Cozy Caravan - Switch Review

Cozy Caravan has the player and their best friend, Bubba, travelling around Harvestvale as brand-new guild rookies. This requires them to assist citizens along the way as they ride their caravan, which is pulled by their faithful bee, Rigby. Some of their duties include giving residents lifts, picking vegetables, playing hopscotch, making deliveries, and holding a market on the weekend where they sell items they’ve crafted with their own paws. Hopefully, all this work will culminate in the best Whizz Bang Fair Harvestvale has ever seen!

The Good

One of the nicest things about Cozsy Caravan is that it’s incredibly chill about the pace that players want to take. There are so many things to do, but it doesn’t pressure the player to do any of them. Aside from the main quests related to the Whizz Bang Fair, everything else is optional. Don’t want to help Dill get down from whatever structure he has climbed for the 100th time? Just leave him there. It’ll be fine. There are no punishments for choosing not to do the optional stuff. Same with the markets. They are not required. While it’s possible to go the entire game without having a market, it will make getting Caravan upgrades hard. 

Kindness is the core of Cozy Caravan. Every nice deed the player does will give the residents happiness, represented as hearts. This can be as simple as waving at them. When the heart metre fills up, players will receive a guild token that can be used to upgrade the caravan that they travel in. This unlocks the ability to cook and craft clothing, which, when sold at the market, makes the residents very happy. This allows for more upgrades on the caravan. Sharing the kindness in Harvestvale is important for the economy!

One of the best ways to get hearts, aside from markets and quests, is to do one of the various minigames that can be found around Harvestvale. Some are stuck to static locations, such as the serving or farming mini-games, which can only be done at restaurants and farms, respectively. Others are roaming and can happen at any location. Where they are located will change the next day. Some of these are the aforementioned Dill dive minigame and the bee herding. The last minigames are the ones that happen in the Caravan when the player crafts items, such as creating dye with a mortar and pestle or cooking food in the oven. Of the many minigames, I enjoyed bee herding and using the mortar and pestle. Both felt quite zen to me.

Something I haven’t mentioned yet is that the characters are all based on animals, and there’s a huge variety of them. There are mammals, reptiles, birds and then different fur/scale/feather colours, so players can be exactly what they want. On top of that, players are able to pick the clothing they wish to wear on their character after they’ve crafted it themselves. If that wasn’t enough, the caravan can also be customised to match the persona the player has created for themself. Five Lives studios didn’t have to go so hard on the customisation, but I’m glad they did.  

Something that I felt stood out to me in the entire game was the characters that the player interacts with. Every location has residents in it, and some are subtle nods to popular culture, such as the turtles named Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo. I couldn’t find Raphael. The original characters are just as good, though. The three brothers in Fellowood, Barry, Larry and Garry, are in constant competition over whose produce is the best. Flossy is…well…Flossy. They are easily distracted and often forget what they were doing. There wasn’t a character in the whole of Harvestvale that I disliked, although Jean Claude came close. While I really like Bubba, the driver of the caravan, who is somehow really personable despite only saying “bubba” and variations of it, my favourite character had to be Rigby. Rigby is the large bumblebee that pulls the caravan with a constant derp with their tongue sticking out. You can pat Rigby twice a day, once during the day and once during camp time

TL;DR

• Most activities are optional
• Kindness at its core
• The minigames are varied
• There’s a large amount of customisation
• The characters are great.

The Bad

One of the worst things about minigames is that there’s always going to be terrible ones. It’s unavoidable. Luckily, the majority of the minigames were good to fine, but I found that I really disliked the Skipping stone and rolling pin minigames. Luckily, the skipping stone one is optional, but the rolling pin one isn’t, as it is required for crafting items. I found that due to the high sensitivity of the Switch 2 Joy-Cons, it was difficult to follow the lines as they moved. The skipping stone minigame was just hard to understand, so I tended to avoid it when I could.

Rigby is the best bug in Cozy Caravan; it’s true, but unfortunately, there were also bad bugs as well. At least three times while driving the caravan, it came to a dead stop like it had reached an invisible wall. I was able to fix it by going into the caravan and coming back out again, but it was annoying, especially as it happened more than once. Occasionally, quests I was working on couldn’t be completed because I had started another quest that overlapped the current one. Now and again, the text bubbles while driving would mix up Bubba and my character's name. It’s not game-breaking in any way, but it’s worth noting that it happens.

TL;DR

• Some minigames are lacklustre
• There are still bugs

Final Score: 8/10

I truly think that the Switch is the perfect home for Cozy Caravan. It’s easy to pick it up, do a few things or complete a day and then put it down. There may be a few issues, but I enjoyed my time with it. Some people did complain about the stop-motion animation making them sick, but the developers have added an accessibility option to turn it off. There are also accessibility options for the hopscotch minigame, as some people had issues with that. Regardless of your age or ability, there’s something for everyone in this wholesome, adorable lesson presented as a game.

Thank you for checking out our Cozy Caravan Switch review, thank you to [PUBLISHER] for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
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