgeous art style that closely resembles Spry Fox’s previous games Alpha Bear and Bushido Bear. The painterly graphics give the game a soft touch that fits perfectly with the cozy vibes. Every character design is immediately iconic and brimming with personality. The soundtrack is just as pretty with gentle guitars and pianos setting a rather Life is Strange-esque vibe. There were multiple times where I left the game running just to listen to the music on loop. There were a few performance issues with the review build on Switch but the developers managed to straighten those out ahead of launch.

It’s not all fish and chill however, as the longer you play Cozy Grove, the clearer it becomes that this story is as much about kindness as it’s about regret. As you progress every NPC’s story over multiple days and weeks, they reveal more of themselves to you, and each of them seem to be haunted by regret. Billweather’s drinking problem is a recurring motif in his quests, while Jeremy Gruffle seems weirdly obsessed with destroying his past creations as if trying to reassemble a new identity from the shattered bits. The postmaster Patrice Furbac has a very dark sense of humour and and makes constant references to being chained to the post. The real-time slow burn of the game means I still don’t have all of the answers, but it’s becoming clearer every day that the ghosts that haunt Cozy Grove are themselves haunted by an existence that, to quote Jeremy Gruffle is “kind of confusing, kind of sad.”

Even the island responds as dramatically to your absence as it does to your kindness. All the colour you bring back to the land through your acts of kindness one day, will disappear after you log out, leaving the world as lifeless as you found it. Each day, you have to work to bring back the colour you wish to see on the island. Much like life, singular acts of kindness are without permanence, and a lasting relationship requires you to show up and do the work every day.

Don’t let that stop you from giving this excellent game a shot, the sad vibes are only here to add texture to what is an unflinchingly relaxing experience. The real-time gameplay loop has made this a daily fixture of my life. It’s always the game I fire up right at the start or at the end of a long gaming session. Like every other game that has clearly inspired it, I’m sure Cozy Grove won’t last forever. There will inevitably come a day when I have fully parsed the regrets that haunt the ghosts of this island, a day when they will no longer need me. But until such a day, I remain haunted by Cozy Grove. It’s a haunting I gladly welcome into my everyday routine, and I hope you will too.

Review code provide by popagenda. Cozy Grove is out now on Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.