The Cozy and Family Friendly Games Celebration is a Steam showcase that happens once a year, highlight a bunch of different family friendly games, that are often cozy, in a bunch of different categories. We love these types of games, so have hand picked a bunch for you to explore:
Pupperazzi
“Pupperazzi is a very adorable, casual, photography game with cute dogs. If only there was more love and care put into it. Pupperazzi is adorable, but lacks finesse.”
Rain on Your Parade
“Rain on Your Parade feels like a really fun game, I quite like the mix of destroying people’s days and helping out others. People start to really love the little rain cloud that you play as! Some of the hats are really hard to earn, as you need to literally solve all of the tasks to get it, but I don’t need hats myself so I don’t mind being done with the level before finishing the extra tasks. This game is just simply fun and cheerful.”
Backpack Hero
“With some lovely pixel art and 16-bit feeling music, Backpack Hero comes together as a very fun package. It would be nice if the quick play options were fully featured early on, but once you’re through the campaign you’ve got a really enjoyable experience to become horribly addicted to as the dreaded one-more-run mindset sets in.”
Catlateral Damage
“Catlateral Damage is a fantastic idea for a game that was inspired by a real cat named Nippy. Chris Chung – whom was Nippy’s childhood owner – has created a cell shaded, cartoon styled game, of which you play through the eyes of a cat. Your goal isn’t to prance around looking cute, meowing at your owner, and munching on your wet food; your goal is in fact to cause havoc and create the purrfect mess. you’re a cat. You’ve finally found a game where you can play as a cat.”
Coral Island
“Coral Island is another slice of life, farming simulator. This time, though, you’ll be exploring a seaside island, full of different people, animals, and things to do! After moving to this town to look after a massive plot of land, you get to spend your days doing whatever you want.”
The Wandering Village
“Those niggles aside, there’s very little to complain about when it comes to The Wandering Village at this stage of its development. An opt-out tutorial that explains some of the extra menus could help with onboarding, but they’ve got plenty of time to put that in. It’s already an incredibly memorable colony-builder with great art and I can’t wait to see how it keeps developing.”
Time on Frog Island
“It might sound quite repetitive, and, to be honest, one of the main things that people complain about in RPGs or Point & Click games is fetch quests, but there’s a devil may care mood about the whole thing, and it’s fun to just run off and explore to learn the island. In fact, I quickly learned that you can run faster while holding certain items, and that you can goad the animals of the island into following you… At that point Time on Frog Island started feeling more like a fun sandbox than a series of linear fetch-quest paths.”
In Time on Frog Island you can trade up from junk to a fully functional boat
Timberborn
“Timberborn is not about building the perfect city. It’s about building a city that survives the next drought. And the one after that. And the one you forgot to prepare for because you got distracted trying to optimise your lumber production. Which, in a game about beavers, feels entirely appropriate.”
Biped
“Biped is a short game, but it offers fun, colorful co-op trials that may test friendships but ultimately are worth the effort. The diversity of each new level is mostly visual, but there are some clever puzzles found within each one that helps separate the feel of gameplay enough to feel unique. The silly antics of armless robots are a fun concept and their large, digital eyes and vocoded coos will warm your heart as you fall to your doom again and again.”
Unpacking
“We finished Unpacking in a single evening, building through this person’s life and experience — and honestly, I could have played more and more levels. I really enjoyed our time with Unpacking, I liked the gentle hint at the story, the persistent items, and the growth that I got to go on through different time periods. Hopefully there are more games like this in the future!”
Unpacking has you moving into spaces, putting your life together.
Dorfromantik
“Dorfromantik is not a game that you will sit down and plug away at for hours. It’s a game to be enjoyed in bite-size pieces. Twenty minutes here, half an hour there. A chance to escape into your own little world for a short period of time and let your mind relax a bit. As the game progresses through early access towards a full release I don’t doubt that more game modes and more landscape pieces will add plenty of longevity and depth to the game in terms of options and potential. In its current form it is still worth picking up. Treat your brain to a little therapy.”
Dorfromantik — Mindfulness and strategy collide in a peaceful building game
LUNA: The Shadow Dust
“Interestingly, for the amazing effort that has gone into the audio, the character speech and dialogue has been deliberately removed. Characters instead communicate through speech bubbles filled with iconographs — not only easy to understand, but also transcendent of language. This is something I am surprised that more puzzle games don’t move to use.”
LUNA: The Shadow Dust combines beautiful hand animated art and puzzles about light
Boomerang Fu
“Boomerang Fu is a lovely game that captured me with their adorable graphics, but still provided a fun game to play for a little while with friends!”
There are tons and tons of other games in the Cozy and Family Friendly Games Celebration on Steam, so do check out their event.
