If you’re a woman over 40 who plays video games, you’ve probably been recommended Stardew Valley loads.
This isn’t a complaint; I love Stardew Valley! It was one of the games that brought me back to gaming in my late 30s, and I’ve spent hundreds of happy hours in it since. But sometimes I don’t want another farming game.
I first wrote this list in 2025, but cosy gaming moves quickly and some of the original recommendations were the same games that appear on nearly every cosy games list, so I had a bit of a rethink.
Not all of these are cosy in the traditional sense.. there’s burnout, a dead family and a shop full of cursed objects, but I think we can allow a little darkness with our cups of tea, right?
1. Wanderstop
Available on: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2
At first glance, Wanderstop appears to be exactly what you’d expect from a cosy game. A colourful tea shop in the middle of a forest, where you grow ingredients, make drinks and talk to the people who wander in looking for a cuppa.
Your character, Alta, unfortunately, does not want to run a tea shop.
She’s a fighter who has spent her life being very good at fighting. After she starts losing, she ends up at Wanderstop and is told to slow down. Alta would much rather turn recovery into a series of tasks, complete them as quickly as possible and get back to her real life.
I can’t imagine why that might resonate with women who have spent years trying to be good at everything…? /s
This isn’t really a tea shop management sim, so don’t go in expecting lots of upgrades and busywork. It’s more interested in Alta and her complete inability to rest without viewing it as some sort of personal failure. A little too relatable, perhaps.
2. Tiny Bookshop
Available on: PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S
This one lets you run a second-hand bookshop from a trailer by the sea, which sounds like the sort of perimenopausal thing I’d announce I was doing after a minor inconvenience at work.
You travel around the town of Bookstonbury, choose which books to stock and help customers find something they might enjoy. These are real books rather than made-up titles, so all those years of reading and remembering oddly specific details about novels finally come in handy.
You can decorate the trailer too, and different items can affect the shop and your customers. Instead of just making money, you spend lots of time getting to know the people in town and exploring its different locations, too.
3. Strange Antiquities
Available on: PC and Nintendo Switch
You probably know by now that I’m very fond of cosy games that are a bit sinister (but not horror!)
Strange Antiquities is set in the same spooky town as Strange Horticulture, but this time you’re looking after a shop full of occult objects. Customers bring you their problems and you have to work out which object might help.
Most of your time is spent looking at the unusual items, reading descriptions and matching them to clues in your reference book. You also get to explore Undermere and make decisions that affect what happens.
It’s dark and rainy, but not too scary.
4. Is This Seat Taken?
Available on: PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android
You know when you get on a nearly empty bus and somebody is sitting in the exact seat you wanted?
Is This Seat Taken? is a puzzle game about that sort of problem. You have to arrange a group of little people according to their various preferences. One needs a window seat, and another doesn’t want to sit near somebody wearing strong perfume, one wants to talk, while everybody else would like them not to…
The puzzles get more complicated as you go, but it never becomes that stressful. You’re just trying to find an arrangement where everyone is happy, which may be the most unrealistic fantasy on this entire list!
It’s a nice one for short sessions, particularly on Switch or mobile. The little characters are cute as well.
5. The Roottrees Are Dead
Available on: PC, Mac and Linux
In The Roottrees Are Dead, you’ve been hired to reconstruct the Roottree family tree after their untimely demise... You search through a fictional version of the 1990s internet, gathering names, photographs, jobs and evidence of how everybody is related.
It’s just you, an old computer and a complicated family full of people who have not always been honest about what they were doing.
This is definitely the most brain-heavy game here (you might even need to buy a new notebook!) You may also find yourself thinking about the Roottrees while making dinner because you’ve realised that one of the dates doesn’t make sense.
If you enjoy genealogy or internet research it’s definitely worth a look.
6. Lushfoil Photography Sim
Available on: PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S
Lushfoil Photography Sim recreates real landscapes from around the world, including parts of Japan, Iceland, Australia and the Alps. You explore them on foot, look for interesting places and take photographs using a really smart in-game camera.
You can adjust the focus, exposure and white balance if you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t, you can still point the camera at something and see what happens, it doesn’t really matter!
There are a few things to find, and it seems like a lovely game for evenings when even talking to fictional people feels like too much effort.
It is played in first person, so I’d watch a little footage first if that tends to give you motion sickness.
7. inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S
Set in a small Japanese convenience store in the early 1990s, inKONBINI follows college student Makoto Hayakawa as she takes a break from her studies to help her aunt.
You stock shelves, arrange products and serve customers, but the conversations are the heart of it. Small choices shape Makoto’s relationships with the people who pass through the shop, turning an ordinary workplace into a collection of overlapping lives.
The 1990s setting gives it a quiet nostalgia without relying on references every few seconds. It’s full of packaging, magazines and everyday objects that make the shop feel convincingly lived in.
This should appeal if you enjoy games about brief encounters and the things people reveal when they think they’re only popping in to buy milk.
8. Unpacking
Available on: PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS and Android
Unpacking is still one of my favourite examples of how much a game can say without giving its characters a single line of dialogue.
You unpack one woman’s belongings across several moves, beginning in her childhood bedroom and following her through student accommodation, relationships and adulthood. You learn who she is from the objects she keeps, the ones that disappear and the spaces other people leave for her.
Placing every mug, book and battered soft toy is deeply satisfying, but it’s the quiet storytelling that has stayed with me. One particular home tells you almost everything you need to know about a relationship before the game confirms a thing.
It’s short, easy to return to and one of the few games about tidying that has never made me feel I should get up and clean my actual house.
Cosy Games Don’t Have to Be Childish
I think this is what I was looking for when I returned to gaming: not games made specifically “for older women”, but games that respected my time and gave me something interesting in return.
At this point in my life, I don’t need every game to last 100 hours. I’m happy to spend an evening solving a seating plan, a weekend untangling a wealthy family’s secrets or a few weeks getting to know the customers in a tiny shop.
I still love farming games, but cosy gaming is much bigger and stranger than its reputation suggests. It can be thoughtful, melancholy, funny, creepy or quietly furious about burnout. Sometimes it can simply give you a beautiful place to walk around for a while.
Have you played any of these? I’d love to know which cosy games you’ve discovered recently, especially the ones that don’t appear on every recommendation list.