Cozy Land

Genre: Application

Players: 1

.

Review:

Cozy Land, released in 2025 on Nintendo Switch, is an Application where players can create little 3D dioramas of a section of a city, town, park, or other locale. Players have a plot of lad upon which they can place various structures, objects, people, and animals to stage their own little corner of a little world.

The presentation here is appealing thanks to the game’s 3D visuals, which have a simple, rounded art style that feels almost like a child’s playset, but with individual objects all animating as appropriate for that object, such as smoke coming out of cars’ tailpipes and people slightly swaying in place. These visuals are backed by… well, elevator music. I suppose in its defense, it’s chipper and simple like the visuals, but it still sounds to me like elevator music.

When it comes to the gameplay, such as it is, Cozy Land boasts having 400 objects to decorate your little city, and there are more available via paid DLC. Each of these is separated into different categories, making them easy enough to find. After that, you just need to move the object into position, rotate it in the direction you want, and place it. it takes a moment to get the hang of, but once you do, it’s straightforward enough.

But here’s where we get to the problems. First and foremost, there doesn’t appear to be any way to put down multiple copies of an object – if you want to lay down a stretch of road, be prepared to go into the menu, select the square of road, place it, and then go back into the menu to start again for the next square.

Secondly, there’s no customization whatsoever – you can’t alter objects’ size, color, pose, anything like that. In fact, even rotation only works in 90-degree increments. What’s more, objects don’t always interact how you might expect them to. I placed a Ferris wheel with the thought of putting people inside the carriages, but the game doesn’t allow for this.

What’s more, objects aren’t always to proper scale. Compared to the Ferris wheel, a person in the game is outright huge – there’s no way one would even fit in one of its carriages! And compared to people chickens are seemingly waist-height.

Finally, for no apparent reason, it seems that you can’t rotate the camera to see your diorama from all angles – it’s stuck viewing everything from an isometric angle.

Given all of the limitations on what was only ever going to be a pretty niche Application already, I can’t really recommend this to anyone… and that’s before publisher RedDeer.Games goes and releases a dozen different versions of the game on the eShop with different configurations of DLC – it hasn’t happened yet as of this writing, but it doesn’t take a wizened prophet to predict this pattern continuing. Suffice it to say, I don’t expect that it will be worth getting any version of Cozy Land.

tl;dr – Cozy Land is an Application that lets players create their own little dioramas of a small section of a town or city. It’s appealing to look at and simple enough to use, but it’s so short on options and features that I can’t see even those interested in its limited concept finding it to be worth buying.

Grade: C-

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