Cozy Grove introduced us to a world of Spirit Scouts, Ghost Bears and magical creatures to meet, greet, tame and care for. Cozy Grove Camp Spirit expands the number of questlines and adds hundreds of new items while staying identical to the first at its core. Unfortunately, this includes a complete lack of any Quality of Life improvements, turning what could have been a fantastic sequel into a bittersweet disappointment.
You play as a spirit scout who can talk to dead bears and recover fragments of their past, relighting the world as they do so. The premise of the Cozy Grove series has always been equal parts endearing and mysterious. The problems with the game don’t lie in any single concept or mechanic, but instead in the clumsy execution that makes this magical and marvellous world an absolutely mundane chore to actually play in.
Cozy Grove Camp Spirit is an example of how Quality of Life can’t be overlooked…
A familiar feel in a new world
The game takes place in a separate world to the first, continuing the story of multiple overlapping worlds connected by the spirit realm. You wind up in charge of a camp, feeding its sentient fire to expand your playable area, uncover new NPBs (Non-player Bears) and new crafting materials.
For the uninitiated, Cozy Grove is a “daily play” style game in the vein of Animal Crossing. You can’t sit and finish the game in one go, instead having to play for 30 minutes to an hour each day to build up relationships, resources and furniture. Furniture might seem out of place in that list, but it plays a core part in how Cozy Grove Camp Spirit works. Furniture items all have tags, and different creatures and plants that provide resources will care about those tags.
Place a Cornflower near Spooky furniture and you won’t get very much from it, but that same plant in a park you made with Fun decor will maximise the Cornflower’s yield every day. This makes placement and design a more engaging part of the gameplay than simply “decoration”, making you care about each furniture piece and its vibe.
If that furniture piece is a lamp, then it’s even more special. Lamps will illuminate parts of the world, expanding the areas you can harvest materials from. Lamps need to be connected to an already lit area, so you end up with streets, squares and trails lit up by lamps connecting back to a core light source such as your camp, or a rescued Ghost Bear.
There’s new mechanics for Camp Spirit, too. The sequel adds a powerwashing minigame and photography challenges, which both make sure you’re paying attention to and caring about the world around you.
It’s easy to see how the loop is compelling, and cute. However, everything about Camp Spirit looks better on paper than in practice…
New friends (and frenemies)
One of the most interesting aspects of the game are the ghost bears themselves. They’re all a little more caricature than character, but the breadth of them makes up for that lack of depth. There are more bears than ever to discover, and they range from camp cooks to self-starter CEOs to streamers. Meeting them and seeing their unique character models and living areas become illuminated, then eventually built upon, is a joy.
The game also isn’t scared to have conflict and quarrel, which is a welcome sight in the genre. We’ve all seen the threads about Animal Crossing and Tomodachi Life characters being “too nice” in their latest versions, but Camp Spirit manages to balance a cosy atmosphere with conflicting characters.
Where does it all go wrong?
I’d love to end the review there and say I adored my time in Camp Spirit, engaging with this world and the characters within. Unfortunately, to actually access any of that content, you have to play the game. This is where the cracks start to show.
Yes, I did want to interact with that fencepost 5 miles away, thank you
As I mentioned, placement and design is vital to the game both in terms of its unique art and vibe, but also for tending to your animals and crops via tags. In a game so dependent on positioning, it must have a robust decoration system, right?
Alas, ‘twas not to be. You’re stuck throwing things out of your inventory, and while the game does grace you with a grid in which to place these items, there’s very little by way of visualisation. You are never sure what will obscure what, what will be visible, and what will even be in range of the furniture’s tags. Lamps have a handy circle showing where they’ll illuminate, but this circle is straight up wrong, so even when there is an attempt at Quality of Life in the placement step, it falls flat.
Once an item is down, you have to walk over to it and press interact to do any editing, moving, rotating etc. This sounds fine, and it works for Animal Crossing because Animal Crossing has a very large, easy-to-navigate grid. Cozy Grove has a miniscule grid, which allows more detailed placement and design but conversely absolutely butchers any interaction once things are placed. We’re talking pressing A to interact with a flower and your character runs around the flower, out the gate, and along the outside fence to interact with a specific fence post. Why the game doesn’t set “interactive” furniture like flowers and animals to a higher priority than “decorative” furniture like walls and tables I have no idea.
In 2026 where this genre is more than full of great games and enjoyable systems, Camp Spirit fails to learn anything from its prior mistakes. These interaction issues existed in the first game, and they’re just as prevalent, if not more so, here.
Inventory limits for the sake of inventory limits
This interaction issue extends beyond just furniture, too. When your inventory is full (It will be) items are left in a pile, and selecting the right ones or even just hoovering them all up after emptying your inventory is another chore — one item at a time.
Again, it’s like Cozy Grove has an inventory limit because “these sorts of games do”. There’s no real reason why this specific one should, though. There’s no Islands to fly to like in Animal Crossing New Horizons, providing a “take all you can before you leave” mechanic that justifies an inventory size. In Camp Spirit you’ll be ferreting back and forth to your camp to drop things off so often that it feels as if the developers think that constitutes interesting gameplay. This down-time and dead air makes interacting with the game just that little bit more tedious.
Uninspired crafting recipes that break immersion
Finally, to cap-off the mountain of mundanity, there’s the cooking. Some recipes are great, and encourage a mixed palette of fishing, bug-catching, tending plants and caring for animals. Others are trash. Did you know that it apparently takes 12 eggs to make 1 boiled egg? Me neither, but that’s the sort of crafting system the developers thought properly encapsulated cooking.
Bear in mind “refinement” also exists and turns ore into ingots etc, but cooking is its own distinct station. Yet, despite making cooking its own distinct station, it behaves 90% of the time the same way as refinement. You slap 12 eggs together to get 1 boiled egg, you mash 5 mixed greens together to get 1 fancy mixed greens, the list goes on.
An incredible idea hidden under a mountain of tedium
All of that negativity, all of that absolutely boring design, detaches you from what the game really is. The bears are well written, the art is fantastic, the vibes are immaculate, the gameplay idea of tags and lamps and placement puzzles is a great overlay to the usual decoration schtick…but then to actually interact with any of those amazing elements the game expects you to put up with so…much…tedium.
I’m no stranger to games like PowerWash Simulator but that is not the sort of tedium I am talking about in Camp Spirit — this isn’t deliberately designed for the sake of gameplay, this is invasive tedium that actively distracts from the core point of the game.
A fixable game, but what are the chances?
A little Quality of Life would go a long way to making Camp Spirit be what it set out to be. Interaction priority where harvestable furniture always gets selected first, or even a dedicated build mode that makes non-interactable furniture selectable only when it’s active, would fix so much daily frustration.
If I have an idea for a cute new area to build, I don’t want to be discouraged from doing it. It’s meant to be a cosy game, after all. Instead, the idea of sorting my inventory, balancing placement, rotation and ranges of influence just makes me give up on the build before I really start. I found myself resorting to just plonking everything of the same tag down in a big pile.
That’s not exactly the sort of mindset I think the game wants to encourage, but that’s what ineffective game design and lack of Quality of Life will do to even the most charming, compelling and interesting of game worlds.
We played on PC via Steam, but you can also play on Nintendo Switch, or Mobile via Apple App Store.
