Sometimes you don’t want to worry about tending to a patch of veggies or waiting on crops to spawn. So if you’re looking for some non-farming cozy games on the Nintendo Switch, then you’ve come to the right place!
And there’s no better time to find this list than now because this is actually a second article on the subject. If you want to see 12 more non-farming cozy games on the Nintendo Switch, you can find them here.
We do our best not to highlight cozy games that use Generative AI at any level of development or marketing. At the time of posting, these games have not reported or disclosed using Gen AI. Likewise, all articles are written and edited by humans… as evidenced by our occasional errors.
Non-Farming Cozy Games on Nintendo Switch
Love, Ghostie
Love, Ghostie puts you in the passenger seat of the love mobile by making you the matchmaker to a group of housemates. Choose whoever you like and set up dates to see how sparks fly. You can even send gifts in their names to help stoke the flames. There are 12 residents and you’re free to match any of them, meaning you have 66 combinations that each have unique interactions and stories. This one is so quaint and charming. The fact that I could couple together the characters that I enjoyed most really endeared me to the whole process. I felt genuinely invested in creating the best dates and interactions possible because I was helping out faves.
Whisper of the House
Whisper of the House is a puzzle game where you explore a whole town filled with people who need help cleaning and organizing their homes or businesses. Some levels will want you to precisely place things, while others give you the freedom of creativity. You’ll also get to find items and coins around town. The coins can be used at stalls to buy items and those items can be used to decorate your own home. I appreciated the ability to walk all over town and while some cleaning jobs had to be done in order, you still had some freedom to deal with what you wanted to in the moment.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is a puzzle game where you’ll solve nonograms in the shapes of furniture in order to furnish the home of your rat. There are hundreds of decorations that can be customized by color and you can even create your own rat avatar. With aids like toggling hints, solving a random cell, and using the Logic-Assist system, you don’t have to worry about getting stuck on a difficult puzzle. Nonograms aren’t for everyone; I generally am terrible at the larger puzzles, but the incentive of getting to make furniture for my rat kept me coming back time and time again.
Catto’s Post Office
Catto’s Post Office is a short but sweet exploration game where you play as Catto and help him deliver the mail for the day. While you run around town making deliveries, you’ll find a few things to get distracted by and other cats to help. Knock things over, climb in a box, or hit the all-important meow button as you explore and collect achievements. This game is on the smaller side of things and I wish there had been more of it to enjoy because I really enjoyed my time exploring and doing little side quests with Catto.
Urban Jungle
Urban Jungle is a simulation game where you make your space thrive with plant life. Starting with your personal bedrooms throughout life and extending into your own plant shops, you’ll create a botanical delight in every space. There are puzzle elements in how the plants like to be arranged and story elements that make you feel like part of the story as you watch a life unfold through many stages. While this game does deal with plants, you’re not growing them. Mostly, you’re getting to decorate spaces while keeping the conditions required for each plant in mind. I ended up binging most of this game in one sitting.
Pine Hearts
Pine Hearts is an exploration and adventure game that has a bittersweet story where you return to a place you enjoyed with your dad, who has since passed. Your goal is to finally climb to the top of a mountain, but to do that, you’ll have to explore several areas of the camp and help the inhabitants fulfill their needs. Interspersed among the quests are a few mini-games to break things up, but you’re very much just going from one quest to the next. This game is one that I’ve played years ago now at this point, but I still think about it fondly. I really enjoyed the slower pace of things and all the little quests that I got to go on adventures to complete.
A Little to the Left
A Little to the Left is a puzzle-based organizational game. It has a series of levels with different objects that you have to study to see if you can find a pattern. You get to fiddle with the objects and move them around, and sometimes, there is more than one right answer! This is one of those puzzle games that’s pretty low-stakes. I won’t say that all the puzzles are easy, but it’s generally not too hard to find one solution to every puzzle, so you feel both accomplished and challenged. Plus, you don’t get penalized for moving things around, so you can fiddle until you get the right answers if you need to.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a detective game where you play as Eugene McQuacklin. He’s a private eye with a bread problem. You’ll investigate areas for clues, talk to witnesses, and put together a case by filling in blanks with the answers you collect. It’s fully voice-acted and I had a lot of fun with it when I played it. Both this game and the sequel, The Ghost of Glamping, play the same way, and I was so excited to have more of the series to dive into.
Minami Lane
Minami Lane is a management sim where you build up a Japanese-inspired street with buildings in order to take care of the locals. Place homes, restaurants, convenience stores, and more to cater to what the population wants. There are a few levels, each with different requirements for completion. You can customize the way the buildings look and upgrade them for greater appeal. Manage the inventory for shops and check in with the villagers to see how everything is faring. The game is short, but it’s a really good way to spend a few hours. I enjoyed building up streets and meeting the specifications set forth for each level. Plus, the art is so, so cute!
Fruitbus
Fruitbus is a driving game with exploration and shopkeeping elements. When your grandma dies, she leaves you her legacy of the Fruitbus. It seems like everyone knows of it, so you’ll meet a whole host of characters excited to see you. Roam around, find fruit in the wild, and use it to fill orders. In doing so, you’ll earn money to upgrade and customize your bus. You’ll also be met with quests from the townies that you can help with. This one is interesting because you do a lot of driving around to different locations in search of ingredients, so you’re not just tied to a constant cooking mechanic. It was a lot of fun.
Paper Trail
Paper Trail takes a unique approach to the type of games that require you to find your way from A-Z through obstacles by introducing the art of origami. It was a lot of fun to fold the paper into new paths and to see things on the reverse side that would help you sort out the correct pathing. I’ll be honest that Paper Trail isn’t normally the type of game that I’d gravitate to on my own, but I’m really glad that I got the chance to play it because the origami design to it felt really inventive. I liked having to think about the path forward in a different way.
SCHiM
SCHiM is sort of a platforming puzzler where you need to get from one destination to the next, but you have to do it through the shadows in the world. It made me look at the landscape in a wholly new way as I tried to figure out which shadows would get me where I needed to, especially when shadows started to move! This is the type of game that starts off simple and gets harder as you go, but it’s so interesting that you almost don’t care that it’s getting harder.
What are some of your favorite non-farming cozy games? I’d love to know about them in the comments!
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