Developer: OverPowered Team
Publisher: Isolated Games Publishing
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Cozy Sanctuary – Review
Whether we are working from home, watching the next livestream, or simply doomscrolling on our PC, most of the time we do this in utmost solitude. Thanks to OverPowered Team’s Cozy Sanctuary, we now have the pleasure of doing this whilst taking care of various abandoned animals, big and small. In this latest idle desktop-buddy game, we get the chance to wash and feed animals, as well as decorate their little sanctuary to make them happy again. And who knows, maybe they will share that bit of happiness with us as well.
Story
The game doesn’t really have a proper ‘story’. All it says is that you now have a little sanctuary and are going to take care of animals who have been left behind. Given the nature of the game, an idle desktop game, there is no need for a proper story.
Graphics
Featuring a beautiful storybook-like art style, Cozy Sanctuary is mostly a 2D game with soft 3D models of the animals you get to take care of. You play the game entirely from your PC’s taskbar, taking up barely any space on your screen. The height of the ‘ground’, as well as how big the game presents itself, can all be adjusted, should you wish to have your sanctuary be afloat in the middle of your monitor, or simply find the base scale too small. There is even an option to enable black outlines on animals to avoid them blending in too much, or to make sure you click on the desired animal wandering around. Aside from the storybook 3D models of the animals, crops, decorations, and functional buildings are all simple 2D drawn images. Some items will be outlined in white, whereas everything else looks almost ‘borderless’. Usually, these outlines will be found on things to keep an eye out for, such as food, manure, or crops.
Another thing Cozy Sanctuary manages to do rather well is keeping the clean and simplistic theme in their UI. By featuring beige and brown boxes, with a slight tinge of a muted pink as an accent tone, everything is very easy on the eyes. This allows the game to push its cozy atmosphere further onto you, not disrupting the immersion of the game. Due to this color palette, you will quickly find that what makes this game so ‘colorful’ and expressive are the animals you get to take care of. They are the main focus of this game, and we’re happy they really stand out.
Sound
Let’s address the elephant in the room: sound design is probably where Cozy Sanctuary lacks the most, though that doesn’t necessarily mean it is a bad thing. Regarding background music, there is one tune playing in a continuous loop. The music fits the generic cozy mood you would find in other similar games like this one. The lack of a soundtrack makes somewhat sense though, as you’re most likely going to be booting up the game whilst focusing on other tasks, that could possibly involve sound.
Now, the game features a lot of different animals, and animals make noise. When it comes to the animals in Cozy Sanctuary, these noises are reduced to two simple tones per animal, some more accurate than others, and they only come out when you’re actually interacting with the animal in question, or when they’ve digested their food. We tried to test out how present these animals are whilst watching a livestream and found that the noises are rather minimal, but occasionally present enough to grant us the desire to mute the game. Thankfully, the settings had a separate option for that as well.
Gameplay
Right off the bat, you are introduced to your sanctuary in this idle desktop game. There’s a small field at the bottom of your screen, with four little planters to the side. You start by taking care of one little duck who is filthy and hungry. This is how you are introduced to the washing mechanic, as well as the planting and feeding gameplay. By clicking on the bottom right, next to your planters, you get a small pop-up of multiple icons. These are rather self-explanatory at first glance. You can press the sponge to wash your animals with a simple click-and-hold on each one. Next up, you can click the bucket to pick up manure, and click again to drop said manure on your plants as fertilizer. Players can choose which crops they plant by clicking the little boxes next to the crops themselves.
So aside from washing and feeding, players get to take care of their sanctuary as well. Once your animal is happy enough, indicated by either checking their individual profile or by the hearts that will float around them, you get the option to release them back into the wild, where they’ll probably live a happy virtual life. In doing so, you receive an unnamed currency, which we will call ‘Paws’ from here on out. These Paws allow you to buy more animals, decorations, or functional buildings. The latter will help you take care of both crops and animals, amplifying the idle aspect of the game. Each pet released returns double the amount of its initial cost, leaving players the option to release one and get two back.
Of course, you cannot get every single animal from the get-go; that would be too easy. By releasing a certain animal three times, or growing a crop multiple times, players will unlock the next available animal in the list. This unlock system indirectly creates an almost linear gameplay loop for those who want to unlock everything first before sticking to their favourite critters.
Lastly, as mentioned earlier, there are also decorations for your sanctuary. These are acquired with Paws and will boost a score bar that will automatically increase the happiness gain of all animals you allow into your sanctuary. There are even four different backgrounds to unlock, allowing for a somewhat different setting of your sanctuary. Sadly, these decorations are nothing but static images, and your animals won’t interact with any of them. Nobody will make use of the bench or tire swing. You also cannot move these decorations once placed. We learned this the hard way, when a functional building was placed in front of our first decoration and had to demolish it in order to make our sanctuary look ‘clean’.
Conclusion
If you are looking for something to bring life to your desktop that isn’t intrusive and doesn’t require your constant attention, we really recommend Cozy Sanctuary. With thirty different animals to unlock, as well as ten different crops, you will have a proper six to eight hours of gameplay. The cute aesthetic of the game, combined with the simplicity of the gameplay, makes for a pleasant cozy idle game that isn’t overpriced either.
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