Cozy Bundle review — A dose of nostalgia — GAMINGTREND

January 17, 2025

MySims is a strange game. It’s a more “kid friendly” version of The Sims, but with a huge focus on building houses and furniture. The player is someone with the power to build, apparently uncommon in the world, and they move to a town in hard times thanks to the disappearance of their previous builder. After a quick tutorial, your job is to bring the town back to 5 star status by building things.

That’s pretty much it. Interacting with other sims is either purely cosmetic or serves to generate resources needed for building. You see, a resident might request that you make them a chair with 10 happy essences in it. You get happy essences by using the happy interaction on another. This will also increase your friendship with them, but I never found this to matter at all.

Let’s back up a bit to go through the gameplay loop. Talking to the town’s resident chef, he wants you to make a refrigerator for him with 10 apples and 10 stone essences. There’s only one apple tree in town, so you take apples from that and plant a few more to speed up the process. To get the tree to grow faster, you can water it over and over until it’s fully grown, then use fertilizer to damage the tree but cause it to immediately spawn a full set of apples.

As for stone, you need to go prospecting for that. You’re not sure where, so you talk to the chef over and over until he finally gives you a hint: by the train station. Prospecting sees you wandering around with a metal detector until it starts beeping very fast, then you dig and hope it spawns the material you need. Repeat until you have 10 stone.

Once you have everything you need, it’s time to head to the workshop and get building. You make literally everything out of wooden blocks, which will highlight green if they’re part of the blueprint. The place you need to put the block also highlights green, so it’s very paint by numbers. Speaking of painting, that’s one of the uses of essences. You can also place them on what you already built as objects, but painting is a bit more fun. You’ll probably have to do a bit of both, as a client usually wants more essences in an object than there are blocks to paint.

Once the object is done, you can deliver it to the client, placing it wherever you want in their house/place of business. You keep doing this over and over, occasionally moving in new residents by building them houses in a similar process (though without essences and more freeform), with each star level unlocking more areas in the town. Once you reach five stars, the game is essentially over, but you can keep building things and customizing everything to your liking.

I played MySims as a kid, being one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, so I thought revisiting the game through the Cozy Bundle would be a fun, nostalgic experience. As I started playing, however, I started to remember finding the game pretty boring and tedious over the 13 or so hours it takes to finish. Maybe I’m just the kind of person who needs something more goal oriented rather than a make your own fun type of game, but even then I feel like there were and are much better options out there.

This Switch port itself, however, is a great step up from the Wii. I remember the original game having lengthy loading screens, and they’re incredibly short here. Using the right stick as a pointer can be incredibly clunky, but the game also supports touch controls, arguably making things even more convenient than the Wii Remote. The game looks great as well, with the art style and characters transitioning well to HD. It’s a great remaster/port, but for a game I don’t see myself playing any more.

MySims Kingdom is one of those games that is a gem that everyone seemed to own in the prime days of the Wii. I was always desperate to play its adult counterpart, The Sims, on the computer, but my family never had one growing up, hence, I used MySims as a substitute. Despite its limitations and much more childlike appearance and gameplay, its charm and adventure are just as strong. I hold a lot of nostalgia for this game in how I used to use games as my own little worlds that I could live in. Instead of actually playing the game as intended, I would roleplay as my character and pretend I lived there, sleeping when it became night, eating, and talking with characters. I don’t think I ever moved past its 3rd world, Rocket Reef, which is hilarious in hindsight due to the game having so much more to offer past that point. So how does it hold up when played properly?

MySims Kingdom, as a successor to MySims, makes leaps and bounds in what it’s going for. For me, MySims was lacking in concept, and I got bored fairly quickly. This was primarily due to being contained in one town and the repetitive furniture building system. There was only so much you could do before it became a slog. In response to this, they ramped up the fun up to 100 in the variety Kingdom has to offer. After a pretty quick tutorial, you end up being anointed as King Roland’s Royal Wandolier and are tasked to venture out into the world to help its citizens with their problems. You’re accompanied by your loveable and comical guides, Lyndsay and Buddy who are MySims icons at this point. MySims Kingdom doesn’t bog you down with dialogue and tutorials and lets you loose within the first half an hour of gameplay, which was very much needed due to how simple the gameplay is. The world map opens up, and you’re often given a few places to choose from to explore at a time, making it pretty non-linear.

The worlds and their citizens are the focal point of Kingdom, and after finishing them all, I’m impressed at how much I liked each one. Some take longer to complete than others, but each of their storylines are incredibly quirky and hilarious to unfold. You have the likes of Spookane, where you help a goth boy find meaning in his existence by helping Grandma with starting her cookie business, and Rocket Reef, where you help a robot open his own diner and a janitor to become an astronaut. They’re all short and snappy concepts that are boosted by the characters involved, as they’re all completely unserious and over the top. This is paired with fun and creative worlds that all have their staple look and unique collectibles to find.

In contrast to its strong style and fun, unique characters and worlds, MySims Kingdom often falls a bit flat in its gameplay and often left me longing for something more substantial. Its core building system is relatively versatile; you begin the game with limited options, and the game allows for creative freedom in some of its missions. They all give you conditions to meet, which is simply using a certain amount of items in a category. However, sometimes this game hits you with a brick wall in insisting that you fill in the provided gaps of items they want you to use. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I never saw a reason for limiting the player in this way. Furthermore, despite the freedom you do get with items, as each world is extremely characterized, the furniture you unlock matches its aesthetic, consequently limiting the player to mixing and matching furniture in different worlds. You do get a catalogue of basic items, but the game steers you towards using a world’s specific items when building.

In order to create furniture, you are given a scroll with materials you must gather. These materials can be found in the overworld, from fruits on trees to ore you can mine and fish you can catch. You pair these with Mana, a currency to build items that you simply collect whilst doing the following activities. I never really had trouble having enough mana, but if you are struggling, Lyndsay can transmute items in exchange for mana.

Each world has its own unique set of materials to find but mostly falls into the same three actions. Catching fish, mining ore, digging up treasure, and shaking/chopping trees. These can get very repetitive, and I can understand why it would put people off, but I treated MySims Kingdom as a brain-turned-off kind of game due to its collectathon nature. If you embrace this type of gameplay, there are hours to be spent in this game.

Other quests act as a completionist guide, from catching all the fish, finding every world’s own unique flower, and collecting every figurine. Mind-numbing gameplay, yes, but pop a Youtube video on whilst playing, and it’s a good time consumer. I found myself unconsciously 100%ing this game as it always gave me new scrolls and quests to complete. It also reels you back into past worlds you explore as King Roland notifies you halfway through the game that previously met characters may have new quests for you to complete. These are very simple quests; mind you, they are normally just improving already built structures.

Finally, MySims has its engineering system, which consists of powering electricity and water through wind energy—progressive for 2008. You link up wires, pipes, and cogs, respectively, to power certain items, from hot tubs to dancefloors and fridges. These parts of the games were fun and innovative to play around with, due to it being down to the player to figure out how to link the energy source and the item. The only problem I had with this system (which is down to me being a freak with everything having to look perfect) was that once you had assembled the line of pipes, cogs, etc., it looked super ugly and convoluted. I don’t really know how they could have solved this solution, but nevertheless I grind my teeth every time a final cutscene plays after completing a world, and a line of electrical wires is cutting across the floor.

To my delight, MySims Kingdom is a well-crafted port. In the Wii version, you would build by guiding your Wii remote around the screen, which gave me achy arms. In the Switch port you are given an onscreen cursor to flit around to guide objects into place. I never found this to be clunky and often felt good to use. This extended to placing items without the use of a grid, giving easy flexibility to placing items. However, I noticed that the port had some weird audio issues. Often, voices are either too quiet or too loud, both docked and in handheld mode, which can be jarring and a bit of a silly oversight on EA’s part.

Overall, My Sims Kingdom is a great, innovative next step for the MySims series and is now accessible for a new modern audience as a great port. Despite its extremely simplistic gameplay, which can turn away a lot of people, its charm and sense of adventure are contagious and allow for hours of fun if you’re looking for a fun time. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that, with plenty of customization to sink your teeth into and collectibles to find. Let’s hope this isn’t a one-off and that its subsequent games get the same treatment, I’m looking at you MySims agents!

Olivia is a small-town girlie from Wales (it’s in the UK!) who has loved Nintendo ever since she got her pink DS on Christmas in 2007. She often spends most of her time replaying Stardew Valley for the 100th time and delving into the world of Indie games. A recent graduate of Comparative Literature, she has realized her interest in viewing video games through a narrative lens, hoping to explore how they do not just exist as fun games to play but also as enriching stories to experience.

David is the kind of person to wear his heart on his sleeve. He can find positives in anything, like this is a person who loved Star Fox Zero to death. You’ll see him playing all kinds of games: AAAs, Indies, game jam games, games of all genres, and writing about them! Here. On this website. When not writing or playing games, you can find David making music, games, or enjoying a good book.
David’s favorite games include NieR: Automata, Mother 3, and Gravity Rush.

The My Sims Cozy Bundle will give you a nice hit of nostalgia and charm, but not much beyond that. MySims and MySims Kingdom are pretty simple and repetitive games, what you see is what you get. While you can make your own fun, it’s only within the limitations of each title.

—Olivia Davies and David Flynn