Teddy's Haven or How I Learned To Stop Trusting Cozy Game Reviews
I want to preface this by saying I don’t hate Teddy’s Haven, and I know this post is going to rustle some jimmies. It’s early access, it's a small passion project and I’m not trying to dogpile the developer. The game is cute, the premise is appealing, and some quality of life features are genuinely great (auto-harvesting and time only passing when the store is open for example).
But I'm baffled by the reception. This game has an extremely positive Steam rating, the kind that makes you expect the next best thing since sliced bread. What I found instead was one of the strangest gaps I’ve ever seen between praise and execution in the 15+ years I've been buying Steam games.
The presentation feels unfinished at a basic level. Movement has no weight. There are no footstep sounds or view-bobbing to give a sense of motion. Movement feels floaty and painfully slow. Mounts exist, but barely as a mechanic. They're tiny toy-like objects with no mounting animation, no visual, no clear feedback, no sense that you are riding anything and no meaningful presence in the world. You can't swim or submerge beneath water, you just walk on top of it and I strongly suspect that's because the dev hasn't implemented these features.
The shop gameplay is the bigger issue. For a game about running a shop, there's very little shop simulation. Customers enter, randomly buy items, then leave. They don’t seem to have preferences. There are no meaningful pricing pressures, no market trends, no seasonal demand, no customer types, no rivals, no reason to think strategically about stock beyond 'sell whatever has the highest value.' There's no supply and demand at all.
The gameplay loop becomes gathering resources, turning them into pricier craftables, stocking the most valuable items, automating the clerks, and buying upgrades that don’t meaningfully deepen the mechanics. This isn’t a shop sim, it’s just a cozy vending machine.
I love cozy games. Stardew Valley, Dinkum, Coral Island, My Time at Portia/Sandrock, House Flipper, all of these are chill games, but they still have structure where choices matter. Cozy doesn't have to mean mechanically empty. I'm not asking for a high-stress sim that requires fastidious micro-management, but Teddy's Haven is the literal opposite where there's no strategy or thought in anything you'll do.
I’m not saying people are wrong to enjoy it. If it relaxes you, nothing wrong with that. But I do think cozy game reviews often blur the line between 'this made me feel nice' and 'this is well-designed.' 'Cute,' 'relaxing,' 'wholesome,' 'the dev is nice,' and 'has potential' are fine, but they're not the same thing as gameplay or mechanical depth. They're vibes, and quite frankly those vibes can be found in hundreds of other titles with far more depth and complexity. Even if your goal is to turn off your brain, there are lots of other titles with more fleshed out worlds (and fully implemented basics) to relax in.
So long story short, I lost my trust in cozy game reviewers. There's a lack of discernment and expectations appear dreadfully low. Steam reviews are one of the primary ways I find new titles, but in Teddy's Haven's case, I feel duped.