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Cozy Caravan – Review

Ever wanted to play a game where you can be a cute critter? Perhaps you just want to take a breather and ride your caravan around the land and meet other cute animals? Now with 5 Lives Studios’ newest game, you can! Cozy Caravan features all the above and more. This game is a perfect blend of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, while maintaining its own unique setting, which we will discuss in this review. Story Cozy Caravan begins with a letter from your aunt Madeline, telling you she needs you to help your community as a brand-new guild rookie, along with your childhood friend Bubba. Whilst he takes care of your caravan, you get to explore various towns and roads where the most adorable villagers could use your help for small and big tasks. These involve simple fetch-quests, fun minigames, or traveling from point A to B. As you go on, you meet different critters and gather upgrades for your caravan, but more on that later in the gameplay section.   Though the story is present, it is mainly there to kickstart the game more than being a central focus point. There are NPCs scattered across the map to make the world feel more alive, but half of them do repeat the same basic chatter to hint you towards a new quest. None of this matters too much, as the game gives the player enough to do to keep the game alive.  Graphics Set in a 3D animated world, Cozy Caravan adds a little extra feature by making the characters move in stop-motion. Though this initially makes it look like the game didn’t load properly, it does add a certain storybook-like aesthetic to the game. Adding this on top of all chibi-styled animals in the game, ‘cute’ doesn’t even cover how adorable Cozy Caravan showcases itself.   Furthermore, due to there being an in-game time flow, all areas change depending on the time of day, making the world feel even more alive. This, on top of various weather circumstances, creates such a realistic, yet storybook-like feel that the player is bound to feel the cozy atmosphere 5 Lives Studios aims to portray.   Sound  Featuring a soundtrack with 21 unique tunes composed by Zander Hulme, Cozy Caravan delivers a soft and gentle sound that matches the calm atmosphere it aspires to portray. A mixture of lo-fi and ambient sounds makes enough variety to avoid having a monotone gameplay. Something a little bit tedious, however, was that whenever you board your caravan, the same song starts from the beginning again. When the player is required to simply hop off and deliver something, then hop on again, this can become quite an ear-sore in long-term gameplay. Aside from that, though, the soundtrack is varied enough to give every town its own little personality. Gameplay Essentially, Cozy Caravan could describe itself as a cozy game, mixed with exploration aspects. The point of this video game is that the player gets to roam around the world with their caravan whilst doing fetching tasks, or minigames to gather reputation points. These can be exchanged for guild tokens, which then can be swapped for upgrades for your caravan to earn more reputation points. It is a cycle of going from point A to B, to then do these things faster, as well as more elaborate, as you progress throughout the world. The controls in Cozy Caravan are pretty straightforward and explained from the get-go. Your first town serves as some sort of tutorial where guild representative Arthur explains to you how to help other citizens, as well as gain points to upgrade your caravan. At the end of your day, you can just climb into the caravan, talk to your best friend, and go to bed to proceed to the next day. During weekends, you get to open a market stand and sell gathered items and products to passing townsfolk, who will reward you with more reputation points. Furthermore, whenever you can interact with characters or items, they are highlighted in a bright cartoonish outline, making it very simple to figure out what you can and cannot do. Aside from that, players are free to go and do as they please without a real major goal in mind. You do tasks, gather reputation, turn that into coins, and use those to upgrade your caravan to unlock more stuff. It is simple, but the lack of time pressure or set goals makes for a relaxing game that you can boot up after a long day or without fear of missing out on something temporary. Conclusion All in all, Cozy Caravan is simply that, a cozy caravan game. The stop-motion animations of the characters, combined with the colorful world you are free to explore, make for a fun and cute game where players are bound to feel at ease. Aside from the slow trailing back-and-forth, exploring is half the fun of this game. If you are looking for something to play at your own pace, or want to take a break from titles such as Animal Crossing without taking too much time, Cozy Caravan is the game for you.