Cozy Games

For me, cozy is a game that I can shut my brain off to or play while I listen to a book or something. Any kind of time gating automatically disqualifies a game as cozy for me because I hate to be rushed or feel like I'm missing something. I'll drop a game if I find out that there was some cool thing or story beat arbitrarily hidden or locked because I passed some kind of milestone in a quest.

I think the general accepted idea of cozy is games with little to no pressure or time gating and no combat or options to make combat easy. Farming sims do well in the cozy community because there's usually no rush and a lot of little low impact things to do to keep you comfortably busy without being overwhelming. Top it all off with a pastel color pallet, and you've got a lot of people's definition of cozy lol