Read to recover.

Five Cute and Casual Games That Deserve More Attention

We all have our own intense games that we love, like our action-packed shooters, tense mysteries, difficult platformers, and brutal roguelikes. But sometimes we just need a break. Calmer and more laid-back games can be a great way to unwind after a tough day. Lots of people have heard of more popular titles like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, but there are a lot of hidden gems out there that aren’t nearly as well-known. Below are five of my favorite lesser-known relaxing games, in no particular order.

Calico

A screenshot of the title screen of the game Calico. The background has the player's house and café, the yard around it, a river with a bridge crossing it, and cherry blossom trees behind everything. The main feature of the title screen is the fact that there are dozens of 3D models of a calico cat floating around in the air.
Yes, this is what the title screen looks like. The cats fly all over the place. It’s glorious.

Calico is a cute, cozy game about running a “cat café” and helping your neighbors with various tasks. Why the quotation marks? Well, while it may be a cat café in theory, the magic on the little star-shaped island the game takes place on apparently makes all of the wild animals friendly and cuddly. This means that you can walk up to any animal on the island, pick it up or ride it, and put it in your café. Want a bird café? There’s a crow, a raven, and a snowy owl that you can find and bring back with you. Big fan of capybaras? Great news, there’s a ton of them at a spa on top of the mountain. Want a deer in your shop? A polar bear? You can have them!

A screenshot from the game Calico of the inside of the player's café. The player is sitting at a table, and there's a cat and rabbit on the floor and a crow on top of the table.
A selection of the cute animals you can have in the café.

Of course, there are many lovely cats to play with as well, if you’d rather keep it simple. My favorite kitty is definitely Pudgems.

A screenshot from the game Calico of the "Animals" section of the journal menu, with the entry for a fat calico cat named Pudgems selected.
The bestest boy.

The game has a very chill, whimsical vibe, with many of the characters and quests being very silly and really leaning into it. You can hold animals and wiggle them around, store them on your head, and even make them big and ride them around, which is super cute.

A GIF from the game Calico of the player character holding the fat calico cat Pudgems and rotating him around.
Incredible gameplay.

Within the café, you can set up furniture and design your own wallpaper. The biggest part of your café though (other than the tough decisions on which animals to keep there) is making the food. You pick a selection of foods and drinks to have out at one time, which characters from around the island will come over to buy. However, in order to prepare the items, you have to shrink down and run around on the counter, chucking ingredients into the bowl and playing little minigames in order to bake and frost your cookies or brew your coffee.

Most of your time in the game will be spent running around helping out your neighbors with various tasks. As you progress with these tasks, you’ll slowly unlock each segment of the star-shaped map, where you’ll find more people to help out and more animals to kidnap. It’s not a long game by any means, but I find myself coming back to it now and again to relax with its adorable animals, cute pastel graphics, slow, relaxing gameplay, and lovely, soothing music.

A screenshot from the game Calico of a store on top of a hill at night, with large plants on top of the hill and cherry blossom trees below. Inside the store are the player character and the shop keeper.
The local potion brewer’s shop is really pretty at night.

Farm Keeper

The title art of the game Farm Keeper, with the logo and a large pixellated rabbit farmer and a screenshot of a farm from the game in the background.

The most obscure on the list by far, this little tile-based strategy/farming game—released very recently on June 17, 2023—has only 180 total reviews on Steam. In this adorable game, you manage a farm made of small tiles. You start with only a few tiles around your house, but each day, you get to choose a free tile from a random selection of three, which you then can place adjacent to existing tiles on your farm.

A GIF from the game Farm Keeper of a player opening the free tile menu, choosing the well, and placing it in the top right corner of their farm map.

Most things in the game take energy: tilling land, planting, watering, and harvesting crops, breaking trees and rocks, and lots more. You only get 12 energy per day, and each action on each individual tile takes one energy. The best way to deal with the energy limitations is to build wells, which will fully refill your energy when clicked on once every three days. Farm Keeper has very short days, which you can end whenever you feel ready to progress (or have run out of things to do).

A screenshot from the game Farm Keeper of a farm mid-game with a chaotic assortment of tiles, including farmland, animals, and wells.

Every four days, you have to pay rent to your landlord. The rent increases as you progress, and the game is technically endless. Instead of a concrete ending, you either win by going long enough to unlock and build the owner’s mansion, or lose by failing to make enough money for the next rent payment. Either way, the game will end, you’ll unlock things based on your achievements (which I’ll get into further down) and start a new game, back to your tiny farm once more.

There are lots of ways to make money: selling crops, selling animals which grow by eating adjacent crops, refining crops into things like beer, cider, and tea, and many others that you unlock as you go. You always start with a very small collection of items, and each time you pay rent more is unlocked within a singular game. In the game as a whole, there’s a “secret tile” system, where you’re able to unlock 42 total things: crops, buildings, animals, utility tiles, more types of workers that you can pay to help you with various tasks, and even the harder difficulty modes. This is a great way to keep you playing, as it gives you mini goals to strive for on individual playthroughs.

A screenshot of the secret tiles menu from Farm Keeper, with most of the tiles unlocked. The cursor is hovered over the "coconut palm" tile, which shows its description: "Produce stackable coconuts daily, with exponential yield growth." and its unlock requirement: "Collect at least 20 giant octopuses and win the game."
The secret tile menu in question.

As a whole, Farm Keeper is a very well-polished game. The sound effects are incredibly satisfying, the pixel graphics and their little animations are super cute, and the simple game loop is fun to come back to every once in a while when you’re in the mood (though it can be pretty hard to stop playing!). The game is currently receiving frequent updates addressing player concerns, fixing glitches, and adding new content, so there’s always more to come back to.

Wobbledogs

A GIF from the game Wobbledogs of a wobbledog, a blocky, dog-like creature, walking in from one side of the screen and exiting out the other. The room is decorated like a living room, with wallpaper that looks like a living room wall with windows and outlets, and furniture including an armchair, a laundry basket, and a TV.

Wobbledogs is a silly little game where you breed a collection of mutant pups, selecting for certain traits over generations to end up with some truly crazy results. As stated on the game’s official page, Wobbledogs is “A 3D pet simulation sandbox where you raise your own personal hive of mutating dogs, physically simulated all the way down to their guts!”

A GIF from the game Wobbledogs of a player petting their wobbledog, which closes its eyes and emits heart particles.
Who’s a good boy?

Each dog has a set of gut bacteria, which are obtained from the different foods that you can feed them. The different bacteria have different effects on their genetics, which can cause mutations in the dog itself as it goes through different life stages—which happens by entering a cocoon, obviously—as well as giving its offspring more of a chance to get certain mutations.

Some examples of foods and their effects include pancakes, which can make your dogs flatter and have larger tails, lasagna, which can make them bigger, and ectoplasm (my favorite dog treat), which can cause white legs, a black body, and a higher chance of random mutations.

There are a ton of different things that can be mutated on the dogs, including: colors and patterns; number, length, and width of legs; width, length, and height of body; eye type and number; ear type; tail type and number; wing type and number; horn type; and more. 

A big part of the game is the achievement system, which is how you unlock a lot of important things like new food types, extra rooms, toys, new decorations, wallpaper and flooring, and even a few special wobbledogs for certain achievements. This creates a strong gameplay loop as you care for your dogs, working toward certain goals, such as making a very wide dog or one with only three legs, and unlocking more items that let you work toward more achievements, all while forming attachments with your adorable mutant pups.

A GIF from the game Wobbledogs of two wobbledogs standing next to a radio emitting music note particles, a normal, default one and a ghost wobbledog, which is translucent and floating with no legs. The wobbledogs are dancing and emitting heart particles. The room around them is a graveyard.
Death is not the end for your puppies—they can come back from beyond the grave to hang out and jam with your living wobbledogs.

Seal World

The game Seal World's title image, featuring a large, very round cartoon seal, the game's name in a round, blobby font, and three fish.

The second most obscure on this list, Seal World is a goofy game where you play as a seal who wants to eat all of the “fibsh,” the main collectible of the game. It’s still in early access and isn’t very long, but at only $3, it’s a steal for the amount of fun you get from it.

A screenshot from the game Seal World of a brown seal named Sampy, which is very round with a simple, cartoony face with sparkling eyes. The seal is very close to the camera, taking up half of the screen. There is a text box on the bottom, which reads "My goal is fibsh." "Fibsh" is written with all capital letters.
FIBSH!!

Fibsh are scattered around the little towns, hidden on shelves, behind trees, in secret tunnels, underwater, and all sorts of other places. You can also obtain delicious fibsh for helping out your fellow seals in silly quests. 

A GIF from the game Seal World of the player character, a white seal, jumping into a deep pond with a waterfall from high up, swimming a bit underwater, and then resurfacing.

As you collect fibsh, you’ll also unlock the other main collectible in the game: silly hats for your seal. There’s all sorts of hats you can get, but my favorite would have to be the one that’s just another, smaller seal.

Every seal you talk to has goofy dialogue, and your seal also has a lot to say in return, making it fun to blob your way around and talk to everyone. The game doesn’t take itself seriously at all, and it’s all the more charming and adorable for it. Seal World encourages casual exploration of its map, making it perfect for winding down and doing something simple and fun.

A GIF from the game Seal World of a conversation between the player character and a cream-colored seal named Ron. Ron says "how you feel?". The player has the option of "Good" or "Not Good," and picks "Good." Ron smiles and says "nice" and then "Go meet everyone!"

Webbed

The title art of the game Webbed, with the title in white, bubbly font in the center of a spider web in between large blades of grass. The player character, a small spider, is on the web, and a large blue bird is in the background, looking down at the spider. Large trees are in the far back of the image.

The final entry on this list is Webbed, an adorable 2D puzzle platformer where you play as a tiny spider trying to save her boyfriend who got kidnapped by a bird. You visit various groups of bugs around a giant central tree, getting their help to build parts of an airship to reach the cloudy area high up in the sky where the bird lives.

Webbed’s lovely map screen.

Webbed has two main controls that will make up the majority of your gameplay. The first is shooting threads that you can swing from and pull yourself toward things with. The second is attaching threads between two locations or objects to connect objects together, make pathways to travel along, catch flies wandering by, and solve lots of other interesting puzzles. 

But you may be wondering: what if you place some threads in the wrong place and need to remove them? Not to worry, our spider friend has the perfect solution: laser eyes! A normal part of any spider, our little friend can shoot lasers to destroy webs that are no longer needed.

A screenshot from the game Webbed of the player character sitting on a thread that is part of a large spider web in the center of the screen. Large leaves and tree branches are in the foreground and background, and in the far back are very large trees. On a branch next to the web is a flower with a ball of pollen on it, a collectible in the game.

The movement in Webbed is incredibly satisfying—by shooting webs and pulling yourself along, you can really build up a lot of momentum, sometimes flinging yourself pretty far. Webbed is one of those games that’s fun to just move around in, even without any of the other aspects of its gameplay, like the engaging puzzles and cute story.

A GIF from the game Webbed of the player character shooting out thread to swing from vine to vine up and to the right on a very large tree, building up momentum as they fly through the air.

And there you have it: five of my personal recommendations for games to play when the stress is starting to get to you and you need to unwind. Each of these games is charming in its own unique way, and with a variety of genres, there’s something here for everyone. So grab your favorite beverage, cuddle up under a blanket, and relax with one of these cute games!

A GIF from the game Webbed of the player dancing on the ground, which involves waving two of their legs in the air. This looks like the spider is waving at the camera. The player then shoots a thread at a log on the edge of the screen and swings away off screen.
See you later!

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