cozy

How could a game with a name as fluffy as PuffPals: Island Skies ever do anything wrong? How could a company called Fluffnest be anything other than the cuddliest love-bunnies on the internet? It’s too implausible to even consider. Except… Launched on Kickstarter in April 2022, PuffPals: Island Skies promised to bring the experience of a game like Animal Crossing to the PC, with the very modest goal of just $75,000. But people were excited, the project got a lot of buzz, and in the end it raised an incredible $2.6 million (kinda). Today, the website for the game is gone, backer refunds are being ignored, and multiple lawsuits against the company behind the project have been lodged.

Two people, David Pentland and artist usLily, started Fluffnest—also via Kickstarter—in 2020. As superbly documented by Mujin on YouTube (thanks PCG) it became an instant success, created gorgeous plushies that developed a large fanbase, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, and a drop-based store that meant each plush was only available for a limited time. In 2022, the pair began the project to create a game set in the world of their plushies, an Animal Crossing-like cozy game with all the fishing, farming and friendship that cozy gamers crave.

That $75,000 figure may seem like a warning sign from the start. It’s not enough to develop the loading screens, let alone a game. But over the years, that’s kinda how Kickstarter’s become. Projects don’t receive any funds at all if their target isn’t met, so if you put your actual forecast costs, say $5 million, you’ll almost definitely not raise and it not get a penny. So developer’s come in very low, ensuring that they get something, with stretch goals in place to encourage more pledges that could actually deliver the game. And that’s obviously a disastrous model, meaning games that need $5m might raise $100,000 and keep, and then clearly can’t deliver, resulting in abandoned projects and furious backers. It happens all the time.

But in the case of PuffPals, it seemed to work. $75,000 became $2.56 million, more than double their top stretch goal figure. As Mujin reveals, however, a lot of that figure was extremely fudged: You could back the project for $20 to get the game on release, but afterward there were “add-ons,” where you could pay another $40 or so to get a plush toy too, and those plushies were ones that had sold out and were highly sought after by collectors. The money still counted toward the Kickstarter total, but a significant portion of it was going toward the toy and its shipping. Which is to say, that $2.6m figure was by far not what they had to spend on the game.

The project then began to follow the failing Kickstarter playbook to the letter. Updates started to slow down, promises would be forgotten or explained away, and wild excuses would be given for why communication had been bad, all always accompanied by new promises that all these things would improve. You’ll always get the six month silence, followed by the “Sorry we’ve been so quiet, we’ve been working so hard!” update accompanied by scant few gifs and a bunch of concept art to “prove” it. And then, of course, a promised alpha build will get delayed and delayed, each missed milestone accompanied by an excuse that contradicts the last. Next you get the heartfelt apologies and promises to improve communication, along with a boast that the build is just moments away, before another stretch of silence ending in claims that the build, due years before, is “on track.” It’s all so painfully common.

But the PuffPals debacle took it all to a new level, by seemingly not only messing their Kickstarter backers around, but customers of their main business too. During the waits, Reddit sleuths spotted that PuffPals trademarks had expired a year ago, and that the game was seemingly being entirely created by outsourcing company Room 8, while the plushies side of the business started having its own major troubles, customers not receiving shipments, claiming they had been overcharged, and delivery prices being almost tripled. It then became apparent the company was being sued for failure to pay back business loans.

Then things got even worse. Fluffnest was going out of business. Blaming rising shipping costs, the company declared it was coming to an end. And yet even here, in this statement, it said, “Island Skies production is secured and will not be affected.” Which, given it hadn’t given any substantial proof of life in years, and it had already been revealed that the entire game was being created by outsourced companies, was quite the claim.

The last update to appear on PuffPals appeared May 21 this year, which was an extraordinary screed of excuses and blame laid at the feet of the company they’d paid (and then not paid) to develop the game. And, of course, every word of it contradicts the promises made in previous posts, even as recently as a month earlier.

Today, the game’s pre-order page is an Expired Domains landing page, the Kickstarter has been abandoned for four months, and people who worked on the game have reported going unpaid. And obviously no one is getting refunds—but it’s important to remember that Kickstarter backing doesn’t guarantee a delivered project, so that’s always murky ground.

Various lawsuits reported by Mujin show judgments being made against Fluffnest, ordering the company to repay owed money totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the company hired to actually make the game, Room 8, is now suing Fluffnest and David Pentland for $1.9 million.

While the various litigations drag through the courts, it’s impossible to know how a super-cute cozy game became such a multi-million dollar disaster. Was this begun in good faith, before collapsing around their ears? Was it a deliberate scam? Was Alpha 2 ever actually a thing that existed? We don’t know, and given court dates stretch as far away as summer 2027, we likely won’t know for a very long time. Either way, it’s astonishingly unlikely anyone will get any of their money back, whether a backer or a developer hired on the project, or even a bank providing one of the many loans. Meanwhile, people will just have to play one of the other 72,482 cozy village life games on PC instead.

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2022’s Strange Horticulture was a breakout indie hit for brother developers Bad Viking. The puzzle game about running an esoteric plant store hid so many depths beyond its species-identifying core, with rich lore, character stories to become invested in, and the rumbling sense of a sinister underbelly. Today arrives its sequel Strange Antiquities, which I’m delighted to report not only maintains everything that made the first game so adored, but also improves it in almost every possible way.

Returning to the fantasy city of Undermere, we’re now working in an adorable little antiques shop that sells mystical obscura such as bejeweled statuettes, charm necklaces that vibrate with peculiar energies, and objets d’art that give you the heebie-jeebies when you hold them. The shop’s owner, your boss, has to head out of town for a few days, and you’re left in charge despite not knowing what any of the weird items on the shelves actually are. Thankfully the boss, a Thaumaturge named Eli White, also left behind his copy of Strange Artefacts: A Guide To Occult Objects by T.S. Gill, which contains descriptions of all manner of magical items. Sadly very few pictures of them, but enough information that, upon scouring the shelves and holding each object, you will be able to deduce which might be which, and as such supply them to your customers.

In this sense, things are much the same as in Strange Horticulture and your dealings with its otherworldly plant life. However, in Strange Antiquities, everything is a lot more detailed and involved. For instance, in the previous game you could pick up any plant and look at it, but that was about it. In Antiquities, every strange item in the collection can be investigated in four different ways. You can study its “Color and Composition,” use your “Sense of Touch,” seek out “Scent and Sound,” and apply your “Inner Perception.” The first three are self-explanatory, and each gives you a unique response for the object (unless they’re not applicable), while the fourth is a more psychic response to what you’re holding. For instance, a red bottle with a raised snake motif will tell you it’s made of red clay, while the snake’s eyes are “small green gemstones,” the bottle feeling smooth with the snake as “raised detailing,” and no particular special smell or noise. But you’ll also learn that to hold it is “unsettling,” and “the eyes seem to pierce my soul.” Such details are all essential to narrowing down exactly what this odd red bottle might be, and what it might contain.

Not only do you consult the indexed pages of Occult Objects, but you also have a tome written by Eli himself called Gemstones & Their Thaumic Properties, an ancient pamphlet entitled On Curses & their Effects, and an ever-growing pile of papers and notes that will provide further information. And then, as if all this weren’t enough, you’ve also got a detailed map of Undermere with which you can interact, clicking on one of its 32 named and dozens more unnamed locations in an effort to discover new antiquities to add to the shelves. Locations are identified through solving puzzles either dreamt during the night, or on notes given to you by clients, and some of these locations then reveal their own detailed maps to explore, such as the two floors of Gleaston Castle, and the Catacombs beneath the city.

That’s a lot! And yet it never feels unmanageable, Strange Antiquities’ superb delivery ensures you gain all these elements at a steady pace, and the game is never in a rush. You can take as long as you need for every customer, without any antsy comments or nagging, meaning you can just relax and leaf through the pages of the books, or decide to solve a map puzzle for a break, never pressured. Also, the game comes with a hint system if you ever do get stuck, and it’s a super-smart one. Rather than just spoiling a puzzle, it begins with far more gentle nudges, like reminding you to check a note you received, or asking if you remember what a customer recently said about something. Prompts like these never feel like they’re taking away from your solving the puzzle, rather just turning your head to face the right direction before you start. Keeping asking for more help and things get more specific, of course.

But even more than hints, the way the game is presented does wonders for clarity. Like Horticulture, the whole game is played in the single location of the store, but this time the shop is so much better arranged. Customers appear in the middle, with shelves stretching off-screen to the left and right, and cupboards and drawers down below. Open the map and it’s spread out beneath the counter, and the same table is also capable of…well, I’m not going to tell you. Hidden all around this are tiny details, little knobs that, if pulled, can reveal secret drawers, and even places just below the counter with room for three of the mystical objects. Place the correct three in the correct order (based on other clues you receive) and even more secrets are uncovered. It means everything feels so special, all that thrill of a beautiful puzzle box, in the cozy setting of a candle-lit magical store.

The game’s puzzles, whether the core identification challenges that make up the bulk of what you do, or the extra elements that appear in the form of playing cards or furtively passed notes, are engagingly challenging without requiring Pentagon clearance to solve. Every character is an intriguing oddity, and the game’s overall storyline is much more involving than that of the previous game. The whole thing has a much greater sense of depth, and the sinister undertones feel more pronounced, more intriguing. It is everything a sequel should be: the same superb idea, better developed in every area, to produce something that reaches higher, wider, and deeper.

Strange Antiquities is out now for PC and Switch, for the ludicrously reasonable price of $16.

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$2.6 Million Cozy Game Wipes Its Websites, Ghosts Its Backers

This Cozy Shop Simulator Rumbles With Sinister Undertones