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The holo Indie games based on Hololive and Holostars Vtubers can be a mixed bag in terms of quality and depth. In some cases, you can tell it’s perhaps a one person project. Ones like Holo X Break, Idol Showdown, and Chrono Gear: Warden of Timecan feel really solid! HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days, an anticipated Animal Crossing style title, is unfortunately not one of those types of Hololive games. It feels more like it should have been released in early access due to a lack of quality of life features and abundance of bugs. It’s cute, especially when you can get into decorating in a way that works for you, but that’s basically all it has going for it right now.
HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days begins by explaining that Kumarine roamed around alone, searching for a certain flower. She happened upon a small abandoned village, where she now serve as mayor with Nodaka assisting. Our avatar is an amnesiac who happened upon the town, and we’re quickly given a home and tasked with making the place more habitable and welcoming to other people. This means cooking, crafting, farming, fishing, and fighting errors outside town. Apparently, it’s happening to everyone, as other Hololive Vtubers are wandering around lost and occasionally happening upon the village.
Ideally, the loop involves waking up when morning starts, then taking care of requests and material gathering. Different NPCs are tied to certain roles and activities, often being your source for missions and items tied to them. So Bubba is the combat character tied to fighting. Kuro is associated with fishing. Chef Lunight is the cooking character. Kodama Korone is who you go to for farming stuff. Each of these NPCs sells things tied to their sphere of influence and is who you can check in with for skill trees. Your goal is to set up a field for crops to farm, fish for cooking ingredients, fight for materials you can use when cooking or crafting, and gather from trees and rocks outside of town. Basically, you follow a routine to maximize earning money and getting materials so you always are working toward being able to invite more Hololive Vtubers to move in and get new furniture for decorating purposes. Once you get established and have at least one villager moved in, you can open a restaurant and smithy. You can then cook food to sell at one or make equipment to sell at the other. If you’re doing more fighting, it’s best to start with a smithy after your first performer moves in, but if you’re focusing on farming and fishing you should go with a restaurant.
Basically, you go day by day trying to maximize output. That way, you can invite enough villagers to fill up your town, get both the restaurant and smithy open for extra income, and start focusing on the more relaxed decorating elements. The problem is the experience of doing those things get in the way of an enjoyable experience.
There are so many things that are broken in HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days. It’s so bad that if I spend too much time thinking about it, this would turn into a bug report instead of a review. While itstarted in full screen and looked that way in the main menu, the second the game started I saw the top of the window appear at the top of the screen and it wouldn’t go away on my Lenovo Legion Go. I got stuck in one place after putting a field in my village. I had to actually exit and reload to get unstuck, even though I wasn’t near anything. When I added logs to my furnace to make copper, I came back to find nothing happened because it just stopped registering that I added wood to make it run. Quest-giving NPCs might take your items and not register that you finished the quest. I caught your three carp for your introductory fishing tutorial, Kuro! You took them! But no, that cat acted as though none were provided and I needed to catch three more. I could never get the Kumarine Store to load clothing, so I guess I just don’t purchase any outfits! When checking for a way to report bugs, I saw other folks talking in the Steam Discussion Board about the day-night cycle breaking the game if you don’t go to bed, and sure enough it happened to me when I tried it! Probably the most minor one is I once invited Mococo to move in (and had a house and room for her), then saved and exited the game. When I loaded it up next time, it was like I never did and I needed to invite her again. Also, while it’s only Playable on Steam Deck and similar devices, I noticed sometimes in shop menus I would need to swap to the mouse controls on my Lenovo Legion Go to sell and not be able to use standard controls like I could for the rest of the game. There’s also an always-online element, which is frustrating for a single-player life sim with RPG elements.
While those are all things that will hopefully be fixed, there are also some design decisions that don’t make sense and who knows if they will change! If your bag is full, the items don’t just drop on the ground and you don’t get a warning. You can just lose things that drop or that you made. You can only have eight Vtubers move into your village, which is disappointing considering how many options are available. Once someone is there, it seems that is permanent and you can’t evict them to swap someone else in. Also, while there are a good number of Japanese branch members around, some aren’t present like Hololive English Promise and Justice. (I sort of feel like only the most “popular” generations and performers were chosen?) Combat is most infuriating, since there’s no block or dodge. (You can even block with a sword in Stardew Valley!) It’s basically button mashing your attack ideally behind something like a rock or tree, so you will still hit the enemy but they maybe can’t land assaults on you. Drop rates on items are weird. You might not get what you expect, with rocks that clearly have ore in them on the screen or trees with fruit growing on them not dropping precious metals you need or cooking ingredients.
There are also elements that feel clunky compared to other games, especially considering HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days is supposed to be a full and finished $24.99 game. The UI for crafting and our bag is fine and easy to understand. The shop menus ones for NPCs like Bubba and Kuro don’t feel as detailed. Placing houses, outside elements like furnaces or kitchen tables, and inside furniture can be a pain. The game will suggest it’s not possible to put some pieces in certain positions, but it is impossible to see why. Which makes it a guessing game whether or not something can go someplace. The fishing minigame is also a button-mashing mess that doesn’t feel entertaining. Also, while we do get to see tutorials when engaging in certain interactions for the first time, they aren’t the most comprehensive explanations of what we should be doing.
I also felt like HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days is bad at making interacting with the Hololive Vtubers entertaining, which is perhaps its greatest sin. Once you do start getting performers moved into your village, they can feel more like decorations than neighbors in the way characters do in Animal Crossing or Petit Planet. Yes, they will gather things when you’re not watching and automatically deposit them in boxes outside of town hall and in Nodaka and Kumarine’s place. You can talk to them and watch them move around town. But there’s no substance to conversations with them and they don’t connect with each other in the way NPCs do in similar games.
One thing I will say in HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days‘ favor is that it is cute. The character designs for our avatar and the Hololive Vtubers are adorable. There are a wide array of furnishing options, once you get to the point where you can start decorating. The downside is, the forced camera perspective in some areas means you can’t really appreciate that. Unless you’re actively taking a photo, you might not get to appreciate how good it can look.
At launch, HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days is too broken and limited to recommend to folks looking for a Hololive Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley sort of experience. There’s too little interaction with Vtubers. The grind is real. The game might just freeze or break on you. For a game that should be packed with personality, thanks to all the performers represented in it, it’s instead incredibly bland. Maybe in a few months, patches could improve some of the issues and you might be able to play without fear of being frozen in place. But it is not at that point right now.
HoloVillage: Our Cozy Days is available for PCs via Steam.
