You know how fetch quests are often the worst part of a video game? Well I spent more than 150 hours playing a game made entirely of fetch quests and it’s one of my favorite experiences of the year so far.
In Cozy Caravan, you and your best friend Bubba, a bug-eyed bullfrog who speaks by repeating his own name like a Pokemon, take off on a lazy woodland road trip to help friendly folk with whatever odd jobs they need doing. It’s a simple setup that needs little explanation: Talk to critters, find out what you can help them with, then help them out. This almost always involves collecting something, talking to someone, or ferrying something somewhere. Completing quests grants stickers, which you can spend on upgrades to your caravan that allow you to traverse various obstacles or move faster. Rinse and repeat for dozens of hours, and that’s the game.
Considering how repetitive it is, this game shouldn’t work. Movement, especially at the start, is painfully slow, and until very recently, there was no quest log (the version I played didn’t have one). The mission types are limited and repetitive, and in a time where every game has a full-blown progression system, Cozy Caravan’s is simple and requires almost no planning or effort to complete. Three hours in and I’d run out of things to unlock. So why did I spend more than 150 hours playing it?
Game researcher Jesper Juul in The Art of Failure asserts that video games are inherently about challenge. Without the threat of failure (i.e., an experience devoid of challenge) the player becomes bored. By that reasoning, a game like Cozy Caravan with virtually zero challenge, no failure conditions, no time limits or missable rewards, and only optional side activities of marginal difficulty should have limited appeal to those who play video games.
This implies that a player won’t stick around to play something that bores them, which at first, sounds like a foregone conclusion—who wants to play a boring game?—but with some thought I know this can’t be true. Or at least not all the time. Any Euro Truck Simulator fan can attest to the boredom of pulling cargo across countries for four real-world hours, and hundreds of Elite Dangerous players log in every day to completely ignore the game’s flashy space battles in favor of transporting goods between star systems. Both of these games boast large, loyal user bases that have stuck with them for years.
I prefer the perspective of Olli Leino, who criticized the widely accepted notion that boredom is the opposite of fun. Leino wrote that profound boredom allows the world ‘to be experienced first and foremost as something ‘in which to exist’, perhaps only subsequently as something ‘to be played’, which is a fancy way of saying that there’s a level of boredom at which point you stop caring about the ‘game’ and start experiencing the ‘world’.
They say that people first getting into meditation find it hard to get past the boredom that comes with deliberate, prolonged inaction. Of all the things you could be doing, you’ve chosen to not do, and those infinite unrealized potentialities force you to reckon with the fact that, instead of literally anything else, you’ve prescribed yourself to a half hour of silent sitting. If you stick with it, practitioners say, something eventually clicks. You no longer dread having to sit still; you’re even excited for it. Only after resigning yourself to the eventuality of a half hour of silent sitting can you settle in the experience without being bogged down by the thousand other things you could be doing instead.
Based on this, there’s no better way to describe my time with Cozy Caravan than ‘meditative’. Cozy Caravan is reliable and predictable. In a world of Battle Passes and endless grinding gameplay, Cozy Caravan offers the luxury of a dead end—meaningless in a way that few games are. Sometimes boredom is a feature, not a bug.
