The 7 Most Perfect Cozy Games Like Animal Crossing

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Haven Park

Image: Bubble Studio/Mooneye Studios

In Haven Park, you, a bird, take charge of a lovely little mountainside campsite after your bird-granny gets too old to handle it. The site is a bit run-down, so your biggest task is making it attractive to potential visitors. They all have their preferences you need to keep in mind while designing, but there’s still a great deal of freedom and flexibility in how you design your demesne. When you’re not decorating, you can spend some time exploring the nearby forest and digging up its mysteries — and treasure. Haven Park has a lot going for it, including the fact that you don’t have to feel guilty if you don’t check in every day. Do all of it — or even just some of it — at your own pace.

5

Winter Burrow

Image: Pine Creek Games/Noodlecake via Polygon

Winter Burrow is a bit more hardcore than your usual Animal Crossing-like, in that it has some survival elements, but it’s no less cozy for it. A small mouse shoulders the herculean task of restoring their forest home to its former glory. It’s not glorious now. It’s a mess, unfit for others to live in, exposed to the elements — and predatory animals. All your scavenging, crafting, and decorating goes toward filling the village with life again, and it feels immensely rewarding. Developer Pine Creek Games adopted a hand-drawn style for Winter Burrow‘s visual direction, so if you’ve ever wanted a game that looked like Jill Barklem’s classic Brambly Hedge series, this is the one for you.

6

Ooblets

ooblets

Ooblets is equal parts Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and Pokemon. You set up a new life in a rundown shack on the edge of an odd little coastal town. Odd, in the sense that there’s a bunch of weird little goo guys (they aren’t guys) oozing around all over the place. They’re nice, though, and they want to be your friend. The ooblets help out around the farm you end up starting as thanks for helping them, or they just join in dance parties with you. Whatever you want, really. Ooblets has a vibe unmatched by other cozy life-sims, and it’s absolutely massive, too.

7

Graveyard Keeper

If your tastes have a slightly more macabre bent, Graveyard Keeper is worth your attention for sure. It swaps farm care for graveyard maintenance as you craft, fish, decorate, and build your way to becoming the top grave-keeper in the village. I mean, you’re the only one in the village, but still. There’s a good deal of flexibility, where you can be ethical and help people out or cut corners and save money regardless of the harm it does. It does lean more toward the sim-management side of things, but it’s still cozy and darkly charming.

8

Palia

Image: Singularity 6

Palia takes the Animal Crossing formula to fantasy lands and gives it a slight MMO-style twist. You wake up one day in a weird land with magic and robots in equal measure and have no idea how you got there or what’s going on. So you do the most natural thing ever: avoid looking for answers and build a house. The answers come, eventually, but meanwhile, you’ve got quests to do, a vast, gorgeous world to explore, gardens to tend, meals to make, furniture to arrange, and all the good stuff. It’s the closest an MMO has come to making the promise of “do daily life in video games” work and be fun, though you can do all of this by yourself if you want. Palia is wonderfully laid-back. There’s a truckload of things to do, but it’s all there for whenever you want to do it — or not! You’re completely free to do whatever takes your fancy whenever it does, even if it’s just riding your horse along the shore at sunset every day.