Collector’s Cove Review — Find the One Piece!! And the Rest of Them too

If you’re a lover of cozy crafting games, you might be shocked to find that Collector’s Cove had slipped under your radar. This seafaring farming game tasks players with doing just what the title suggests: collecting, going from region to region, and discovering new items to fill out a compendium of new discoveries, all while building a self-sufficient houseboat along the way. The game is about as low-stress as it can get, with very little consequence or time limits to push you out of your comfort zone, allowing you to take the experience on completely at your own pace.

Collector’s Cove uses a pretty interesting mix of mechanics to create its own take on the collect-a-thon farming game.

The first of these two mechanics involves hopping from island to island. With the help of your companion, a large, Nessie-like creature that pilots your houseboat for you, you go from one uncharted island to another, discovering what each one has in store. This element of the gameplay is core to the experience, but I personally feel like it could have been done better, as many of the islands begin to feel very samey pretty quickly into the game. It doesn’t take long before the islands feel less like unique areas to explore and more like necessary stops to gather the materials needed to engage in the main gameplay loop.

That loop is the build, grow, and collect mechanic of Collector’s Cove. Essentially, the game challenges you to collect wood, stone, and other materials in order to craft workbenches and production areas on your ship. These production centers allow you to engage in the main collection systems, which involve fishing or farming.

For all you fishing fans out there, Collector’s Cove has a pretty well-put-together fishing system. It’s not the most advanced or realistic, but it combines a simplistic approach with a bit of challenge to make for a real, engaging minigame, one where you fight against a fish’s pull while avoiding snapping your fishing line. If I were to make a comparison to another game, I’d say it reminds me of the fishing in Red Dead Redemption II or a simplified version of that in Final Fantasy XV. It’s a familiar but fun system and was one of my favorites to engage in during my playthrough of Collector’s Cove.

The farming is much simpler, requiring you only to plant seeds, water them, and wait. However, the mechanic is made more advanced by the use of region-locked seed growth, with the two available regions being the right environments for different seeds. Similarly, the fishing system requires you to venture into the right bodies of water at the right time in order to collect different species of fish, which ties the collection elements back to the exploration and travel mechanics of the game.

Now, you might think that the collection compendium stops at fishing the right fish or growing the right plants, but it becomes more complicated with fabled variants of each produce or fish in the game. Essentially, by collecting enough fish or growing enough plants, you learn how to craft bait or fertilizer at the previously mentioned crafting areas, which then allows you to catch or grow gold-star variants of those same fish or plants. Collecting enough gold-star variants then unlocks a tip to find the fabled version of that fish or plant, which is a complicated task that essentially rewards you with the ultimate version of what you’re collecting.

The game then becomes not only about finding each unknown fish and vegetable, but also about capturing gold variants of them and then finding the fabled version. Only when you’ve done that for each entry in the game will you become the ultimate collector.

Chances are that explanation is probably enough to get you hyped on the game, if it is indeed the kind of game you enjoy. For Stardew Valley or other farming game players out there, I think Collector’s Cove certainly scratches that collection itch, and while the game is a little devoid of characters and locational variety, the loop it presents is so fun and easily repeatable that it can easily hook you, the same way you hook countless fish on your ocean-bound adventure.

Besides the lack of variety, I would say the biggest “flaw” with Collector’s Cove is that the game feels a little small. Outside of the main collection loop, there isn’t much to do or see, and the game’s story is almost dismissible. Outside of the tutorial, you’re essentially on the open sea and left to your devices to grow or fish your way to a completed compendium. And you know what? That’s completely fine.

Especially for the generous asking price of the game, I think Collector’s Cove offers a lot to players, particularly those chasing a very niche kind of feeling or gameplay style. If you’re the kind of person who wanted to grow a gold-star variant of every crop or catch the perfect version of each fish in Stardew Valley, Collector’s Cove builds upon that feeling and delivers a solid execution on those mechanics. The right audience is sure to be right at home in this cozy, sea-bound collect-a-thon.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Collector’s Cove. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Collector’s Cove is available on Steam, Epic Games, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.