Cozy

About Cozy

Cozy is a two-person game made for the Pixel Horror Jam 2016, where it placed second, and it is free on itch.io for Windows, with a Java build for Mac and Linux. It was made by Gray and Doctor Crows, and its page points to Shiver, a longer free point-and-click horror game from Kowai Sugoi Studios, as its spiritual successor. Markiplier played it on his YouTube channel.

It opens near sundown, as you step out of your hatchback into the muted stillness of a winter forest. You have come to make sure your uncle is all right. His cottage is dark, the door is locked from the inside, and before long the car you came in is no longer a way out.

It plays as a first-person point-and-click adventure in painted pixel art: a car half buried in snow, a cabin hall with a fire in the hearth, a kitchen with a frosted window. You click on things to hear the narrator's short, often dry remarks, pick up a stick, a glass or a hammer, and use them on each other and on the rooms to get further. The puzzles are practical ones, like melting snow or prying boards off a wall, and the cottage, its shed and the ground under it hold more than they should.

The fear is quiet: a warm-looking cabin where small things are wrong, the light going, and the feeling that whatever reached your car is still near. It suits players who like short, puzzle-driven horror they can finish in one sitting, in the line of the free point-and-click escape games.

How to play Cozy

1. Download Cozy free from its itch.io page: Cozy.exe for Windows, or Cozy.jar for Mac and Linux, which needs Java installed.
2. Start the game and click on things in each scene to look at them; the narrator says what they notice.
3. Click items to pick them up, then use them on other items or on parts of a scene to combine them or solve a problem.
4. Move between the car, the forest path, the cottage, its shed and the rooms by clicking at the edges and doors of each scene.
5. Work out how to leave before night falls; press F4 for fullscreen and Esc to quit.

Tips

• Try every item on every likely object: most puzzles are about getting the right thing into the right state, such as a glass of snow into water.
• Read the narrator's lines; they often hint at what is missing.
• Go back to scenes you have already seen after something changes.

Questions