5 Lives Studios’ Cozy Caravan is a game that challenges you to take it slow and really immerse yourself in the world of Harvestvale. As fresh-faced Guild Rookies, your customizable character and best friend Bubba the Frog travel through picturesque landscapes helping members of unique communities along the way. From crafting and farming to selling your wares, you’ll meet an entertaining mix of characters, each with their own stories and needs.
Cozy Caravan is super cute and engrossing, yet unique in its challenge to players to take it slow.
Throughout the day you’ll ride your caravan from location to location and fulfill quests from the adorable characters across over 20 areas in Harvestvale. You can farm vegetables for farmers and gain a few for your effort, fish in most of the water or help fishers unload their catch, get flowers and cotton for making clothing, and pick up a few items from specific quests. Your goal is simple. Help others, and ultimately help make this year’s Whizz Bang Fair the best Harvestvale has ever seen.
At night, you have the chance to hang out with your buddies, eat some food to regain stamina to sprint around (both you and your giant bumblebee buddy), and craft (cooking or sewing) before sleeping. The game will force you to sleep so you can’t try to maximize like you might in a different cozy farming game.
Similarly, farming doesn’t require you to plant and tend your own veggies. Instead you help other characters by harvesting their crops and then in each location receive three to five of those crops for your hard work. You can also receive crops or other items by swapping one of yours for one of the other characters’, which is fun. I love farming games but like farming the least depending on the way the mechanic works in each game, so I really liked getting to do something totally different. There are also a number of community gardens where you can pick crops, but you’ll have to unlock those by completing quests (of course).
As you interact with characters and make them happy you receive hearts that fill up and when you get enough, you get a guild token. Get enough of those and you can swap them for upgrades to your caravan, basket, and market stalls. Tokens are key because to unlock the entire map you have to upgrade your caravan a number of times, and to carry more items at once, you must upgrade your basket.
Markets are one of the most important aspect of Cozy Caravan. On the weekends you can sell everything you’ve harvested and that you’ve crafted. Crafted items gain you more hearts and each location each week might want an item more than another, which you can learn from a psychic owl lady. Statements never made before.
Another great way to gain hearts is to WAVE AT EVERYONE EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF TIME!!! This is something I somehow missed learning when I first started playing and then when I was showing a friend the game, waved and got hearts and we both flipped out. As she put it, “never has a game rewarded me for being so nice” and that’s really the core of Cozy Caravan. Be kind, help folks out, and have a great time exploring the world.
However, if you like fast and you like maximizing your crop output so to speak, this is not the game for you. There’s no fast travel or teleporting, though after a certain upgrade you can sprint and bumblebee can go a bit faster which is really nice when you’ve unlocked more of the map. Some of these locations are super far from one another. Fortunately there are some accessibility features that mean you don’t have to hold down the sprint if you don’t want to or autocrafting (so you don’t have to hold down the buttons while cooking or sewing).
Personally, there were times where I got tired of having to drive the caravan, especially when quests took me from one edge of the map to the other, but that’s when I saved and quit the game for another day. Cozy Caravan is not the game for speedrunning.
It’s a game where you can serve pies, pasta, pizza, and milkshakes for more hearts, play hopskotch or hide and seek with the kids, and find a bunch of frogs to take back to their dad. So if any of that sounds like fun to you, this IS the game for you!
Images and review copy courtesy of 5 Lives Studio
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!