Recently I’ve watched the Wholesome Direct livestream, a showcase event dedicated for cozy and chill themed games. There are certainly lots of interesting adorable games that seem fun to play and have lots of potential! My Steam wishlist grew so fast haha. Some of the games offer free demo as well, so I decided to try them out since I was curious.
Here’s a shorts clip compiling some of the games I tried out on stream! Some of them have Twitch integrations to interact with chat as well, that adds more fun to try them out. I’m looking forward to see the full version of these games, you can check them out on Steam too!
Sticky Business
Being a merch artist myself who have sold my products online, this game quickly caught my interest since its early previews on Twitter!
In the game we can design our own stickers from preset elements with customizable colors – it’s so fun to see the creative possibilities shared by the community! I often get pleasantly surprised to see ‘oh, you can combine the shapes to make something like that!’
You get to arrange your stickers on paper for printing – for those who are used to arrange your own printing files, it will feel like home to arrange the designs as efficient as possible to print as many stickers as possible in a sheet to save cost :p It gave some insight into how online homemade stickers shop operates!
You’ll then get orders and will pack the stickers according to the orders, choose the packaging colors, and send them! You’ll also get customer feedback and some life story updates from your repeat customers, which I think is a sweet thing and I wish we can interact more with them.
Be sure to watch out for your income with costs of printing, and place care with time management since there’s only limited things we can do in a day, just like real life.
The fun part is you can also get your stream viewers to be your ‘customers’, which I think is a nice way to engage your viewers to be involved in your shop!
By connecting the game to Twitch, your viewers can order your sticker designs by writing commands such as ‘!order 1 2’ which will order sticker design #1 and #2. They do not need to use bits to order, though you can set it to be subscribers only for now. There’s only a limited amount of orders can be processed in a day, so viewers can compete to get their orders in!
The developers are also active on their Discord server to gather feedback and bug reports from players, so I certainly look forward for its future developments.
More info: [Steam]
Bubblegum Galaxy
In this game, we’ll be a new intern who’s in charge of building planets – and restoring a galaxy! The starting screen music is cute and catchy that it got stuck on my head some time after playing, by the way.
You get to place different colored tiles on the map to build a planet. There are blank tiles, mountains, forest / tree tiles, or a mix of them. The general rule is to place similar tiles closer, such as similar colors and environment type. By arranging them well, you can score higher points (to make the boss happy!) and complete missions.
The gameplay should be pretty easy to follow, yet provides challenges to keep trying. I find it quite relaxing with the sounds and seeing all the color-coordinated tiles or line of trees forming up from the tiles. You can also do a free mode to get highest score that does not link to the main story mode.
The graphics are adorable with cozy colors, and the character designs are interesting to look at (for example, the main character has a house-shaped head with a cat face). There’s a story progression and we can talk to the different characters between the stages so we can take some time to go around the office.
Some of the dialogs are quite cheeky that hit a bit too close to home talking about internships, haha. I’m quite curious how the story is going to progress – who made the galaxy disappear? Also will be interesting to see different colors and environment terrain types in the further stages!
More info: [Steam]
Gourdlets
If you enjoy cute, cozy building games that gives you a lot of freedom, you can check out Gourdlets! Here you get to build your own city as you like, with visitors of cute blobs ‘Gourdlets’ will come over to visit with a train ride and interact with your city.
The game is a sandbox-style, as the description summarizes: No objectives, no points, just building! It might not be for everyone as I know some people can get lost with the lack of objective, but for those who enjoys creative freedom building, it will be fun.
You don’t need any progression or grinding as the elements are all unlocked from the start, and you can freely add and remove elements as you wish. You can decorate indoors inside the building and have different varieties of scenery elements like trees, benches, bridges, etc.
This game also features a Twitch integration, where your stream viewers can join in the city you’re building as the cute Gourdlets! By typing in command !gourdlets after connecting the game, viewers will show up as a random Gourdlet design wandering around the city. The cuties can interact randomly with the environment such as fishing, sitting on the chair, singing, and so on.
I’m not exactly the creative type with building, but I can imagine I’d spend some time designing places and taking a look at the cute blobs going around! You can also toggle day/night and hide the UI buttons to showcase your city or save it to use as a wallpaper, for example.
More info: [Gourdlets website]
Afterwords
The games on this post are some of the many demo games featured in the Wholesome Direct event. I personally enjoyed them and excited to see their future updates of development!
You can discover more wholesome, cozy games at Wholesome Games site! I’m glad I get to discover it so I can get updates on new games with chill vibes and cute styles that I am interested in. Feel free to drop in your wholesome game recommendations too as I’ll still be on lookout for more to try!
