2025 has been crazy… mass protests, world wars, chicken jockey… with so much civil unrest, I made the decision to take a break from my typical angsty competitive shooters and explore a relatively new genre for me: the cozy.

Cozy games are video games that emphasize non-competitiveness and relaxation. Staples of the genre you might recognize are games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. So, if you have a Neanderthal brain like me but are getting tired of the ranked grind in games like Marvel Rivals or VALORANT, here are some games I recommend to chill out and forget about this mad world for hours at a time.

Schedule 1

Schedule 1 is the perfect game for adults who may have never experienced cozy games before and like drugs. The game is an open-world resource management game with very satisfying industry builder and automater-style gameplay as you get into the mid and late game. The graphics are simple, the music is vibey, and the mechanics are oddly therapeutic. In the game, you start by growing, harvesting, packaging, and selling the devil’s lettuce, aka ganj, aka Mary Jane, aka Jazz Cabbage, aka Macho Man Randy Savage.

You have to perform little minigames for each task, from putting soil in the planter, digging a hole, taking the seeds out of the package, covering it up, watering the plants, and even throwing away your trash… then you have to clip the buds, put them in little baggies, and hit the streets slanging more and more of that sweet sticky icky.

As your operation grows, you can expand and purchase new equipment, making the minigames less time-consuming. Eventually, you can hire employees to automate the entire process. As you expand your territory, the clientele gets harder to satisfy and you end up going full Breaking Bad, manufacturing meth and coke. It’s truly awesome.

Oh, and if you have friends, the game is multiplayer! Although this game sounds anything but cozy, I can’t tell you how therapeutic it was for me and my bestie catching up on life in Discord while spending 30 minutes cleaning and optimizing the trap house.

One of the coolest things about this game is that it was developed almost entirely by one dude! A single developer sold 6 million copies of a game at $19.99, totally life-changing and inspirational. In an era of gaming where major corporations are spending way too much money on games we didn’t ask for, Schedule 1 is a breath of fresh air.

The Planet Crafter

Game number two is another Steam gem I’ve been sinking an obscene amount of hours into to numb the excruciating pain of real life: The Planet Crafter. At its core, this game is a survival and resource-collecting game with tons of awesome crafting, base-building, and exploration. You start off crash-landing on an uninhabitable world with the goal of terraforming the planet by collecting materials to build drills to release pressure from below the surface, and creating heat and oxygen to cultivate a livable biosphere.

Oxygen is basically non-existent, so a large part of the early game is crafting tools like oxygen tanks, jetpacks, and exo-suits to help you explore further and further away from the crash site, until eventually you’re whipping around in a decked-out space buggy, launching full-size rockets, and visiting new moons and planets.

This one supports multiplayer for up to 10 people. And while it’s an open-world sandbox, it’s not procedurally generated, meaning the terrain is all linear. That might sound strange for a game like this in 2025, but it’s forgivable given how immersive the environments are and how enthralling the story is.

In a lot of games I play, I’m guilty of plowing through the campaign and skipping cutscenes and lore. But the eerie messages and mystery of the planet pull you in, and the further you explore, the more spectacular the findings.

Final Reaction

My one piece of advice for these two games, and cozy games in general, especially if you’re new, is to do just one thing: relax. My first instinct in both of these games was to fall down a YouTube rabbit hole, min-maxing each strain of Silly Cilantro or speedrunning my new ecosystem, but that defeats the purpose. Take your time, play your own way, enjoy the mundane, and speedrun on the next playthrough.

Well, I hope this was useful. I’m sorry everything kinda sucks and if it makes you feel any better, I don’t think it’s going to get better anytime soon. So that gives you plenty of time to pick up and enjoy these games!