Disclaimer: For transparency purposes, we are letting our readers know that after taking on the code for this game, our reviewer Alayna came to the realisation that she had worked with some of the developers behind Cozy Caravan in a past role. As her Editor, I have 100% faith that this has in no way affected the review Alayna has submitted, but in the interests of fairness and ethical reviewing, we will not be submitting this review to Metacritic or OpenCritic.
Cozy Caravan Review - Preparing for the Whizz Bang Fair
Cozy Caravan is the latest in my growing collection of cute games that let you play as a lil guy and meander around a world, crafting recipes and making friends as you go.
The game is essentially a series of adorable fetch quests. You are tasked with helping everybody prepare for the Whizz Bang Fair, an annual event that the guild is organising. You travel from one town to another, dropping off and picking up items, messages, and hitchhikers. Everything you do rewards you with hearts, which are converted into guild tokens that you can spend on expansions to your caravan. Some of these are mechanically useful, like a cooking station or sewing machine, while others are solely aesthetic, like moss for your caravan’s roof. This was clearly a priority for me.
Cozy Caravan reminds me of Locomoto, with a similar core game loop that takes you from place-to-place across an ever-expanding map. Although there’s a little less opportunity to decorate the interior of your caravan here compared to the train in Locomoto, I found the towns in Cozy Caravan more interesting: they’re large, bustling, and easy to differentiate from one another, with something to make each location unique.
The key similarity between these games comes less from the locations you visit and more from the slow process of travelling between them. It’s clear Cozy Caravan is deliberately trying to encourage players to slow down—and sometimes in ways that veer close to boring or disengaging. You start out with only four slots in your inventory, requiring you to backtrack often to drop your foraged items off at the caravan. You have to pay guild tokens to unlock the ability to sprint, and then you still need to eat a meal each night to refill your stamina so you can sprint the next day. Those limitations made the early game feel more frustrating than restful to me, and I think the game could still encourage players to engage in relaxing, repetitive activities without needing each of those actions to feel so sluggish.
Although you meet lots of people on your travels, Cozy Caravan doesn’t have a complex relationship system. You learn about the connections between various characters through the emergent narrative, but the hearts you collect are non-specific, filling one overarching meter rather than impacting your relationships with each individual. This might not be as engaging for somebody who loves a detailed relationship system in their cosy games, but as a player who often deprioritises that gameplay, this simplified version suited me.
However, because you don’t have a stereotypical menu that lists all the characters’ portraits, names, birthdays, and favourite gifts, this system comes at the expense of the characters being more forgettable. This made it difficult sometimes to remember who I needed to visit and for what purpose as I travelled between locations. My memory was also hindered by the lack of a centralised quest log; although you can see the current tasks you have listed for each location on the map, it’s easy to miss things because quests are listed against the location of the quest giver and not the location of the item you need to find or person you need to speak to. This is a minor gripe, but for a game that is all about the fetch quests, a better quest log would go a long way.
Each location you visit has specialisations, like the orchard, where you can find apples or Sweetness Way, where you can gather sugar cane. As you forage and farm for items, you can use those ingredients to make increasingly complex recipes. You can sell your cakes, breads, and clothing items on the weekends at several different market locations, gaining extra happiness when you offer stock that is ‘in demand’ in that town. I found that the number of hearts you get for hosting a market doesn’t always feel worthwhile, especially early in the game, where you’re just selling a carrot or two; you get more hearts by waving at the people in the nearby milk bar, which also doesn’t require wasting an entire in-game day. But your profits increase as you unlock sales boosts and more complicated recipes, which each made me less likely to skip market day.
To craft those recipes, there are a series of minigames you have to complete in your caravan, which usually involve clicking, holding, or dragging at the right times to keep your cursor aligned with a certain shape. Some are trickier than others, but they don’t require huge amounts of skill; I found they were more tedious than satisfying, and I opted to use the accessibility setting that autocompletes the tasks for you. I was pleased to see that setting exists—not just for lazy people like me, but more importantly for players who might not have the motor skills to succeed at specific, fiddly actions.
Cozy Caravan has adorable graphics with a deliberate stop-motion-inspired animation style (which can now be switched off in the accessibility settings if you need, thanks to a recent update). It has relaxing lo-fi tunes, although I often had them muted in favour of watching something on my second monitor. Although this game is relaxing and enjoyable, it suffers from a bunch of pacing issues in the early game. Still, if you like the aesthetics and see potential in the game loop, I recommend persisting through that slow start and unlocking some upgrades that make the game start to feel more responsive and satisfying.
Cozy Caravan was reviewed on the PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
