Cozy Caravan Review

Cozy Caravan, as its name advertises, is a cozy game about a couple of critters who ride their caravan across the countryside gathering fruits and vegetables to sell in the towns or to craft into everything from salads to pies to offer at higher prices. It’s bit like those games that give you a farm on which to grow an ever-diverse collection of crops, but in this case you’re not doing the farming (although local farmers will give you a share of the crop if you help them with the harvest).

The game begins with you setting-off from your home village with your friend Bubba the frog in a caravan drawn by a giant bumblebee. You are rookie members of the Guild, a regional merchants’ collective, and are off to prove yourselves and cement your status in the organization. As you make your way down the local county roads, you’ll discover new communities. Most of these are little country crossroads surrounded by a few farms. Each farm specializes in a single crop, and if you help with the harvest – run through their field picking ripe crops – they will give you a cut of the harvest for your troubles. This is the primary way you’ll gather the items that you can sell at market or use with recipes to craft meals. If it’s market day, you can set-up shop and sell the items that you’ve collected to the locals. A big part of the game is knowing where to find all of the raw materials and timing your route to arrive on market day at the village that has the most demand for what you’ve collected in the back of your caravan.

There are other things to do besides picking fruit and vegetables to sell later. As you collect recipes, you’ll be able to spend some time inside your caravan after setting up camp for the evening, combining ingredients to make new dishes or intermediate ingredients that can either be sold themselves or used in turn to craft higher level recipes. Each step in a recipe, chopping, frying, etc., involves a simple timing-based mini game. This is a cozy game, so you can’t fail at any of the steps, but doing well will increase the quality of the end product. Other mini games include fishing and a Diner Dash style exercise in serving up customer orders and collecting dirty dishes for a few of the local eating establishments.

The goal of the game isn’t to get rich. You don’t have any costs of doing business and you don’t even earn money selling your goods. Instead, you are essentially generating goodwill that will help you advance in the guild. Sell the people what they want or exotic goods and you generate more goodwill and advance faster. You can even generate some goodwill simply by waving hello to each person you encounter during the day. Advancing in levels within the guild gives you credits that you can use in the guild store to purchase cosmetic upgrades or new equipment that will allow you to be more productive or to produce more advanced recipes.

Cozy Caravan is the kind of game that you can play when you just need to relax and unwind. There’s no pressure to quickly advance within the guild or to avoid bankruptcy. You can easily return to the game after a while and simply jump back in without having to worry about remembering anything about where you are in the story or what quests you left unfinished. If you’re looking for challenge you won’t really find much here, but sometimes you just need to chill and pick some fruit, right?