By Haley Perry
Haley Perry is a staff writer focused on video games and booze. She has spent innumerable hours playing games and tasting spirits.
When the air is crisp and the days are short, cozying up with a chill video game is incredibly appealing. We have some long-standing favorites, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Stardew Valley, and The Sims 4 at the top of the list. But if you’ve already played those classics, and you’re looking for something new and a little different, we have plenty of recommendations for games to play while you’re relaxing on the couch, whether you’re on your phone, PC, or console.
Is This Seat Taken?
Top pick
This puzzle game has players pick the perfect seats for opinionated people. It’s highly addictive and easy to play in small doses.
Is This Seat Taken? asks you just one simple question: Can you pick the perfect seat for every person? It may sound easy, but through a series of levels staged in different cities and public settings, you’ll quickly find that meeting the demands of picky characters can be a challenging (albeit addicting) brain twister. This game is like a cozy combination of matchmaker and classic Zebra puzzle, where a group of people have their own individual quirks and preferences, and just any old seat won’t do.
On a bus ride through Barcelona, for example, you’ll encounter certain characters who want to sit alone, others who can’t stand loud music, some who want to blast loud music, and those who want someone to chat with. And you’ll have to seat them all according to their wishes. But these characters don’t just have requests, they also have individual traits. Some of them exude a body odor that could bother the people around them, some simply don’t want to be around kids, others steal snacks from their neighbors, and so on. Whether you’re filling seats at a sporting event, a concert, or a wedding reception, each level feels fresh, engaging, and utterly rewarding when you get it right. And while certain scenarios are tricky and may take multiple restarts, it rarely feels stressful or overwhelming. There’s no time limit or pressure to avoid mistakes, and the bite-size levels are easy to pick up and put down in your spare time.
Tiny Bookshop
Top pick
In this slow-paced management game, you decorate your caravan, boost your community, and recommend books to literary lovers.
There’s something about Tiny Bookshop that makes me long for a rainy day. This game is a love letter to the literary greats, and it evokes the cozy vibe of curling up with a good book when it’s gray and gloomy outside. In Tiny Bookshop, you set up a seaside caravan in the town of Bookstonbury and stock it with classic books for curious customers. When you open your doors in the morning, different people will come in and ask for specific recommendations, like a romantic YA novel or a sci-fi epic similar to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And then you’ll handpick titles for each customer based on the books you’ve acquired along the way. In your off hours, you can purchase new books and decorations for your shop, and you can customize both the outside and inside of the trailer.
Although you are indeed running a store, Tiny Bookshop doesn’t feel at all like a profit-driven management game. Instead, it’s slow and serene, and there’s more emphasis on helping characters in the community around you than on the stress of keeping your business booming. As you get to know the locals of Bookstonbury, completing small tasks for them will strengthen your relationships and earn you Memory stamps. You’ll watch them grow as people, and thanks to your help, you’ll be invited to celebrate their successes, like attending their concerts or graduations. Combined with the laidback bookstore-management system, this intimate narrative experience makes Tiny Bookshop one of the most wholesome, meditative games I’ve played all year.
Town to City
Top pick
This tranquil game involves building a 19th-century Mediterranean town from the ground up, and it gives you an impressive amount of freedom to create beautiful places.
If you like the idea of building a city, but you don’t want to worry about complex economics, warfare, or fussy citizens, Town to City is the perfect game for you. Instead of worrying about your people starving to death, revolting, or being attacked by neighboring factions, your main focus is simply to make things beautiful and fulfill requests at your own pace. On a variety of idyllic, gridless maps, you’ll turn a sleepy town into a bustling city by adding homes, businesses, and farms inspired by quaint, 19th-century Mediterranean architecture.
Compared with other games in the city-building genre, Town to City distinguishes itself with its relaxing tempo, as well as with the unprecedented agency you’re given to customize the little things. If you want to zoom in and add flower boxes or lights to each home’s windowsills or add tiny decorations to a fencepost or backyard, you can do so freely. These items can also take different shapes and forms depending on where you place them, and playing around with new configurations can make each building or area feel completely personalized. I’ve spent quite a few late nights trying to create the perfect park, town square, and ivy-adorned home. But when my head starts to hurt from placing hundreds of individual objects, I’ve equally enjoyed zooming out and expanding my city from a more macro perspective. Town to City is currently available in Early Access, which means it’s not perfectly polished yet. But the game has already received content updates, including animals and seasonal-themed items, and there are more expansions on the way.
Tavern Keeper
Top pick
Utterly addicting and oozing with charm, this cozy game involves running your own tavern, and it’s among the best entries of 2025.
When Tavern Keeper came out, I lost sleep for an entire weekend. This management game whisks you away to different fantasy worlds — like an arid canyon that feels inspired by Zelda’s Goron City or a Halfling village straight out of The Hobbit — and it asks you to start your own tavern from scratch. You’ll receive a preexisting building to clean up and redecorate, and while you can completely customize the inside, you can’t change the fundamental layout. This creates a welcome challenge: Trying to cram the necessary taprooms, storerooms, staff rooms, and more into the limited space becomes part of this fun and refreshing puzzle. To establish your tavern and build a reputation, you’ll have to balance your earnings, hire and manage staff, purchase and stock beverages, and even create your own food menu. In the campaign mode, you’ll also have to complete various objectives and make narrative choices along the way.
Tavern Keeper also offers the option of customizing every piece of furniture, and this is easily a mini-game on its own. Any placeable item or surface can be redesigned to look a million different ways, and you can share or import designs from other players online. I am regularly dumbfounded by the creativity of other people in the community, and my own design skills feel meager by comparison.
The game in its current state offers three campaign levels and a sandbox mode, and it’s available in Early Access on Steam, which means you could experience some bugs. The developer roadmap promises more on the horizon. But the sandbox mode has already given me an additional 50 hours of delightful play, long after completing the campaign, and I don’t plan on putting it down anytime soon.
Preserve
Top pick
This game challenges you to create harmonious ecosystems by strategically placing plants and animals from a deck of cards.
Instead of doomscrolling on my phone at the end of a long day, I’ve learned to wind down with Preserve — a calming puzzle game that involves restoring natural habitats and creating flourishing ecosystems. Preserve whisks you away to different biomes, which are little more than honeycomb-shaped wastelands when you arrive. Your task is to breathe new life into the land by selecting various climate, flora, and fauna cards from your hand and placing them carefully on individual tiles. Bringing water in the form of rain, river, or lake cards, for example, will cause lush grass to grow beneath you. And connecting adjacent forests, flower fields, or rock formations will create sustainable habitats for the animals you choose to introduce to them. Playing these cards will also grant you points, depending on how strategically you place them, and true puzzle lovers will find a healthy challenge in trying to achieve the highest score available for each biome. I typically play the game without minding the scoreboard, and you can also do this if you just want to take in the landscape and pass each level by meeting the required points threshold. It’s enough for me to simply sit back and watch things bloom. Seeing other beings — including wolves, goats, and even dinosaurs — thriving in their new homes has brought a genuine smile to my face on more than one occasion.
Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
Top pick
This short, silly detective game is set in a haunted campground, and players hunt for clues, make “de-duck-tions,” and look for “fowl” play.
In Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, you star as Eugene McQuacklin, the titular duck detective who dons the familiar trenchcoat and fedora found in many a film noir flick. Though you’re grappling with a bread addiction brought on by the bitterness of your recent divorce, you won’t let that stop you from doing what you do best: snooping around, questioning suspects, and piecing together clues to solve the mystery behind a haunted campground. Most of your motions will include exploring different rooms and areas to pick up clues, as well as speaking to other characters to collect evidence. After you’ve gathered enough information to start making sense of the story, you’ll pull out your trusty notebook to make a “de-duck-tion,” which prompts you to fill in the blanks of a passage by plugging in the correct words based on your investigation. The story takes only a few hours to complete, but it’s full of intrigue, and the dialogue is extremely witty. Also, even though The Ghost of Glamping is technically a sequel to Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, you don’t need to play one to thoroughly enjoy the other.
News Tower
Top pick
Set in the glitzy Jazz Age, this simulation game will have you doing what it takes to run a successful newspaper — even if it means rubbing elbows with the mob.
Print media has never been an easy industry, and News Tower doesn’t shy away from expressing the niche challenges of publishing a successful newspaper. You begin the game by inheriting your family’s declining news tower, in 1930s New York City, with the hopes of rebuilding your own paper. You’ll set up a printing press, expand the newsroom with new desks and reporters, and send your journalists on assignments to gather stories in time to make the Sunday paper. Each reporter specializes in a specific subject, such as crime, sports, and politics, and you’ll have to arrange the layout and front page of your paper every week to publish their juicy (and hopefully profitable) headlines. But your journalistic ethics will be challenged by pressure from the mafia, the mayor, and other groups — and they all have their own agendas for what you should and shouldn’t publish. News Tower is decidedly stylish, with a swanky, retro aesthetic and a continuous jazz soundtrack. And the captivating challenges that come with growing your own media empire make it all too easy to forget how much time has passed since you started playing.
Ooblets
Top pick
This undeniably endearing game involves farming and dance-battling bizarre creatures.
Ooblets is a wholesome game that has you collecting creatures by winning dance battles, and it has been the chicken soup for my soul over the past three years. You can challenge the creatures, called Ooblets, to turn-based dance battles if you acquire different resources by farming, cooking, and exploring. And if you win, they join your squad and help you battle other Ooblets, or they tend to tasks around your farm. You can collect more than 50 different, wacky species. My personal favorite is Hermble, a bird-like critter with a terrible haircut on the sides of an otherwise bald head. He is a perfect specimen of nature. Ooblets has a surprising amount of things to do, an adorable art style, and a catchy selection of dance-off songs, and it never fails to cheer me up whenever I return to it.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Top pick
This iconic cozy game involves customizing an island and cultivating community. And it’s about to get a refresh, with all-new content slated to arrive soon.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been a favorite of ours since it grabbed the world with its laidback pace and cutesy characters at the peak of the pandemic. New Horizons plops you onto a desert island, which you’ll build up over time by inviting new animal villagers, constructing homes, and terraforming the landscape. You’ll also run around catching bugs and fish, crafting new decorations, gardening, and giving gifts to your villagers to cultivate friendships.
Whether you’re a brand new player or looking to revisit this game, it’s good timing, since a major update is coming soon. The update will launch alongside a dedicated Switch 2 version, and it will add a new resort hotel, new items and clothing, and a collaborative island system where you can build and design a community with friends online. The update will be free for all New Horizons owners. And if you already purchased a copy for your original Switch console, you can also upgrade to the Switch 2 version for only $5.
This article was edited by Arthur Gies and Caitlin McGarry.
Further reading
Video Games to Ride Out the End of Winter
by Wirecutter Staff
Winter isn’t done yet, but there’s good news: These video games are ready to hang out with you inside until it warms up out there.
Skip House Cleaning. Play These Cleaning-Themed Video Games Instead.
by Haley Perry and Arthur Gies
Spring is almost over, but there’s never a bad time to clean or organize in a video game—and your back is less likely to ache when you’re finished.
The Best Puzzles, Animal Toys, and More for Energetic 2-Year-Olds
by Caitlin Giddings and Wirecutter Staff
Many 2-year-olds are learning to manipulate objects in more-precise ways, so look for toys and gifts that challenge their fine motor skills.
The Best Jammies for Kids Are Comfy, Cute, and Make Great Gifts
by Laura Motley
Our favorite pajamas for kids come in fun prints and soft fabrics, and they hold up well through lots of wash and wear.
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