While you’d typically imagine playing a cozy game snuggled up in a blanket during the night, getting warm and cozy as you lay down to relax, many cozy games will just stress you the hell out instead.

The definition of a cozy game is incredibly vague, and if I see

Risk of Rain 2 being referred to as a cozy game
, then literally anything genre be cozy despite the immense pressure they put you under.

For this list, I’ll go with the definition of cute characters or comfy visuals being the usual standard to meet. Basically, if the game looks quite approachable and comforting, it counts.

Either way, these games have elements that make you smile, but on the inside, you’ll always be stressed about something and feeling anything but relaxed about the situation you’re in.

8

Kind Words

Written Off

I decided to put Kind Words at the bottom, because it’s practically the stock example of a cozy game with lo-fi beats and pastel visuals, but is absolutely a game meant to be played by people who are already stressed.

It’s essentially a group venting simulator. You throw your problems into the wind, occasionally get a few words of comfort back, and try to help other strangers with their issues in the hopes you’ll get some help in return.

Thing is, whenever I actually feel relaxed, I turn off the game again. It’s great at getting you from being stressed as all hell to seeing something comforting, but it’s never a game you play to feel relaxed.

The point of the game is to have it on while being stressed and upset, and the relaxation usually only seeps in due to other factors. Still, I believe it deserves an entry here, at least on a technicality.

7

Stardew Valley

Profit Margins

This is likely a consequence of the fact I’ve played Stardew Valley way too much and

usually do heavily optimized challenges
instead of letting things go by naturally, but I find this game really quite stressful.

It’s a good kind of stress, and I appreciate the aspects of managing my farm, money, social life, and skills all while trying to make sure I get things like the Community Center done on time, but it’s not relaxing.

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Maybe it can be relaxing if you’re weird and take your time, enjoy watering your crops by hand and love interacting with all the characters. But if you have over a hundred hours in the game, you already know it’s required to put your nose to the grindstone.

You need to make sure you harvest as many of the best crops for money on time and with optimal planting so you can do it again next season, and you need to do excursions into the mines that are way too deep for comfort.

6

Celeste

A New Platform

I see people pick up Celeste, looking at the vibrant pastels and lovely characters with adorable artwork, only to realize it’s

an incredibly tough precision platformer
that is intended solely to kick your ass and make you learn.

I absolutely adore this game, and when I play it, I’m completely locked in, doing wavedashes into wall bounces and messing up any attempt at supers because I’m nowhere near good enough for that stuff yet.

Even aside from the fact it asks a ton from you, the game itself is about anxiety, and it absolutely does its best to make you empathize with Madeline and feel her pain from struggling with self-doubt.

It’s never going to make you feel relaxed. The most it feels that way is the sense of relief you get at the end of every chapter, only to immediately throw yourself at the next one and lock in all over again.

5

Melatonin

Ain’t Got Rhythm

Maybe it’s a me thing, but I feel stressed

whenever I play rhythm games
and have to keep perfectly with the beat for the best score. Given the fact I’ve seen people still rage at good scores, I feel that’s not an uncommon emotion.

While Melatonin does its best to mitigate that feeling with cozy visuals, relaxing music that still makes the beat quite apparent, and silly ideas that are really entertaining, I still can’t help but feel inadequate.

Even if it’s to the beat of using a credit card to shop for fancy stuff, being slightly off and seeing the score reprimand me will never make me feel anything but stressed out and enhances my feeling of desired perfectionism.

And while some people are gods at rhythm games that will put in the work to always get perfect scores, that takes immense stress and effort, and it’s certainly not relaxing to be that focused for that long.

4

Magical Delicacy

Jumping Around

On top of

not being a very great game, Magical Delicacy
throws you into a random town without a penny to your name, making you cook up magic sweets in order to persist off a few bucks.

This isn’t the stressful part. Instead, the exploration is so janky when combined with the horrible platforming it feels more frustrating and upsetting than it ever feels like a relaxing and fun time.

The mini-games are QTE-filled drags that don’t make me feel the slightest bit of joy, and perhaps I’m just bitter, but the cute aesthetics and music do absolutely nothing to solve any of these problems.

It feels like a taunting attempt at relaxation, like they knowingly coated a game full of frustrating design with the paint of a game you could zone out with for hours, just to mess with your head.

3

Cuisineer

Back And Forth

The epitome of the cozy aesthetic, Cuisineer blasts you with adorable character designs, vibrant visuals, and a dichotomy

between roguelite hack-and-slashing
and stressful restaurant management simulation.

This leads to the roguelite bits making you feel really on edge, throwing you into dungeons where you can easily perish and lose all the ingredients you’re trying to gather so you can run your restaurant.

Once you’ve gotten back, it isn’t even one bit less stressful. Your restaurant fills up with orders, customers get frustrated, and everyone is unhappy unless you multitask and perform your absolute best.

It feels rather invigorating and occasionally quite intense, and never once have I wanted to boot this game up to relax. It’s only if I’m already down to have a manic time with micromanaging a dozen things at once.

2

Slime Rancher

Number Go Up

You’d probably look at the adorable slimes and pastel, cel-shaded aesthetic of Slime Rancher in combination with the fact it’s a farming game and believe it would be a really relaxing, quirky monster-taming game.

On the contrary, this game is all about

taking advantage of the slimes
you kidnap from all across the intensely dangerous environment while you avoid getting eaten alive by the mistake of three slimes mixing together.

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On top of those worries, once you’ve collected their product, you need to either keep it in storage forever, or sell it to the constantly shifting stock market, adding another layer of strategy to your stress.

It’s far more of a strategic economy simulator than a cutesy farming game, and running around everywhere as you micromanage the various increasingly deadly slime pens you have set up is a genuine nightmare at times.

1

Rain World

Cute Cats, Worrisome World

I see Rain World frequently getting labeled as a cozy game, and I get it, because the slugcats you play as are adorable little critters. All of their animations sell that fact really well.

The thing is, this game is stress incarnate. The entire world is out to get you, and you need to scale it and dodge around creatures that would like to have you for dinner. They aren’t asking very nicely.

I’ve seen this game frequently getting loved and adored by my same friends that play Animal Crossing and Webfishing religiously though, so clearly something about the cozy appeal is still working.

If you like cute critters and don’t mind watching them get eaten alive by a rope you didn’t know was actually a living creature, then Rain World is most certainly the game for you, despite how messed up that is.

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