The must-try cozy-but-creepy demos we’ve been must-trying

Steam NextFest was hot on the heels of Summer Game Fest, so there were plenty of new game demos to try out over the past few weeks. While the games below don’t represent all the game demos I’ve played so far this summer, I did notice a bit of a pattern start to emerge from a lot of the games I enjoyed as went through my list.

These are the games I played through that are cozy, but aren’t completely feel-good vibes. They have a little bit of a bite to them — maybe literally.

Discounty

Discounty is kind of an odd one, because it isn’t all that odd. The gameplay loop is a fairly bog standard shop management sim. Buy shelves, buy products, put em on your shelves, sell for money. Some products need refrigeration, some can get buffed by special shelves. You can explore the little town your shop is in, and make friends and influence enemies to allow you to sell their stuff in your shop. There’s also a slightly creepy vibe, as many small towns can have. Locked houses, strange noises, blocked roads — standard small town stuff. And your aunt is definitely keeping secrets from you.

But there’s something incredibly satisfying about the way Discounty is designed. The way the text bubbles pop up and display is incredibly crisp, and matches the sound design perfectly. I understand that saying “you gotta try this one because the menus are good” is wild, but that’s what a demo is for.

Ritual of Raven

While farm sims are frequently represented in the cozy ecosystem, Ritual of Raven seeks to iterate on the genre by adding an extra couple of elements to the gameplay loop. You can’t touch a lot of reagents with your hands, and have to instead rely on scripting automatons to do your bidding — even walking from farm plot to farm plot requires your input. Plus, it feels like a farm sim, but in the demo there isn’t much farming, per se — it’s more collecting reagents to work spells. It seems like a fun game, and the vibe is cottagecore as heck, but there sure are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, even though part of the point of automation is fewer things to keep track of, generally.

Crescent County

Crescent County stretches both the cozy and the creepy idea here, by being a driving and delivery sim with a very witchy angle. In the demo, you hang (and race) on your souped up moto-broom with your very supportive friends against a technicolor sunset backdrop with an upbeat pop-rock soundtrack, then you get to learn how to make your deliveries. The driving is a little intense, and despite cautioning players to use a controller, the mouse and keyboard controls were tuned really well and intuitively. Crucially, the one exception is that I couldn’t figure out how to exit the game and wound up alt+f4ing to quit.

I’m very excited to see how the rest of this one shakes out — but then, I do like racing games and mostly consider them to be a cozy pastime. The driving does get a little intense, with drift and other mechanics.

Occlude

I’d call Occlude “Solitaire, and.” The core gameplay is very much a game of Solitaire, though rather than alternating suit color in descending order, you can place cards only on their own suit by ascending or descending order. However, each board has its own set of hidden rules you can only figure out by trial and error, and the framing story you’re told between games will be affected by your success at determining these unseen rules on the fly. The framing story is where things turn from standard cozy into something darker, and the overall vibe is deliciously creepy. The nature of both makes this a great game to demo, to determine if you enjoy it, or if it’s just a little too fiddly, or too dark.

Strange Antiquities

The follow-up to Strange Horticulture had most of us around the office very excited. Strange Antiquities has similar casual puzzle-based gameplay to its predecessor, and a similar vibe that veers between general witchiness and truly dark occult themes. We would expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg, too. The puzzles revolve around identifying the artifacts in your collection and giving them to the people who need them, though we’d expect that like Strange Horticulture, some of your prospective clientele aren’t necessarily being truthful with their intentions for your wares. We’ll also note that, since we spent much of the spring feral for deduction showstopper Blue Prince, the puzzles in Strange Antiquities seem a little simple in comparison — which is frankly kind of an unfair comparison.

Oh, and one extra point in the “cozy” column: you can pet the cat.

Initially published June 13, 2025. Updated June 16, 2025.