Gouache Painting, Grief & Change: A Personal Creative Journey
It’s been a while since my last post, and I wanted to check in. Life has been busy, bittersweet, and creatively fulfilling in unexpected ways.
Work, Priorities, and Why I’m Not Gaming as Much
As a remote SEO content specialist, work has kept me on my toes. While I usually love unwinding with cozy and casual games, I’ve stopped buying new ones. With my husband still looking for work, I’m mindful about spending—a decision I am pretty sure many of us have had to make in “uncertain times”.
That doesn’t mean I love cozy gaming any less! I still follow upcoming cozy game releases, and when the time is right, I’ll be back with fresh recommendations.
Skittles as a tiny, wide-eyed kitten on the day we brought him home.
Losing a Furry Friend and Finding Comfort in Creativity
A more challenging part last Christmas and the beginning of this year has been saying goodbye to one of my seven, now six beloved cats. Anyone who has lost a pet knows the profound emptiness their absence leaves behind. My other cats have comforted me, each offering their own fur-coated unique ways of their version of love (which sometimes is suspiciously just like their annoyance. )
Grief looks different for everyone, but I’ve found an unexpected outlet in gouache painting.
Why Gouache Painting Became My Creative Escape
I recently started using a Strathmore 8×11 watercolor sketchbook, and it’s been a game-changer for my creativity. If you’ve ever been curious about gouache but weren’t sure where to start, here’s why I love it:
Forgiving & Beginner-Friendly. Unlike watercolor, gouache is opaque and rewettable, making mistakes easy to fix.
Rich, Vibrant Colors. How it layers and blends makes it feel like a mix of watercolor and acrylic.
Less Noisy Thoughts. I enjoy how, even if I am mixing and swatching or I do not finish, it can make the inside of my mind quiet.
I’ve been experimenting with soft landscapes, loose summer nighttime greenery, and even a few cat portraits. It’s been a great way to channel emotions into something creative and meditative.
Cozy Games on Hold (For Now), But Not Forgotten
A vibrant gouache painting featuring a sunbeam illuminating a path, moss, and a dead tree trunk
Even though I haven’t been playing as much, cozy and casual games remain one of my favorite ways to unwind. Some upcoming indie titles have caught my eye, and I’m excited to dive back in when the time is right.
I’m considering revisiting old favorites still in my Steam library for now—sometimes, the best cozy game is one you already own.
Embracing the Present
Life is a constant balancing act between work, creativity, grief, and financial mindfulness. Right now, I focus on what brings peace and fulfillment in the moment while balancing everything else. How have you been doing? What are you trying to focus on?
In this oddly cozy witch game, the sunlight seems perpetually stuck in early dawn or dusk within the forest. The shadows grow too long at night, and the air is too chill. The distant bleating of goats and the murmurs of shivering people haunt the air with each exhale.
This forest lives.
But so do the people in it.
Key points about Reka – A Cozy Witch Game:
Reka is a cozy witch game in early access right now on Steam.
It features Baba Yaga, a figure from Slavic Folklore, and you, a talented young witch.
It is labeled on Steam as an Indie builder and a single-player game.
I purchased this game for myself, with my own money, which I earned by writing official—professional?—making words for money through my day job.
I like the game, but the main quest is unfinished and lacks any meat to chew on.
The concept is fantastic, and I do not feel like I wasted a single cent if this means the Indie company, Emberstone Entertainment, gets to make the game they envision. I want to play more of it, but not as it is.
At-a-Glance 1-5 star Review of Reka
Keep in mind: I don’t expect this score to stay at this level, especially since it’s obvious it’s early access. I will probably revisit this and update the score once it’s official.
Graphics and Art Style: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Voice Acting: ⭐
Atmosphere: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Story: ⭐⭐
Concept: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Controls: ⭐⭐
Building Process: ⭐
Cooking Process: ⭐⭐⭐
Main Quests: ⭐
Side Quests: ⭐⭐
Cozy Witch Game Reka: Neither Dark nor Light.
In the misty forests of the early access game Reka, you play an orphaned child thrust into the wilds of a very earth-like forest. Supposedly alone, you hear the tale of an old, wise woman. Something about the stories, some good, some sinister—stirs something within you. While you inquire about this mysterious elder in the woods, you lend your hand to the villagers to help them with daily chores. A pumpkin patch needs harvesting before the frost sets in. A baby goat, too wiley for its own good, jumps a fence and plays too close to a well. It is simple hand work that you do, yet it helps immensely before the threat of a long, cold, dark winter settles in.
You find out more and more about the old woman in the woods as you help villagers and they warm up to you, until someone finally directs you to a seemingly cozy cottage. It looks like a simple weather-worn triangle against a blue sky and grey-green pines. You hear the chickens clucking joyfully in the front yard and find the lands around the cottage rich with planting.
You’ve found the old woman. Or…did she find you?
The Unexpected: Baba Jaga and Cozy Games. Together? Together.
While watching teaser trailers and peeking at screenshots of this game on Steam reveals this spoiler the moment you lay eyes on it—the two concepts were still unexpected to me. And somehow, Reka, this cozy witch game, balances this effortlessly.
You find—are called to find?—discover the Old Woman in the forest is none other than Baba Yaga herself. And she needs your help. The character (Baba Yaga/Baba Jaga/Yaga, and many other names), or one of three sisters sharing the same name, has her roots in Slavic Folklore. While the game’s interpretation of the mythical figure hints playfully and occasionally ominously at her somewhat darker nature (y’know, frying up children and eating them), she does not fly in a wooden mortar in this game. She walks on two legs and has a stooped-with-age spine.
Her head may be lowered by her years, but those things on her face appear glued-on or grown bone spikes. And yet, this creature from mythos seems surprised to realize she needs you. And she is further surprised by your skill, which she immediately recognizes as beneficial to her. However, our cozy game Baba Yaga did not foresee a tiny detail that made a minor derailment in her plans.
Building a Baba Yaga Cozy Witch Game Mystery?
She needs you to help her finish a very important ritual and spell. As you help her out, it soon becomes clear who this ‘mysterious’ lady in the woods is as she reveals her name and the purpose of the spell. The ritual or spell works, but she quickly realizes this power only responds to you now. With unsurprising slyness, she offers you mutual shelter as the two of you are without homes, with the bonus of teaching you all she knows.
And, as she teaches you, you just so happen to be able to build your home, craft furniture for it, decorate with crafted and gifted furniture, cook meals, make candles and—well. I assume a lot more is coming.
Thing is about Reka, is that it felt very early access.
Hello? Is There Anybody Out There? Nod if You Can Hear Me?
This unique (to me) cozy witch game with the most unexpected Baba Jaga casualness is glaringly not yet finished. Emberstone Entertainment’s game has built the foundation (see what I did there? Eh? Ehhhhhh?) for a fantastic game for those who want to explore Slavic-inspired settings with a casual, cozy twist of crafting, helping, and decorating. However, as of my purchase date of the game, the main quest is unfinished and abruptly short.
As I read reviews and searched further, many affirmed that after a certain point, the main quest just stopped, but the game will allow you to explore further now that you have your house. You can break through the mists to journey to other areas, but the maps are randomly generated, and the only quests that await you are small villager tasks, exploring the forest around you, and crafting. I am interested in the main storyline and where it goes, so for me, that meant I enjoyed this cozy witch game for the time I played—it just wasn’t enough to keep me playing for longer than a few hours.
Controls: I Can Only Call Them Finicky Right Now
I could have used my 8bitDo PC controller, but that didn’t feel right, so I switched quickly to the keyboard. While movement and general interactions were easy, building and attempting to place anything so far in Reka is…finicky. You have a visual guide of the piece before you as you select it before you build, but that flickers in and out or disappears. It also behaves very glitchy whenever you try to fit pieces together. This creates home pieces that go in every direction but the one correct direction.
The building and decorating aspect could be fun when it worked, but it wasn’t exactly a cozy vibe.
Is Reka, The Baba Yaga Cozy Game Worth It and Recommended?
Yes, but with an essential sticky side note. If you prefer a cozy game with a solid main quest, Reka is not ready to give that to you. I would enthusiastically suggest adding it to your wishlist and following it so you can return to this game and see what has changed as it nears its release. If you do not mind a game advertised as early access actually be, well, exactly what it advertises itself as–and you want to help an indie studio, then yes. If you can afford it and do not mind waiting as the game improves, it’s worth tinkering with.
I recommend keeping a close eye on Reka. It’s a beautifully different, cozy witch game with ambiguous vibes. It has a fantastic concept that I hope gets released with the developer’s vision and the story they want to tell. 1
1. All game reviews on this website reflect the author’s opinions and can differ from yours. You’re always encouraged to seek out gameplay videos and research to form your opinion on the best games for you and your budget.
Everafter Falls is advertised as a cozy game. I recently purchased it from Steam for $19.99 with my own real adult money. It is rated 2000+ as very positive, published by Akupara Games, and developed by SquareHusky.
You can play Everafter Falls on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows PC, Linux, and macOS.
I played it on my PC on my time off. Here’s what I thought about it.
Steam Describes this Casual Cozy Game As:
Rediscover the simple life. Farm, fish, forge and fight to restore the peace in an all-new farming adventure. Features split-screen coop, a helpful pet, automated drones, resourceful pixies, a card-eating progression system, and dangerous dungeons to delve into!
My First Impressions of this Cozy Game:
My At-A-Glance Game Review for Everafter Falls, a cozy pixel art game:
Story: ⭐⭐⭐
Quests/Tasks: ⭐⭐⭐
Art Style: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Combat: ⭐⭐
Controls:⭐⭐⭐
Music: ⭐⭐⭐
Everafter Falls is a cozy game about gathering, collecting, farming, mining, and defeating evil baddies within the mine while helping the people in your peaceful town. It provides a split-screen co-op option, but since my partner in crime and husband aren’t a fan of these games, I played solo and cannot speak to the features or gameplay in co-op mode.
After roughly 41.1 hours played, I have realized that this game’s pace is perhaps meant to be slower and more deliberate than most, from my perspective. I am not big into playing the market and amassing heaps of gold as soon as possible, so I can see where some fellow players, mentioning the leisurely pace of planting, watering, and growing, can affect the enjoyment of the game.
Story, Quests and Tasks:
The story is tied to your progression through crafting or item donation for various villagers’ needs. Villagers will seek items and your help to build items that unlock story beats and insights into life at Everafter Falls. But Everafter Falls doesn’t do a lot of hand-holding when explaining everything, what it does, and how to unlock or utilize a few things within this cozy pixel game.
For instance, I found the Everafter Falls Reddit forum invaluable for seeking information about crafting machine layouts, the steps to crafting, and how things worked, like pixies, which I relied heavily on.
Combat:
Combat revolves around and happens within the mine dungeons. There are four dungeons, each a bit tougher than the other. They are unlocked through cursed runes, which you will then work with a villager to remove the curse and place the rune on a podium, unlocking one of the four dungeons.
Inside the dungeon are valuable ores, stones, chests, enemies, and captured creatures to rescue, allowing you to unlock more health points or other boons for your character. To get better at combating the enemies and eventual boss(es) found in the dungeon, you will work to upgrade your sword, equip rings, necklaces, and other accessories, and unlock abilities for your pet and your eventual robot drone friend.
Combat here isn’t very complicated, but the process of getting your tools and accessories powered enough to handle what the dungeon throws at you is–you guessed it–slow. I enjoyed the rewards of combat more than the combat itself, but that could be my dopamine, reward-seeking brain.
Controls:
I have an 88BitDo controller hooked up to my PC, which I attempted to use at first. This is 100% my personal preference, but I found that a good ol’ fashioned mouse and keyboard worked best for me. It could be my age or other unimportant factors, but accuracy and not accidentally aiming the wrong way/digging the wrong hole/placing something one space off of where I wanted it to go was an issue with the controller I did not encounter with the keyboard and mouse. As the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.”
Hot Take – Fishing Mini Game:
I wouldn’t say I liked the fishing mini-game. That’s on me; you may enjoy it, but if you find it a bit too complicated or frustrating, you can turn the mini-game off in settings.
What Makes It Unique?
Craft special bottles, offer food at Pixie shrines (either built by you or the one in town), and pixies will show up. You can then capture these pixies in a bottle and assign them tasks according to their color to gather, mine, or speed up the process of crafting and resource gathering.
Your skills for many things and advancing them can be found in cards. You don’t collect them. You eat the cards.
You get drones through tasks or by building them that expand inventory, help gather, help water, and shoot laser beams at your enemies.
The opening animation for Everafter Falls got a bark of unexpected and amused laughter from me. I won’t spoil it, but I will tell you I assumed it would take the same route many cozy farm games do. You know the formula: you inherit a farm or feel tired of city life, so you take a bus and ride into the country.
There’s a bus involved, okay. But it takes you to Everafter in a way that is a bit different from the usual.
What made Everafter Falls feel unique to me was the addition of a personal pet, catching pixies and drones. These drones are available as task rewards, can be constructed by you with rare(er) materials, or can be purchased from the general store. There are harvester drones that will harvest your garden for you, watering drones that will water a section that can be increased by adding drone parts, and a companion drone that you can equip that not only will expand your inventory but can have additional features unlocked to make it a great battle companion with lasers.
Pixies can gather materials for you during the day, and once you go to bed, they drop everything they gather off near the shrine in town for you in a chest for you to pick up the next day.
Your pet, which you unlock almost immediately, helps you till soil and water plants and is extremely helpful. As you progress and unlock more of the game, you can also increase the amount of tilled spots and water and even equip an attack for your pet to help in the dungeon mines.
How do you unlock all these additional skills and attributes for yourself, your pet, and your drone while utilizing pixies again? Through cards.
Do you equip these cards? Nope. As I said, you eat them. Eventually, you can turn the letters your villagers send you into recycled materials, which provide a blank card paper that you can then spend cash to print them at a print shop in town.
Why do I think Everafter Falls Appeals to Patient Players?
You can play this game however you like, but it takes time for everything. Everafter Falls wants you to discover, grow, craft, and collect all over the map, with time locks on everything. Want silk to make silk ropes? Well, it takes your silkworms time. You can speed this process up by utilizing your captured pixies, which can also help you gather, but again, yep, that takes time.
What Did I Think about This Overall?
I like the slow pace of farming. However, once you get the hothouse to grow any vegetable at any time of year, you have a lot of space. And that space needs to be planted, then seeded, then watered. You do get help in the form of tiny pixellated robotic friends.
Regarding in-game cash, I find it takes several days and about three seconds to spend massive amounts of it. So be prepared to invest your effort into making money for upgrades, new cards, farm expansions, house expansions, etc.
The cards and getting ahead financially seem challenging because I keep squandering all my patiently grown gold in pumpkin stocks in upgrading tools.
You can gather:
Bugs
Wood, Light Wood, Dark Wood
Pixies in a bottle (sung to the tune of “Message in a Bottle,” by Sting and The Police.”)
Flowers
Wild berries
Mushrooms
Fish
Treasure Chests
Metals
Sap
Eventually, cook
Garden
Mine
Magical Jewelry with stats that make battle, growing, fishing, minding, and movement better
Drones that make life easier
Is Everafter Falls Accessible?
There are a few accessibility features that you may enjoy. You can tone down the colors, disable background animations, screen shake, and torch and lighting flicker effects, disable all weather effects, and utilize colorblind assistance.
You can make the UI larger, and as someone with bad eyesight, I embiggened my UI immediately; otherwise, I found myself constantly suspiciously squinting at my map and toolbar.
There is an easy mode that reduces the monster’s attack and hit points, but once you start the game, you cannot change it back to normal.
I am not hearing nor vision impaired, with relatively good hand mobility, so I feel that I cannot speak to accessibility further when it comes to these aspects.
Is Everafter Falls Worth Your Time?
As gaming recommendations for pixel art games go, coming from someone with a full-time job that often leaves my brain feeling drained at the end of the day, if you enjoy a game with many different parts that eventually come together with time spent in-game and out, then yes.
Everafter Falls encourages all kinds of gameplay. Do you like to min/max your playing style? Would you rather fish the day away beside a babbling brook or seaside until the silver stars twinkle? Does stubbornly insisting on having one of everything found, collected, and cataloged sound like your jam? Yes! Try this game!
However, if taking 7 days of in-game time to grow a particularly lucrative crop is not your jam, you may want to sit back and watch for other reviews that get into the technical weeds or wait until the game provides possible means to help speed that up.
Everafter Falls is a cozy game you need at least to put on your cozy game radar or wishlist. I believe there is still a demo available on Steam. I love that developers/studios provide them and encourage hesitant gamers who can’t make up their minds via gameplay trailers alone to get their hands on a demo and try it themselves.
Everafter nudges you to be cautious with your time, which, given everything, seems like a pretty essential and enjoyable aspect that may work for you.
As you may or may not know, I have a new job. I haven’t had much time to write for myself or play cozy games. So, it is time for my Cozy Game YARL (Yet Another Random List) review.
Beep, beep! Get in, Friend. We’re Going Caravan: SandWitch
Game Info:
I purchased this cozy game with my own real money.
I bought this from Steam. It is also available on PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox.
I used a keyboard, but it can be played with various controllers.
The At a Glance Review:
Story: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Quests/Tasks: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Art Style: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Combat: None.
Controls: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Music: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Do I recommend it?
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Yes, I do. This peaceful game encourages exploration, puzzle-solving, driving, and has themes of family and found family. If you need further convincing, I took so many screenshots. So. Many. Also, the music and soundtrack fit and are a delight.
What I Loved:
You navigate a planet that is not Earth. It appears to be a lonely planet with scraggly grass and wind-bent trees. You are returning to your home after being gone for five years. Your father lives here, as do a few stubborn humans. A resource-hungry cooperation has nearly stripped the planet and has abandoned it. They left behind factories, robots, machines, obsolete tech, and buildings. You remember how it used to be and wonder how it will be as something you thought well-buried in your past suddenly crops up again.
You play as Sauge, a former resident of said planet. You’re a pilot.
You eventually get to drive a cozy caravan van—it might even be a camper van. It was made by the last big tech company that abandoned the entire planet. It is the last of the working vans and is essential. It’s how almost everyone travels, and they rely on you to drive them.
You collect obsolete tech for town repairs and for yourself.
You get additions to your camper van unlocked via obsolete tech.
