There is a “Cozy genre” of games, led by the likes of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, which are adorable little games with a soft, gentle, and relaxing atmosphere. In cozy games, you feel at home, where everything is safe, predictable, and calm. Cozy games are the games in which players tend to their gardens, fold their clothes, care for animals, and relish in a peaceful existence.
Another game, Slime Rancher, is often regarded as a cozy game, but I disagree. While games are allowed to color outside the lines of their respective genres, those genres do have some basic required elements. The relaxing, hominess of Cozy games is just not present in Slime Rancher, and I believe that excludes it from the genre. While you can put coziness in games outside of the Cozy genre, you can’t take the coziness out without fundamentally recategorizing the game.
As I just stated, “coziness” is the key element of the Cozy genre, but it is not a quality exclusive to Cozy games; elements of relaxation and a sense of home can be found in even the most uncozy games. Take Destiny 2 as an extreme example. This sci-fi MMOFPS sends players out into a post-apocalyptic warzone, only for them to return to social areas like “The Tower” and “The Farm.” These areas are devoid of enemies and let the player walk around, play, talk to NPCs, and socialize.
The Farm is quite cozy, is it not? After each mission, you return to this makeshift base of operations where a persistent cast of friendly NPCs are there to talk to you and give you new quests. There are no enemies to harm you, and there are also fun minigames, such as soccer, to play with your friends.
I don’t know anybody who would claim Destiny 2 is a member of the Cozy genre, but it definitely contains cozy elements. This isn’t all that surprising, though. When it comes to genres, games tend to gain membership in a genre by having the hallmark elements of that genre, and then they are free to cross-pollinate with bits and pieces from other genres. Destiny 2 is an MMOFPS because, at its core, it is a vast online world where players adventure and level up through activities centered around first-person gunplay. Yet, its playful social areas borrow elements from cozy games; its “Darkness Zones” implement the kind of permadeath found in roguelikes, and its six-player raid activities put a spin on the dungeons of traditional MMORPGs.
Now, we turn our attention to Slime Rancher, a game many have called “cozy.” In this game, you spend your days rounding up and feeding little rainbow slimeballs that eat berries and multiply. You take the little shards they produce, called “plorts,” and fire them with a vacuum gun into a computer console to sell them on the “Plort Market.” I mean, come on! It’s adorable!
But it’s not “Cozy.”
Despite its cute aesthetic, Slime Rancher lacks those hallmark elements of the Cozy genre. Your home base isn’t at all separated from the wilderness, and it is far from stress-free. On a good day, your slimes are nicely contained in their pens, but things can go terribly wrong if you aren’t careful.
Even if cuteness is often lumped in with cozyiness, I think Slime Rancher is more of a simulation game than a Cozy game: an adorable, slow-paced simulation game. I don’t think we can classify it as a Cozy game due to its lack of a relaxing home base separate from the chaotic elements of the game.
Like in the case of Destiny 2, adding elements from other genres without changing the core of the game doesn’t dilute the game’s genre membership. However, like with Slime Rancher, leaving out the hallmark aspects of a genre should, I feel, exclude it from that genre. If you remove the guns in Destiny 2, it’s not an MMOFPS. But if you add swords to the game’s existing armory (which they did), it remains a first-person shooter. As much as people like to refer to Slime Rancher as a cozy game, it just lacks the heart of what makes a game part of the Cozy genre.
