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We like cute things around here. So when we have the opportunity to start a community of precious animal cuties along the bottom of our screen, we take it. That’s what we got from Cozy Sanctuary, a new casual desktop idle “farm” management game that lets you keep a flock of furry friends happy along the edge of your taskbar with light farming, cleaning, and maintenance tasks to help you grow and populate your precious farm of animals.
Welcome to the Sanctuary
Being an idle casual management game, Cozy Sanctuary is going to be light on the gameplay elements. At the bottom of your screen, you’ll have a pretty little forest scene that stretches the length of your desktop, along which your group of up to 20 animals at a time can frolic, spin, rest, eat, and more whilst you work on whatever you want on your desktop above them. You’ll be tasked with feeding them, keeping them clean by washing them off, and making sure they get all the pets they desire. By doing these things, you’ll make them grow in happiness, fullness, and cleanliness and earn and bank paw points. Once they reach a certain level of happiness, you can sell them for double the cost of what you bought them, which allows you to continue to grow your horde of happy inhabitants and unlock new species along the way. You can also use those earned points to build upgrades that either make your visual environment more playfully vibrant, or allow you to reduce the clickable upkeep necessary to keep the animals satisfied. That’s the whole experience, which is to say it’s exactly as advertised.
Smooth Sailing
The game ran incredibly smoothly throughout, even when I was running heavily taxing games or editing videos, and that’s probably not even when you’d want to have it running anyways. The little animals are infectiously cute, and the noises they make when you’re petting them to retrieve your stocked up points or make them happy were sparks of joy during light work. The available music to play was also perfectly pleasant and not too distracting, and of course the option is there to turn it off completely. It was a treat getting to unlock a new animal and plop them down onto my desktop, watching them scurry around amongst the others. I mean, seeing 20 reindeer prancing along my taskbar is something I can say was worth the small GPU hit. Along with the animals, you’re able to plant and upkeep crops that are used to keep the animals fed, and each animal has its own preferred food which will make them happier and fuller faster. This was a nice little element of gameplay that kept me lightly on my toes, though the animals would eventually eat whatever they wanted to keep themselves full without much fuss.
Balancing the Idle Action
There are 25 total fuzzy buddies to invite to your screen, and they’ll all arrive dirty, hungry, and in need of care. Since it is an idle game, if you ignore them for too long, mainly good things continue to happen, but with a catch. Each animal has a certain amount of points they can store on themselves before you pet them to earn those points, and that earning potential stops completely if they get too unhappy. This can happen if you don’t feed them enough food, keep them clean, or leave them untouched. So, at a certain point, you do have to check in on them. I found this balance of requiring interaction and leaving them alone -almost- perfect, but leaned a bit too much into the “touch me as much as possible” potential for the first hour or so. In fact, I caught myself skipping out on what I needed to be doing on my computer because I had to clean up incrementally growing piles of poop early on before I got the upgrades to help do it automatically. The experience is definitely a bit front-loaded, as you learn the best way to earn points and unlock more animals. Once you get rolling though, it’s hard to stop, but also easier to, as the point saving capabilities of animals you unlock later on allow for longer breaks between necessary clicks and the automatic upkeep systems grow in usefulness. If you’re an achievement hunter, I was able to completely unlock all content in under four hours, with probably 50% clicking on the game, 50% doing other work. Oh, and you can also name your animals, along with sending them to a storage system to pull out later if you’ve got your faves you want to keep around while trying to complete other objectives. Daxel the Reindeer will always be full of strawberries on my farm, don’t you worry.
In Conclusion
Cozy Sanctuary isn’t loaded with a ridiculous amount of unlocks or things to do, but the adorable list of animals available to unlock and help keep you company is commendable for an idle game. Everything stayed well within acceptable computer requirements for this type of casual experience, and I had no issues at all with how it operated on my computer around other applications. If you’re into these types of fun visual treats that play as peaceful gaming applications, you’ll surely enjoy Cozy Sanctuary.
