With life being busy and it being cold inside, this is the perfect time to curl up with a blanket and enjoy something cozy. So when Cozy Caravan came to my attention, I was intrigued because this seemed like the perfect type of game for this time of the year. Would this be the game I needed this year?

In Cozy Caravan, you play as an animal from what might be the cutest character creator I’ve ever seen. I ended up as a pink cow wearing a skirt and cardigan, so this was already off to a very adorable start. You and your frog friend Bubba travel together on a caravan across the land of Harvestvale, doing tasks for the other animal inhabitants, crafting, and selling your wares at a weekly market, all in advance of the Whizz Bang Fair.

Right out the gate, the first thing that you’ll notice is that this game is very cute and feels like the perfect kind of aesthetic for this type of a game. There is a lot of visual polish and charm, which is enough to make you want to inhabit this world. It’s a game where you drive a caravan being pulled by a giant fluffy bee and you collect items to make things like apple pies. This is a pretty perfect vibe. The animation has an intentional stop-motion look to it with its frame rate, which adds to the charm.

The gameplay I don’t think has quite that level of polish, though there are multiple ways you can look at it. If you’re looking for a game with distinct objectives, goals, or stakes of any kind, Cozy Caravan isn’t for you. If wandering around and doing the most basic minigames sounds like a good way for you to unwind at the end of the day, that might be something more up your alley. Personally, I feel like this errs on the side of being too chill, where it conflates coziness with a lack of mechanical depth. Which hey, that might be exactly what people want! I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but as someone who put in a lot of hours with Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar last year, I kept thinking about the comparisons of crafting items to sell at a market. These are very different games, but Story of Seasons allows for a variety of play styles. For me, I loved multitasking and having several objectives at hand, but you could play the game much slower than I did. Cozy Caravan just has one mode, slow. So instead of relaxed, I often found myself just bored.

I think Cozy Caravan will appeal to a lot of people, but at the end of the day I found out it wasn’t for me personally. It’s very cute and charming, but the gameplay loop is just too slow for my liking. There are also other choices that just don’t make sense to me, like I wish there was an actual, trackable quest log. There’s a lot to like, but if you want any amount of friction to your gameplay I’d recommend looking elsewhere. However, if you just want to relax in a cute world as a cute cartoon animal, you could do much worse than cozy Caravan.