Some might like to kick off their 2026 gaming with a bang: huge gunfights, intense multiplayer madness or fiendishly difficult platforming. Me? I’m more content easing myself into the year with something a little more gentle, hence me dipping my toes into 2026 with Cozy Caravan, a game that’s all about sitting back and enjoying a slow jaunt around a beautiful world.
Despite it being a slow game, there’s no preamble here; no dying relative leaving you acres of neglected farmland or the local mayor showing you the ropes. You get a letter from your favourite Aunt Madeline asking for some help from the local guild and then you’re off to explore. You’re not alone in this task though, you’re travelling with your grandma (Bubba, which seems to both be her name and all she can say) and you’ll meet a colourful cast of anthropomorphic friends along the way.
First impressions of Cozy Caravan were strong. In a fashion typical for the genre you start by making your character. What I didn’t expect were so many options though: in a world full of animals they’ve really gone to town giving you as many different species as possible. You’ve got the standards like sheep and bears etc, but there are owls, monkeys, frogs, koalas and more. I eventually settled on a turtle, as it’s my son’s favourite animal, and after choosing my voice and outfit I was ready to hit the road.
In my mind there are a few sub-types of cosy game, and Cozy Caravan falls into the “running errands” category for me, fitting alongside games like Lil Gator Game The bulk of the game has you travelling between locations in your caravan, meeting friends and helping them with problems they have. It might be finding a shop assistant who’s wandered off, returning overdue library books, herding honey bees or ferrying people across the world. There’s never anything too taxing, and while it felt incredibly slow at first, I soon came to enjoy the gentle cadence of arriving in a location, chatting to the locals and seeing how I could help.
Getting from area to area is a joy too. Your caravan, pulled by a giant bumblebee (named Rigby!), moves much like a car in any other game. RT and LT are there to accelerate and reverse and the game is generous with your ability to manoeuvre, meaning you’re a lot more agile than you look. Yes, it can be quite slow while travelling, especially when you’re rolling through tight winding roads, but eventually I accepted the fact that it’s a slow game and just found trundling along an enjoyable, relaxing experience.
You may be wondering why you’re playing as a nomadic dogsbody, and it’s all in order to help spread joy across the world. You’ll spend the weekdays helping people and gathering ingredients and recipes during your waking hours and camping out overnight in your caravan. Weekends are market days though, and you can ring the bell on your caravan in any of the more populated locations to open a market stall and sell your wares. It’s like a much slower, much calmer version of the selling mechanic in Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, and you’ll be placing items on stalls as shoppers browse and make purchases.
While you can sell the items you’re given for completing tasks, or the fruit and veg you’ve foraged, you’re often better off cooking with them first. Your customisable caravan can be outfitted with stations and tools to allow for more complex culinary creations. This means you’ll be able to turn milk into cream, then into butter, then add some sugar, flour and apple to create a delicious apple pie, for example. These dishes can then be sold to generate larger quantities of joy, or may even be useful for some quests dotted around the world. It’s a really nice mechanic, and cooking is quite fun too. Each stage of the process involves small minigames and while they’re only ever about as complex as your standard cosy fishing minigame, they’re a nice way to make you feel connected with what you’re doing.
When you’re not lending a hand or in your caravan cooking, you’ll probably be sitting there gawping at the gorgeous scenery in the game, like I was. It looks like a diorama, with a slight tilt-shift filter applied to the world and a small stop-motion effect on the characters, meaning their movement is never quite as smooth as the world itself which lends to the feeling you’re looking at miniatures on a board. I’ve not seen anything like it before and there’s a level of fidelity I hadn’t expected. More impressively there’s a full-featured photo mode which not only gets used for some quests, but lets you get right down to street level in the game and examine all the details up close.
The game sounds as good as it looks too, with a laidback soundtrack that helps you just melt into the sofa as you play. I love how the lo-fi beats really kick in as you start driving your caravan, almost like an in-game radio, and it’s easy to switch your brain off for the 30-60 seconds it takes to drive between locations.
It’s important to stress just how slow Cozy Caravan can be though, and for many that will be a turn off. At first I really struggled to get into the game as it just felt like trudging through molasses at times, between the constant stream of busywork and the plodding amble of the caravan. Eventually something clicked though and I found myself looking forward to those journeys, often saying “I’ll just get to the next location and stop” before getting sucked into a treasure hunt or giving another character a ride to the next place. The tasks you’re doing are neither overly exciting nor long enough to be considered dull, however they can be a bit repetitive. One example involved a shop assistant who had gone missing. After finding and returning him, I came back the next day to find he’d gone missing again, and then it happened a third time after that. It just felt a bit unnecessary and stood out against the other activities.
Cozy Caravan is a great way to start 2026 if you’re looking to ease yourself back into gaming. This is real low stakes stuff, but if you can put up with the slow tempo then you’ll find yourself enjoying this warm and whimsical world.