I Don’t Want the Stress: The People Who Play Cozy Games

@pixabay Jerzy Górecki

Before Work This Morning, I Cleaned a Whole House

It was a day I woke earlier than usual, with half an hour left over even after breakfast. Wondering what to do with it, I decided to clean an abandoned vacation home.

It was a forest lodge in the middle of snowy mountains. A fire burned low in the living-room hearth, and beyond the windows stretched a landscape covered entirely in snow — lodgings, by the look of it, for winter-sports trips.

The owner’s commission asked me to clear the snow outside and clean the interior. If I had time to spare, it added, would I also mind repairing the old stairs, and buying decorations to dress the house for the Christmas soon to come?

Rag in hand, I moved through the lodge. A house of many windows, so the glass took a fair while — but there was no need to hurry. When the Christmas decorations were up, I stepped back and looked at the house. It was unmistakably different from when I had first walked in. A small thing, and yet my heart was full.

The owner paid a generous fee, and somewhere along the way an achievement unlocked. Time to close the laptop and go to work. Not a bad start to a day spent with House Flipper. Strangely, cleaning — which gives me little enough joy in reality — feels rather comfortable in a game.

* In House Flipper, the player becomes a contractor who repairs, cleans, and decorates houses for profit. The commissions never stop coming, but nobody scolds you for working slowly. A free one-person business.

The Words “Healing” and “Cozy”

House Flipper is a game about cleaning and repairing neglected houses for money. No enemy gives chase, and no timer runs on the cleaning. Misplace the furniture a client wanted and you earn a little less — that is all; there is hardly a situation one could call failure. In place of the traditional elements of games — conflict, tension, victory and defeat — simple labor like mopping and painting becomes the game’s main activity.

A confession: I do not like games about fighting. I live tense enough in reality; I have no wish to be chased and to fight in games as well. Perhaps that is why my hand keeps reaching for games like these. And there are more of them than you might think. Tidying scattered things, unpacking after a move, farming, brewing and selling potions, climbing a mountain, delivering parcels. Games of this grain have formed a current of their own for quite some time now, and in Korea we have usually called them “healing games.”

But stare at the word healing long enough and something odd emerges. Healing means cure, and cure generally presupposes a wound or a pain. Take the word at face value and the player becomes someone in need of recovery, the game a kind of prescription. Yet it is not as though I played these games only on hard days. On perfectly ordinary days, tidying a house, tending a farm, and keeping company with nature were still a pleasure.

Where Korean says “healing,” the English-speaking world more often says “cozy” — a word for several overlapping senses: snugness, warmth, familiarity. In this essay, though, rather than carrying “cozy” over as is, I will call the sensation at its core “comfort.”

What, concretely, is comfort in a game? Is it a matter of pastel palettes and quiet music? Of enemies not appearing? Or of a situation in which the player stands to lose nothing? The people who make games, and those who study them, have tried not to stop at calling this vague atmosphere “comfortable,” but to explain what on earth produces the feeling.

What is certain is that it does not mean merely pretty, cute games.

Comfort Has Conditions

The journey into comfort’s identity began with game designers. In 2017, eight of them gathered at a regular workshop to discuss what coziness in games is, and how it can be designed.

The conditions they propose come down to three words: safety, abundance, softness.

• Safety: no danger lurking; nothing to lose by a mistake.

• Abundance: no scarcity, no urgency.

• Softness: the sensory register — slow tempo, warm color, gentle sound — that conveys the safety and the abundance.

  
  

Comfort can be realized when these three conditions align — and, as an imagination realized in digital space, it is also a kind of “fantasy of coziness.”

To explain it, the designers borrow an old psychological theory that human needs form a hierarchy: only once the problems of bare survival are settled and a sense of security attained can the higher wants — relations with others, self-realization — arise. In that sense, the cozy game is a world in which the lower needs are met by default. In a world where one need not starve, need not flee, and need not fear losing anything, the player can give their heart to things unrelated to immediate survival: decorating a house, collecting objects, building closeness with someone, or gazing at the scenery to no purpose at all.

Only, one more premise attaches, and it is the crux: every activity must rest on the player’s own volition. Compulsion without volition breaks the comfort. Comfort’s most fundamental condition is neither graphics nor music but voluntariness.

That games of tidying in particular feel comfortable, they analyze, is not simply because “cleaning is a comfortable act”: it is because the hands can move busily while the mind need not be rushed — and because the total quantity of the activity, its end, is known.

Seen this way, the comfort of cleaning in House Flipper is partly explained. Real cleaning is tiring. You must decide what to throw away, think about where to put things, and cannot even know whether you will finish today. Cleaning is hard not only because the body must move, but because the process demands continual choosing, judging, deciding.

The same goes for A Little to the Left, which finds order for scattered objects, and Potion Craft, the alchemist game whose potion-shop customers never press you. By removing the penalty for failure, or the pressure of haste, the game sends the player a message: it is all right to go slowly.

* Clockwise from top left: A Little to the Left, Unpacking, Easy Delivery Co., and A Short Hike — all cited as healing, or cozy (comfortable), games.

One Comfort, Three Uses

Interestingly, a cozy game does not necessarily carry a cozy story. In 2020, game researchers divided the ways the cozy aesthetic is used within games into three.

The first, “congruent” coziness, is the case where a game’s appearance and its play experience align — the cozy games we usually think of. A Short Hike shows a protagonist, on holiday, climbing to the summit of an island, but there is no need whatsoever to arrive in a hurry. You may chat with those you meet along the way, or fish, or wander off down another path after coins. The world the screen shows and the actions asked of the player point in the same direction at once: no rush — it is fine to linger.

The second, “incongruent” coziness, looks comfortable on the surface but holds a heavy story — sorrow, loss — inside: comfort wrapped on as an outer layer. That Dragon, Cancer delivers a family’s grief at loss within soft, warm color. Rather than making us face the heavy story head-on, it sets it down inside a familiar, comfortable world. Unpacking is similar: it looks like a snug little game of unboxing and putting things in their places, but in fact treats the bends of one person’s life — partings, growth.

The third, “situational” coziness, offers comfort only at particular moments or places while the game as a whole stays tense — which makes calling coziness a genre harder still. Take the bonfires of Dark Souls, or the campfire of Don’t Starve: the game at large runs on tension, but the fireside becomes a comfortable place to rest a moment in a world full of combat and danger. Comfort of the situational kind.

In the end, comfort looks less like a game genre than like a material available for use within a game. In one game it composes the entire world; in another it becomes the surface through which a heavy story is delivered; in yet another, a place to catch one’s breath between tensions. The same sensation does entirely different work from game to game.

But here a question arises. If comfort is something contained in the game, shouldn’t everyone playing the same game feel it?

In the End, Comfort Is Something the Player Makes

The answer comes from recent research: comfort is less something already installed in the game than a subjective sensation the player feels.

According to a 2026 study, at the base of comfort lie familiarity and predictability. The more you know what to do in a game, the better you can anticipate what will follow from doing it, and the more familiar you grow with what is where in its spaces, the more comfortable the world can feel. The researchers compare it to the comfort we feel at home: home is comfortable because even on a dark night you know where the bathroom is, and you know where the light switch sits without having to think.

Many cozy games, rather than teaching a separate repertoire of behavior that works only in the game, let you carry out intuitively what you already know. You come to know what is in which place, and to anticipate how the game will respond to you. A space you once moved through tense becomes, at some point, a familiar route. The moment the game world turns from a strange place into a place you know, a kind of “feeling of home” can arise there, too.

So, interestingly, even a horror game can be comfortable to someone. Repeat a game whose monsters once burst from who-knows-where, and at some point you may know every enemy’s position and pattern. If you know what comes out when you open which door, in which corridor you will meet the enemy, where to run and where to hide, the first terror shades, little by little, into a different sensation.

The opposite case exists as well. Dave the Diver is often named a comfortable game of exploring the sea and catching fish — but for someone who ordinarily feels the cruelty in fishing, it can be an experience with no comfort in it at all. The same game arrives for one person as a resort, for another as a hunting ground.

Comfort, then, is less a property already inside the game than something that arises where the conditions the game has built meet the player’s own experience.

* In Potion Craft, the player runs a potion shop, brewing and selling potions to customers.

An Escape into Safe Space?

People discharge stress in different ways. Some do it through tension: the thrill of fierce combat and clean hits, the joy of winning the battle of wits, the felt growth of a character stronger than yesterday. Others depart for a low-stress space with the tension removed — a place where no one gives chase and nothing is lost, where nerves strung tight all day can finally be set down. Before the same stress, opposite prescriptions.

For a long time, the mainstream language of the game industry has been tuned to victory, competition, and challenge. But the people making cozy games put a question to that mainstream grammar; in that sense, the rise of the cozy game can be seen as a kind of alternative practice toward the dominant culture. The game researcher Rainforest Scully-Blaker has named this practice “radical slowness,” reading the player’s performance of meditation, rest, and hesitation as an act of resistance to the capitalist loop and its breathing — development, accumulation, consumption.

Some may aim the word “escapism” at players who depart for comfortable, peaceful worlds. But I would rather propose seeing it as play that enters a world with the threats removed, to quiet one’s anxiety in a society oversupplied with stress. Think differently about the negative ring of the word escape: taking shelter under the eaves on a stormy day is simply a practice — hardly a thing to be judged good or bad.

So there is no need to insist that calling cozy games escapism is wrong — nor, conversely, to package them as unconditionally good. Leaving reality for a while does not always mean giving reality up. Sometimes, if anything, one needs a spell in another place precisely in order to return to it.

References

• Group Report: Coziness in Games: An Exploration of Safety, Softness, and Satisfied Needs(2017)

• Towards the aesthetics of cozy video games(2020)

• Coziness in Games: Second Homes, Audiences, and Esthetics(2026)