Hozy Review

Hozy’s title is a seeming amalgam of ‘home’ and ‘cozy’, which serves to describe what this game is about. You are presented with a series of rooms that have fallen into a state of disrepair and assigned the task of cleaning and restoring them. Pick up trash by clicking it with the mouse and then drop it in a bin. Select cleaning tools such as a squeegee or mop, and remove dirt by erasing it with sweeps of the mouse. Pick a paint color and then apply it to the walls with a roller brush, periodically dipping it in the paint tray to refresh the paint. There’s no timer, no obstacles to overcome, no puzzles to solve - you can just go at your own pace with your reward coming from the satisfaction that you restored a neglected space to its former glory.

Once the cleaning is done, you’re given a collection of moving boxes, each labeled with a category such as furniture or lighting. You’re free to arrange the furniture and decorations in any way that you wish. You can just toss them out of the boxes or take your time arranging a space that you’d be happy inhabiting yourself. You don’t even have to place everything – if you’re just not feeling it with a particular chair or end table, just drop it into the void surrounding the room and it’s gone. Some of the objects are interactive, so you can turn on lights, open shutters, and play some music as you’re decorating. Once all of the boxes have been unpacked, you can enjoy your work, take a few photos, and then move onto the next room.

Unlike a lot of cozy games that opt for cute, cartoony graphics, Hozy uses Unreal Engine to create more realistic spaces – they’re not photorealistic, but they do make the rooms and the objects within them resemble dioramas or dollhouses. The lighting is dynamic and realistic, changing as you open shutters or turn on lights. There’s also a physics engine at work, and objects react realistically as you gather things up or sweep them around.

I appreciated that the game provides attractive and even eccentric spaces to work with, and it was fun unpacking the boxes and seeing what interesting décor I had to work with. It would be nice if there were more options for the base layers at least; you are given a choice of three colors for the walls and no options for flooring. There’s also no real story to the game, so it’s truly casual in the sense that you’re renovating for renovation’s sake. I also wish that there were more rooms in the game, as it is it’s a rather short experience. You can always play through it again and try different designs, but it loses a little of that magic of discovery the second time through. And as a final caveat, if you’re planning on playing the game on Steam Deck it is possible, but the controls can be difficult to use and some frustration will creep into your cozy time.