REVIEW – “Cozy Caravan” is a sweet deal at MSRP

Cozy Caravan is only US$19.99, and I can’t stop thinking about that nearly every time I play. Driving the caravan along, looking at the scenery: “I can’t believe this is only $19.99.” Getting literally lost in the larger towns (and…

Cozy Caravan is only US$19.99, and I can’t stop thinking about that nearly every time I play.

Driving the caravan along, looking at the scenery: “I can’t believe this is only $19.99.”

Getting literally lost in the larger towns (and I have a damn good sense of direction): “I can’t believe this is only $19.99.”

There’s just so much of the game! I really can’t believe this only costs $19.99 … and the next paragraph explains why.

5 Lives Studios sums the game up thusly: “Spread kindness, share, and help prepare for the annual Whizz Bang Fair!” It has a nice, leisurely pace, no big-game stressors, plenty to get lost in, and is charming as heck — a solid, cozy game. So how is it only $20 when it feels like a lot more? They partnered with Apple Arcade, which I assume increased the development budget. Right now, the game is available on Switch, Steam, and Apple Arcade. Some upcoming content will be Arcade exclusive (it’s timed, so eventually new content will filter to non-subscription players). Everyone will have an opinion about this — just search online for the whole gamut.

Spreading kindness and gameplay

After creating your animal character from the impressive number of options available, the game begins. Your Aunty Madeline sent you a letter with an urgent Guild request. She’s planning the annual Whizz Bang Fair and needs help, so you and your buddy, Bubba, get recruited as Guild Rookies. With the help of your Guild Rep, you set out on your journey to assist others, spread kindness, and help prepare for the fair.

Using your aunt’s old caravan, you take to the road. There are many opportunities to earn kindness points, such as greeting people, running errands, doing fetch quests, selling wares at the market, petting the bumblebee that pulls your caravan wagon, talking to Bubba, harvesting crops for others, crafting, photography quests, eating, petting giant silkworms, and being a very in-demand Uber. When the kindness/heart gauge fills, you earn a Guild Token. These can be used for various level-ups, such as upgrading carrying capacity, cooking and sewing stations, wagon, travel speed, and market space, along with buying the fishing rod after the unlock quest. The tokens also buy new outfits and new wagon themes, which come with a new color for Rigby, the bumblebee who pulls the caravan.

You, Bubba, and Rigby start out landlocked. The map expands thanks to a series of guild token upgrades to the wagon, such as thick muddin’ tires and floaties. The wagon is cute, the journey is cute, just everywhere is cute. The first seaside city I discovered has a cute little tugboat that adds to the ambiance as it chugs past three fishing boats — the site of a gathering task. Some villages and towns are large enough to get lost in! They all have their own feel and their own attractions. There’s even a national park. Unsurprisingly, the NPCs in these places are also just so stinking cute (see a theme?), and even when they recycle phrases, they’re fun. I laughed at the two animals who talk and argue about the dress with the colors that went viral a while back.

It is clear the writers put a lot of thought and care into the NPCs. There are references to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their namesakes. We have Leonardo balancing on a pier crane-style, a la Karate Kid, so a clear TMNT callout. Donatello the dye monger is a little high-strung and demanding, so maybe this callout is more for the artist than the turtle, though his dialogue could be interpreted as being methodical and calculating, so a bit more of the intellectual chill vibe from the Turtles’ version of Don. Later, when the dice mini game unlocks, there’s a pretty clear reference to TMNT. ¿por qué no los dos? Don’t worry, “Mikey” and “Rafa” are there, too.

The rude, demanding Chef Jean-Pierre is another little reference they slipped in, and let’s not forget Isaac the Bartender. The fashion designers are petty and narcissistic, which I found to be just the right amount of comical. The fishing rod quest for the FishPro5000 rod comes from Arthur the Guild Rep, who is an otter. I was amused.

Navigating the game to find all these NPCs is pretty easy. The map, of course, is helpful, as it should be. Road signs direct you, too. You want carrots? Follow the sign. The map shows postcards when you hover over each town. These are a bit Gravity Falls-esque with their art style, which I dig, but they do more than look good. Use X to flip postcards over to display details about quests, items available for gathering, collected stickers, froglets, mix tapes, and the NPCs in the town. One small quibble: If we had a little line drawing mini-map overlay when driving, it would make wagon travel even better, as I don’t always pay enough attention to the signs.

The on-screen guides are helpful and appreciated, both for driving the caravan to a specific destination while Ubering random animal hitchhikers and for crafting. After selecting a recipe, a similar arrow guide prompts for ingredients and directs you to the proper stations to complete your food or textile.

Every day at sunup, it’s time to rock. You can stay as busy as you wish until making camp at night. If you don’t want to be busy or if you just want to advance through the day, have a seat and hold the button to pass the day. There are so many beautiful places to just sit and chill. Since photography is a key component in gameplay, there’s no shortage of scenes to snap.

When you are ready to do some guild work and spread kindness, there’s plenty to do. Wave hi to everyone you see each day to earn kindness points. After Week 15 of gameplay, hearing “hiyo” over and over got annoying. Waving in the right direction can get multiple greetings done in one fell swoop. NPCs have interesting dialogue besides “hiyo”s. Through them, you learn about your own backstory — old childhood antics and stories are brought up by old classmates, at least one relative, and neighbors. One animal tells about the time teenage Bubba sneaked into Kristoff’s vineyard and “ate his frog weight in grapes.”

Sometimes you learn more about the NPCs themselves during fetch quests. I delivered a mixtape to a G.O.A.T., the rapper’s cousin in another town, so they could work on a collab in one quest. They had a lot to say during this! After I delivered the cousin’s jambox, he sent for G.O.A.T., a new collecting activity opened up — finding mixtapes! Dig those ’90s colors when you literally dig up the tapes! One of the recurring quests is delivering milk far away for Cherry Sundae, the owner of ‘Dairy Me’ Milk Bar. I bet she is related to Caramel Sundae, who lives in Toffee Top Orchards (it may have been mentioned in gameplay, but I missed it). See, even the names are cute!

But I’m getting a bit ahead of things. From Day 1, you can help farmers such as Barry, Garry, and Larry harvest crops by working as a farmhand. They reward you with a portion of the harvest. At first, this is vegetables or wheat, but it expands into more vegetables, fruits, and fiber-crafting necessities like cotton and silk. Farms aren’t the only place to gather. The towns have milk, flowers for dye, mushrooms, olives — too much to list.

Fishing, as mentioned above, is unlocked fairly early (what’s a Jeremy fish? Is this a reference to an artist named Jeremy Fish? This question lives rent-free in my head), and is soon paired with clamming. Fishing wasn’t my favorite. Hooking a fish didn’t seem to take skill, just press A until one of them finally fights back. Reel it in, and if it’s a collectible one, get a pic (possibly crash the game). If it’s a generic fish, press A to keep it for cooking or B to throw it back. There seems to be a limit of one fish per day per fishing spot, and I’m not a fan of that. Taking pics of the record-breaking fish clogged up my photo album, slowing down moving from tab to tab in the journal (and possibly crashing the game). Digging clams was repetitive — I have no recommendations for fixing that. I just enjoyed harvesting more, so I focused on that.

A tad further into the game, you unlock textile arts. Grind flowers into pigment, then craft that into dye. Loom cotton and silk into fabric. Mix dyes and fabrics to yield outfits, and of course, some of them are pretty cute, too. Some of them are sassy, while others are traditional. There’s a lot of variety, and that made me happy. As you craft an outfit for the first time, it might unlock variations of that pattern. Cue the collecting bug. There’s a big temptation to just spend a couple of weeks crafting every single outfit available!

Unlocking the community gardens takes a little bit of time, but it is well worth the effort. Each garden grows a variety of crops to help stock up on crafting inventory for the weekends. If strawberry jam is a preferred item for a town on the east side of the map, but I can’t make it all the way to the west side to gather, I can hit up a community garden around the middle of the map instead.

You can also trade for materials. There’s a town with a dockside merchant who trades with you for cocoa beans. Trading with other merchants in the morning before market or in the evening after market is super useful, again, for materials that were too far away. It’s challenging to get from one side of the map to the other within five weekdays, and you don’t want to blow market day!

Randomized minigames pop up, such as hide-and-seek, hopscotch, skipping stones, herding bumblebees back to their handlers, and Roll ‘n Run — a dice game that shakes things up. The rewards are usually new recipes for food & outfits. There are random visitors sprinkled throughout the week. Rummage the trash panda wanders the map with his bucket and rewards garbage deposits with kindness heart points. You can deal with the Begerk problem. Begerks — chickens — plague their owners by refusing to get off the nest so we can gather their eggs. The NPC asks you to figure out which fruit each brood prefers so you can lure them away and snatch the eggs while the begerks eat.

There are plenty of towns where you can help out as a server at various eateries, taking food to patrons and picking up their empties. This grants kindness points, of course, but you may also get rewards such as milk or recipe cards. The impulse to collect ’em all with recipes is pretty strong. It has a practical purpose. You want to unlock recipes for high-value items to sell at market.

Cozy Caravan‘s take on a fortune teller looks decidedly Animal Crossing-ish. She grants you knowledge of a spotlight item for this week’s market. At first, I figured she showed up in a town once a week to give you the spotlight item. These are items that will please any shopper regardless of their thought-bubble item indicator (not all animals have this), and that means filling the kindness gauge quicker. But as I played further, she showed up multiple times during the week, probably rotating from town to town every day. So far, the most I’ve gotten her is three times in a week.

Saturday and Sunday are market days where, as mentioned, you sell your wares for kindness points. Aside from the fortune teller’s spotlight items, there are two hot items for each marketplace. Choosing where to sell should be based on what’s in your inventory and what can be added to inventory by Friday night. This helps plan which towns you should visit that week.

Market days are exciting and not entirely calm, in a good way. Once everything you plan to sell is crafted and you’ve done any trading you want with the other merchants, ring the bell to let Bubba and everyone else know that your table is open. The table has room for two items. Shoppers have those aforementioned thought bubbles if they want a specific item, such as purple dye. Run to your storage box and find what they want, but don’t be too slow, or you’ll get the frowny face.

Juggling restocking the table, working the cash register, and meeting customer demand is pretty fast-paced. At the beginning, you have one table and the cash register, while Bubba hangs out on the wagon. As you spend Guild tokens for extra carrying capacity, extra tables, and extra help from Bubba, running the market gets easier and more profitable.

Each night when your adventures are over, it’s time to set up camp. There’s a little fireside talk with Bubba if you want, and later in the game, you can feed Rigby and yourself to recover stamina and earn kindness points. Go in the wagon, climb up the ladder to your loft bed, and say goodnight. It feels like the perfect ending to a perfect day with your cozy caravan.

Visuals, atmosphere, and performance

The whole vibe of the game is obviously laid back and full of lush, kawaii-cute environs — pretty much hallmarks of cozy games. The music reminds me of lo-fi chill instrumentals, so the soundtrack complements the gameplay quite well. Cozy Caravan’s art style and character design are reminiscent of Animal Crossing and Hello Kitty Island Adventure. The labyrinth gardens in some of the towns looked so cool! I tried picking up one of the potted topiaries right beside a picture drop because it looked gatherable, I suppose. There are lots of little touches. You can customize your wagon both inside and out, and there is just a huge amount of outfits and foods to discover and craft. Rumor has it there’s a cave where you can change your appearance, too.

It looks great; however, it didn’t play great on the OG Switch. I had so many issues. So many issues. The graphics performance was terrible, even after the update with the splash screen regarding stop-motion animation style, which I had already turned off long ago. Too many things felt very cumbersome during mid- and late-game. I would get lag just trying to tab from one screen to the other when accessing my storage. A lot of lag, especially on the Photos tab. Framerate drops happened during travel from the beginning and were consistent every single time I traveled. The game froze multiple times.

One freeze up resulted in losing a whole day of progress, so I made it a point to visit the caravan pretty often for autosaves. I didn’t like having to do that. One of the more amusing glitches was when gameplay wouldn’t advance during a table serving task. I sat there just watching these two guys with “beers” who wouldn’t stop drinking, so I could pick up the empties and finish playing server.

The game’s black error screen crashed at least seven times, often during photography (photographing caught fish, specifically) and at bridges. Most of my driving problems usually happened at both bridges on the road from Sandystone Point to Pebblewick. The bridge pop-in actually got me stuck underneath the water after I upgraded Rigby. He flew faster than I was used to after the upgrade. When driving, I ended up half hovering and half in the water before the bridge graphics finally popped in.

Thankfully, there’s an “I’m Stuck” feature in the menu that returns you to Fellowood Acres. But that meant I had to drive back to where I was, and it was right before a market day, which threw off my selling plans.

Summary

Do I recommend Cozy Caravan? Absolutely! Just not on the OG Switch. Probably Switch 2 or Steam. Personally, I don’t see how I would play this on my iPad without syncing a controller, and I’m not keen to do that or to resubscribe to Apple Arcade. There are obvious placeholders for future content — wishing wells that are boarded shut, lanes off the main road going to smaller settlements, additional character designs, poses for photos, new stickers, more collectibles like dice and fish and recipes, a soccer game, more skins for the wagon and mount, and, why not a third map expansion? I’m sure that’s planned.

The game has a future, though. I enjoyed the heck out of the gameplay, and somewhat importantly, it scratches the collecting itch. I want to keep playing, but I’ll probably do it on Steam and skip the subscription … but I can easily see how it would be tempting for players who don’t want to wait for additional content.

P.S. Consider taking a screenshot of the dedication at the beginning so you can read it.