Hozy
Hozy (presumably a mashup between "House" and "Cozy", not about hoses) is a short game about decorating rooms. You start with an empty trash-filled space and clean the floor, windows, tidy it up, and a few other room-specific things (like taking the planks off a workshop floor). It's a very thoughtful and handmade game, which can be both a blessing and a curse. It's very highly polished in terms of interaction, but still has a few minor bugs (trash not disappearing etc). Overall it's a very satisfying experience with lots of interesting well made objects to place in beautiful environments.
Notes
Hozy is clearly made with love, and it made me think about a design decision they made. Each level is clearly hand crafted, which makes each room feel unique and enjoyable. However, it also means that the game is short, and that creating new levels will take more time and effort. With something like House Flipper 2, the systems are there for you to have a lot more freedom, like creating rooms, knocking through walls, and decorating spaces in different ways each time. The catch there being of course that they sell DLCs with new items for €15, which is the cost of buying Hozy in the first place.
Pros
- Very pretty
- Thoughtful controls
- Hand made interactions for each room make each one feel special. Pulling the old planks off a floor, clearing away leaves, drying the lighthouse walls etc make each level feel unique.
- The game is relaxing. There's no score, timers or stress, it's just about making pretty rooms
- Each room has it's own nice soundtrack
- The boxes tell you what kinds of things are inside them (so you can unpack huge things first)
- All of the lights (and some other objects) can be interacted with, and turned on and off. Some of the levels look very different when you fiddle with the objects
Cons
- Short. Expensive for what there is. There are 9 levels, and I finished the game in 5 hours.
- There's a few minor issues with moving objects or interacting with things based on camera angle - like trying to get furniture in and out of the cafe, or cleaning the lighthouse