One of my dream jobs in sandbox MMORPGs is to run logistics. Whether it’s flying space trucks around or steering a caravan, delivering goods from one place to another is one of those pastoral pursuits that I frequently want to do but don’t often get to, since most sandboxes available now basically turn my preferred activity into a painted target for PKers. So when I was granted a review code for the early access single-player title Cozy Caravan by developer and publisher 5 Lives Studios, I was immediately intrigued. Let’s talk about it today in MMO Burnout.
Cozy Caravan is not just a descriptive title but a promise: You play as a fluffy animal friend who drives a caravan around the game world, stopping at several villages and farms along the way to perform an assortment of tasks, with an ultimate overarching goal of getting goods to sell during weekend markets. All along the way, completed activities award hearts that fill a bar, with a guild token granted every time the bar fills that can be spent on upgrades to the caravan like new crafting stations, increased personal storage, or additional market stalls.
Boiling it down, the game basically is a rotating set of comfy little chores, like an Animal Crossing based around being a helpful critter.
The activities in question right now run a pretty limited but still cute variety. Most of the central tasks involve visiting farms to gather their harvest and earn a pile of crops, but additional things to do pop up frequently, like gathering enough hay to help someone leap off of a barn safely, finding and returning missing frogs, playing hopscotch with children, herding runaway bees to an NPC, or completing some longer form quests like helping someone figure out a stew recipe or joining in on a treasure hunt.
As far as crafting is concerned, all of that is minigame-based, with processing raw materials by chopping, stirring, or stirring in a mortar and pestle involving button clicks or turns of the thumb stick. These managed to toe a pretty careful line between engaging and approachable, though I get the sense that failing these routines is literally impossible.
As mentioned before, you’ve basically got weekdays in the game’s world to gather and craft ingredients, after which you can park up at a town and open up a market stall to sell your wares on Saturday and Sunday. Things enter a sort of minigame state here as well, with NPC thought bubbles that guide you to placing the items people want, though there’s technically nothing stopping you from selling what you have on hand. There’s also a fortune-telling owl to find who gives you a clue on what sort of item would earn big sales that week.
Much of this gameplay can be approached from a few different vectors: You can roam around the world, taking up what little cute quests and activities you care to do; you can try to maximize heart gain; or you can plan circuits around the game world to try and maximize the harvesting from the assortment of veggie farms on offer. You can even completely ignore the market weekend if you want to. How much or how little pressure you put on yourself to progress is placed on the player and not the game itself.
Throughout the whole thing, there’s a sense of community that interweaves all of the adorable animal residents of Cozy Caravan’s world. There’s just enough personality to suggest that not everyone gets along perfectly, but things never really reach any point of tension, which is obviously the point while still making the world feel at least a little believable; after all, not everyone in a community are friends.
And of course, there’s the visuals. Character animations are purposely frame-limited to sort of give everyone moving around a stop-motion animation appearance like the kind you might find from Aardman Films or Woodland Animations, while bright colors paint across the screen and adorable designs are everywhere. The music is also an extension of the relaxed vibe, with a couple of chillhop tunes weaving through the experience, though it would be nice if the music were a bit more varied.
As good as all of this is, there are still some things that are glaringly missing from the game’s early access build at the time of this writing. For one, the game constantly references getting something to upgrade the caravan to move through muddy trails, yet there’s nothing that points out how to do so. As it turns out, the upgrade is not yet available according to 5 Lives — something that’s not explained in-game, which basically meant the game was gaslighting me multiple times.
Speaking of glaring omissions, another major missing feature is a quest journal. There are quite a few little quests that crop up, with some being longer than others, but you’re left to try and remember just who wants what item since there’s nothing in-game that keeps track of these things. Perhaps placing stickers in the game’s map is the intended way of marking where a necessary NPC is, but if that’s the case then that’s just bad design. Mercifully, the studio has heard the calls for a quest tracker and confirmed it’s in the works, and a recent roadmap post promises more of the map soon.
Beyond those two major missing pieces of the puzzle, Cozy Caravan is otherwise pretty solid and stable, with only a couple of hard locks that forced me to shut the game down (without losing any progress or items, thankfully) and at least one instance of character model weirdness.
Regardless, this is still an early access title, meaning players who are averse to that have the right to be, even if Cozy Caravan is just $20. I might argue that the asking price isn’t quite on par with what’s available right now and would suggest that perhaps interested fans should wait a bit until more of the game world and mechanics are introduced. Even so, I’m having a lovely time escaping into this comfy and chilled-out world to do my little chores, sell my crafted goods, and pet the big fuzzy bee that pulls my caravan along. Even in its limited state right now, Cozy Caravan is a refreshing palate cleanser of a game.
Are you burned out on MMOs? It happens. But there are plenty of other titles out there with open worlds, progression, RPG mechanics, and other MMO stalwarts. Massively OP’s MMO Burnout turns a critical eye toward everything from AAA blockbusters to obscure indie gems.
