Hozy Review — Cozy at Home

There’s a supreme sense of satisfaction that comes from renovating, decorating, and overall restoring old properties. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and nowhere is that more true than with abandoned structures: the skeleton of a house just waiting for the right determined person to come along and turn it into a home.

While home restoration is an expensive process, I’ve reviewed a few games in my career that capture this fantasy in an affordable package. No title, however, has done it quite like Hozy, a restoration-decoration title with a unique presentation and approach that hopes to deliver a bite-sized and comfortable experience for its players.

Hozy uses a unique, almost isometric camera angle to present to the player a series of run-down and abandoned structures that need renovating, one room at a time. With a small checklist in each room, you’re given the ability to pick up garbage, sweep up leaves, rip up floorboards, or do whatever else you need to do to restore the property you’re at, with each level having its own unique interactions and problems to fix. Generally, though, you’ll find yourself painting walls or picking up garbage, and the transformation at the end is always impressive to behold.

I really love the game’s art style, which feels like a compromise between a realistic portrayal of the environment and an oil painting. It’s slightly cartoonish, warm, and cozy, which is everything something like Hozy should be. The choice in furniture and decor in each level is also unique, ranging from pieces you might see anywhere to some truly unique items I actually want in my apartment. If anyone knows where I can get a coffee table made from a tree stump on the cheap, please tell me in the comments.

Decorating and unpacking also play an important part in each level, with each room you renovate then needing to be filled with a selection of furniture pulled from boxes that are definitely way too small to actually fit them. While the decorations are pre-chosen, how you place them is up to you. It’s totally possible to just throw everything into a corner and forget about it, but considering Hozy gives you a special camera tool at the end of each level to take pictures of your hard work, the game has some expectation for you to take pride in your decorating skills and truly express yourself with the tools given. Self-expression, if you ask me, is the key element that separates decoration and renovation from just doing chores.

Mechanically speaking, Hozy is a point-and-click or click-and-drag interaction game, giving you the freedom to use tools as you see fit and place objects as you want within the environment. On the PC, it uses your mouse to move and pick up objects, and it lets you rotate the camera slightly to get more precise angles at a slightly isometric level.

In practice, the mouse controls lead to a lot of slippery, imprecise movements that can feel a little bit awkward to use when trying to do a task such as painting. I definitely felt like the paint roller was always moving a little bit further than I wanted it to, often feeling as if it was actually pulling in the direction I pushed it and slipping to the left or right, messing up my nice, precise, and straight paint lines. This is, of course, not a real issue, but these small control glitches can somewhat fight the feeling of satisfaction the game wants to give you, precisely when you can’t do things exactly the way you might want to, or the way that feels right, because the tools simply don’t work like that.

The game’s use of specific camera angles can also cause slight issues in finishing tasks. Using painting again as a specific example of this problem, I often found small corners to be blocked by my camera or otherwise unreachable because the hitbox of my tool was too big or too awkward to fit into that space. A little refinement in this area, I feel, could go a long way toward making the game more fun to play.

Small issues here and there do not detract much from what Hozy has to offer, as advertised in the game’s title: a cozy, comfortable home renovation game where players can express themselves while accomplishing easy, satisfying tasks. It triggers something in the brain that just makes you feel good about yourself and makes for an excellent, short, comfortable experience.

Players should understand exactly what they’re getting into with Hozy, a game defined by that short and comfortable experience and not by scoreboards or objectives. This is not House Flipper, where you’re trying to make a buck by purchasing and renovating homes. At the end of the day, the only thing you’re trying to do in Hozy is have a good time.

For those looking for a comfortable, contained, cozy experience, Hozy is for you. The keyboard controls can feel a bit awkward at times, and minor interactions with the physics or camera angles can make renovations take slightly longer than you planned. These problems are so minuscule, however, that they’re unlikely to take away from your experience with the game, which promises to be cozy and fun, if not incredibly long, clocking in at just around three to four hours depending on how you play.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Hozy. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Hozy is available on Steam.