Cottonville - Switch Review

The creation of Polish developers RedDeer.Games, Cottonville released on Steam and Nintendo Switch on July 17th. Bringing its twist to the cosy genre that’s popular recently, Cottonville combines farming with crafting and shopkeeping as players run their boutique in the countryside after a friend vacates it. Does Cottonville stack up to its cosy small-town fashion description, or is the game all style with no substance?

The Good

Cottonville has a relaxing vibe that matches the gameplay. Its core loop of growing crops, turning them into clothing, and then selling that clothing to customers feels chill. While the game has a time mechanic, there’s never a true sense of urgency. Shops are open for a long time, crops don’t wither if they’re not watered; instead, they just cease growing, and customers don’t complain if you skip over them. Many times, I had a customer who I didn’t have the correct clothes for. It was easy enough to skip over these customers with no grumbling. They just disappear. Each customer has a style, colour, and material preference. If you manage to hit all three preferences, you get three stars, but it’s not like the customers will refuse what you pick. The only downside players face for not meeting the criteria is that they will earn less money. This lack of punishment makes the game perfect for young kids, people who might be new to games, or those looking for a low-stakes game. 

Despite Cottonville using a 2D chibi-centric vector style, it has a large degree of customisation options for the player character. There is even a skin tone for vitiligo! Hooray for representation! When starting the game, Cottonville asks the player to pick from a multitude of 2D hairstyles and colours, eye shapes and colours, mouths, and the aforementioned skin tones. It might seem simple, but I was ecstatic to find that a purple-to-black gradient was available in the hair colours. Normally, gradients aren’t an option in customisation, whether it’s 2D or 3D, so I was happy for that. However, you can choose two different-coloured eyes, or in my case, purple eyes that turned yellow in the middle. It’s such a small thing, but it complements the 2D vector aesthetic that the game has going for it. 

Cottonville gives you three types of crops to make clothing from: cotton, flax, and bamboo. Usually, farming games only have cotton and wool to make clothing from, but as the emphasis is on creating clothes, it makes sense to have multiple types. The preferences that customers have for certain kinds of cloth are a lovely touch, too.

TL;DR

• Great aesthetic and customisation
• Relaxing gameplay
• A variety of garment crops

The Bad

While there isn’t anything wrong with the core gameplay loop of Cottonville, it all seems a bit shallow. Grow crops, turn those into clothes, and sell those clothes to buy seeds to grow more crops. It is a simple core loop, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing. However, once you’ve played through the first day, there’s no real incentive to keep going beyond an uninvolved rewards system. Plant five crops, dye five clothes, sell five items, and spend this much at the shops. These all give rewards such as crops, clothes, or fabric. There’s nothing special there that keeps the player incentivised. It probably doesn’t help that while the world is populated, they all repeat their lines. There’s nothing to the NPCs. The shops aren’t much better either. The seed shop has all the seeds from the get go and the pattern shop only gets new patterns when the previous stock is sold out. It just feels…hollow.   

One of the main things that’s contributing to this feeling is that there are no upgrades for anything. Farmland stays the same size and cannot be changed at all. The watering can stays the same size, meaning that often half the day is wasted just filling up the watering can, especially when the filling animation is so slow and can’t be skipped. There’s no opportunity to unlock new dye colours or to even mix colours to create new ones, and with only seven crops to create colour with, it’s incredibly lacking. Yet somehow, there are brown clothes with no brown plants to dye them; they just occur, I guess? Being able to create new colours would have been nice, especially as customers could start off wanting basic colours, but as you unlock the dyeing station, that broadens. It doesn’t help that high couture customers show up only a few days after starting. If there were a shop upgrade system, it would be possible to limit the customer types until the player is ready for the richer ones. Additionally, there is no way to customise the shop at all, so it very much feels like going through the motions. This might have been what the Kickstarter was for, but with it suspended, they no longer had the funds to fulfil their vision.

Lastly, and this is honestly the most egregious of all the issues with the game, is its lack of basic quality-of-life implementation. I kept trying to use the D-pad to navigate menus, which, considering all the clothes crafting uses them, is a lot. The D-pad does nothing in the menus. Instead, I was forced to use the Joystick and the left and right bumpers. The Joystick was used to select a section, and after being confirmed, the left and right bumpers are then used to select other colours and things. It just felt like the menu navigation was backwards or wrong somehow. On top of that, there was no way to see if you’d already made fabrics, dyes, or clothing items, meaning that I would have to exit one of the three crafting stations to check my inventory. It got so bad that I seriously considered creating a spreadsheet to keep track of what I had. It’s such a small thing that it seems ridiculous that there’s a crafting game in 2025 that doesn’t have inventory management.

TL;DR

• Shallow gameplay
• No upgrades
• Lack of QOL

Final Score: 6/10

When I first started up Cottonville, I thought it was going to be a mish-mash of Story of Seasons and Style Boutique, but instead I found that it was a game that felt like it barely contained either. It all feels as threadbare as a cheap shirt. The worst thing is that I can see what it could have been with more time, effort, and funding, and it leaves me mourning for the game it was never able to be. Cottonville is here for a short time, much like a product that’s part of the fast fashion industry, which is ironic when the game is supposed to be the antithesis of that.

Thank you for checking out our Cottonville Switch review, thank you to RedDeer.Games for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
• Bobby Jack
• Jack Caven
• Nintendo Maniacs
• RedHero