In praise of Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit, my trusty study buddy

I just watched the credits roll on Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit, and dear reader, I admit I got a little choked up. For the uninitiated, the game is a more narrative-oriented take on the Animal Crossing-style life sim. The character writing is a lot sharper and more personal, so while you are doing plenty of things you might do in a game of this sort: fishing, planting flowers and trees, harvesting resources, and taking to anthropomorphic animal friends (here they are also ghosts!), the emphasis is on helping them get through traumas or difficulties they had in life so they can move on. It's often a bittersweet game, and it gets very real at times, even though it never forgets to inject the levity appropriate for its concept.

It's meant for regular, short sessions, with finite daily tasks. Like the original Cozy Grove, it's deliberately designed to avoid addictive or compulsive play, which I something I appreciate, particularly for my use case. I've been playing it just about every day since it arrived on the PC last July (after developer Spry Fox untangled from Netflix ownership—the game was exclusive to the streaming behemoth for most of its life). It's been a very steady (and comforting) part of my day during a time of massive upheaval and life changes for me.

Back in July, on booting the game up for the first time, I was kind of in rough shape. I was working full time at a job that had become increasingly far from the position I had signed up for. I was also working part time (as a lecturer), volunteering regularly on my ambulance, and taking multiple upper-level college science classes, all at once. I'd been in that life, with that schedule, for around 18 months at that point, and it was tough. I had to get mostly As in said classes, in order to have a shot at some further medical training I was looking into, and because of that, the vast majority of my waking hours were spent working or studying.

A massive fan of the original, I jumped into Camp Spirit a few days after my 5-week accelerated microbiology term finished, and it's been a steady companion (and study buddy) pretty much daily since then. Every day, I wake up, fire up lectures for my classes (or related supplementary material) and have breakfast and caffeine while I play and listen in on the other screen. This is my process: I warm up for the day by listening to my school stuff and vibing with ghost bears.

While this is maybe a little unconventional—and I hilariously associate a lot of complex biochemical pathways with running around a haunted island digging up sticks and fruits—it works. My working theory is that Camp Spirit engages different parts of my brain while the heavy science stuff sinks in—including the emotional parts that relate to these characters, and the game design sectors that ponder the drop rates of various items or fish in the sea. It even stimulates my creative writing cortex (yes, I made that up), looking for bits of character writing inspiration I can take for my own practice. So really, it's not just a case of "this cozy game helps my anxiety," it's more "this cozy game gives me a bunch of productive tracks for my brain to dance around on while I do reps with dry learning material."

Perhaps that's a bit in the weeds, but, by necessity as both a lecturer and a 42-year-old science student going back to school after 20 years, I've had to think a great deal about learning and how the brain copes with major cognitive loads. I guess it's a very "me" thing to combine playing games and learning science, so it somehow feels right.

It's all helped me stay on track at a time of massive upheaval. Late in the summer, some changes at work led me to leave my full-time job, essentially ending a 20-year-long career of writing about games. While I had been preparing for the eventuality (given the media hellscape around me), it was still a huge shock, and not something taken lightly. I've tried to make the best possible decisions, but I'm still scared, every day. And still, every day, I fire up my lectures, I load up Camp Spirit, and I ponder enzyme regulation and the finer points of the electron transport chain while I run errands for an agoraphobic little guy named Charlie who really loves astronomy, or help Sofia, a service journalist-turned-private-investigator in a goofy fedora, find "clues" about what happened at the campsite many years ago. It's helped me keep focus, and stay on track, and frankly stay afloat at times when I wasn't sure what direction I was pointed in my own life.

I wonder if some folks on the development team have also felt massive life changes, since Camp Spirit came to other platforms, after the Netflix era. When I learned the team was going independent (again) I was excited and scared for them as well. Things have been so crazy (and often terrible) for game developers in the last few years. I can only hope the team knows they made something special, that they can be proud of themselves for it, and that they can continue to make games of this caliber for many years to come.

So yes, I got a bit verklempt today, watching the cutscene and credits roll. This is a "forever game," and of course I jumped right back in after a few minutes, back to tending my island as usual. It gave me a few minutes to really think about how far I've come since starting up the game in July—since then, I've finished several more courses, started applying to physician assistant schools and even, I'm thrilled to say, had an interview at a program.

My life is already so very different than it was just four months ago. It's already so different than it was even back in September. I have a lot of fear, and a lot of hope. I'm thrilled that I can still write about games, even if it's not (and not going to be) my main thing anymore. I'm grateful that I've found a process that works for me, and grateful to the folks at Spry Fox for putting it out into the world.