Thank you Isolated Games Publishing for providing us with a review code!

Cozy Sanctuary is a cozy simulation game that lets you rehabilitate various animals on your desktop while you’re running your day-to-day apps. There is no background story, and your sanctuary opens with a stinky duck for you to clean up and take care of. The tutorial will show you how to clean and feed your animals. Not long after they eat, the animals will poop and you’ll have to scoop it up and use it to fertilize your garden. The garden will need to be watered too.

Every animal has a food preference that will fill them up twice as much in comparison to other nourishment options. Your garden is limited to four plots and not every favorite food item is available to be grown. Items such as treats and bread can be purchased as needed.

As the animals have their needs take care of, their happiness will increase and they will store up affection points. When you pet the creatures, their affection points will be released and converted into spendable currency. You can buy necessities like crops and food as well as other critters to rescue. Each new animal type has a prerequisite before they will become available. Some of the requirements include releasing a certain amount of an animal type or harvesting a set number of a specific crop.

In total, you can have up to forty animals in your sanctuary with twenty roaming around on your desktop and the rest of them chilling out in the back yard. Your ultimate goal is to release the animals, and you can do so when their happiness threshold has been met. The two factors that contribute to their happiness are fullness and cleanliness. You can purchase various decorations and backdrops, but I don’t know if that impacts their happiness levels.

As you accumulate points, you can spend them on various automation tools. For example, you can have your garden be automatically watered and harvested. The critters can be automatically petted, cleaned, and fed a selected food item. The only downside to these automations is that they have a cool down period, so the feeding schedule works best with a handful of animals. The poop can be automatically collected too; I want feature this in real life!

I’m happy to report that Cozy Sanctuary does support Steam Cloud saves, so my progress seamlessly transferred between my desktop and laptop. There is support for switching between multiple monitors, but I experienced some graphical cut off when switching between two different monitor resolutions. My last gripe is that there is a bit of pixel hunting as you’re trying to locate the correct spot to trigger washing or petting the animals correctly.

The visuals are colorful and charming. Your desktop wallpaper and apps will still be prominently visible as you have this game running. The animal animations are similar between all of the creatures, but they all have unique noises that they’ll make when you pet them. The sounds are more focused on being silly than accurate.

There are no moral issues worth noting. Just like real life, poop happens and it’s up to you to clean up after the animals. Thankfully, there is no gross humor to worry about.

All in all, Cozy Sanctuary is a cute game that can be played while you’re multitasking on e-mail, internet or other programs that don’t need to be full screen. The asking price of $4.99 is reasonable and there’s plenty of gameplay time to be had before earning 100% of the Steam achievements. I like how you can buy upgrades to automate tasks and essentially convert the game to an idle clicker. If you enjoy the concept of rescuing animals while sharing your desktop space, be sure to check out Cozy Sanctuary.