As a giant fan of Cozy Grove (a daily Grover, you could say), I was ecstatic to learn today that developer Spry Fox is working on a proper sequel. The team announced Cozy Grove 2 via the studio blog, stating that, with copious updates (things like seasonal festivals and the recent paid DLC, New Neighbears), it will essentially be easier to get out of tech debt by building a whole new game from scratch.
From the Spry Fox Blog:
“We look back on the past year of post-launch development of Cozy Grove, and we’re so grateful to have had that time to keep working on it. We feel that Cozy Grove is an incredibly good value in its current state, and we are very proud of the game it has become. We love this odd little universe that we’ve created, and we love telling stories inside it. We want to keep doing that.
One major challenge we face is that continuing to deliver updates has become increasingly difficult for us as tech debt builds up, despite our many attempts over the past year to tackle that. At the same time, most of the revenue and platform financial support that pays for all these free updates came to us over a year ago with the launch of the game. All of this combines to make it extremely difficult to deliver new content and features that our community is telling us it wants (like for example new locations to explore.) So we’ve concluded that the best thing for Cozy Grove and for all its fans is for us to commit to making a sequel!
A sequel to Cozy Grove will give us a chance to take the large amount of time that we need to address the remaining major technical issues that make expanding Cozy Grove too difficult, while also giving us a chance to do the work that will be necessary to delight all of you with new content and hopefully bring new people into our community as well.
So yeah, we’re going to make Cozy Grove 2! And it’s going to have a bunch more new ghost bears, in new environments. And Flamey. And Scoutmaster Blake. We hope you’ll choose to come along for the ride.”
This is a game I play every day, and love to cover when updates come up. I’ve even gotten my girlfriend to be a true believer in one of the finest cozy “life sim” games ever created. Needless to say, I’m excited for the release, and I’ll be farming and hanging out with the current ghost bears until the new game comes down the river.
It will be a bit, as the studio announced a blanket “2023” for Cozy Grove 2. They aren’t even committing to that yet, but the team is “hopeful” that the new title will be ready by the end of next year.
In the meantime, you can check out all of our Cozy Grove coverage, including guides, right here on Fanbyte.
As usual, I’ll offer this disclosure notice when covering the game – I worked with Kris Lorischild, a writer on the project, back at zam.com.
