10 cosy games for the British Summertime

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But our summer is a capricious thing and, when your sandals melt or the heavens rain down on your barbecue sausages, you may well find yourself needing an indoor contingency plan.

If that’s the case, we have you covered. Here are 10 games which’ll give you a cosy, dozy summer feel without having to slap your factor 50 on.

Bugsnax

If you’ve ever considered rescuing your picnic sandwich by scoffing down a wasp, Bugsnax has been made with you in mind.

Playing as a hard-boiled journalist on the tail of a missing explorer, you arrive at an island occupied by critters who are halfway between, as you may well guess, a bug and a snack.

There are 112 to capture and feed to others in order to progress - with punning portmanteau names like Shishkabug, Flapjackarak and Cinnasnail.

Created by Young Horses, the team behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch, the game seldom takes its tongue out of its cheek. If Rare had developed Pokémon in the 1990s, it might have felt like this.

Kevin Zuhn’s script has the same goofily dry humour, and its cast of muppet-adjacent characters - who you’ll have to interview to progress the story - are impeccably titled. In the course of your investigation, you’ll be happily acquainted with Texan ketchup-farmer Wambus Troubleham, obnoxious photographer Beffica Winklesnoot, and general practitioner Eggabell Batternugget.

Even though Bugsnax is suffused with off-the-wall wholesomeness, there’s a morbid secret at the heart of Snaktooth Island, but we’ll leave you to uncover it. Even as the story gets darker, the action keeps its dedication to silliness. If you can’t use a long summer evening to slingshot chocolate at a sentient box of french fries, will you ever do it?

Untitled Goose Game

A goose honking at a hapless person in a shop — Cause mischief in Untitled Goose Game. House House

Swans may be the property of the crown, but it’s geese who think they own the place. Untitled Goose Game invites you to step into the webbed feet of a particularly antisocial bird, a bird who can’t have a relaxing afternoon unless several others have been ruined.

Heartwarming cel-shaded graphics and short musical snippets of Debussy’s piano Préludes give this one the air of a leisurely jaunt - but make no mistake, your modus operandi is to be as mean as possible.

Over the length of about three hours, you’ll drop a bucket onto a punter, relocate a delicious lunch and cause a man to shatter his dartboard, to name just a few hijinks.

It’s cosy and it simmers with lazy summertime energy - but we can’t help but feel that it’s also a way to develop dark triad personality features. Rarely have we felt so morally compromised by a game as when stealing a small, confused boy’s model aeroplane and then doubling back to pinch his glasses. There’s no abuse like goose abuse.

Bee Simulator

If Bugsnax hasn’t fulfilled your creepy-crawly quota, there’s an even more low-tempo insect game to try. Climate change and habitat loss are famously making life hard for our humble Hymenoptera, so we’re on board with anything that gives bees a PR boost.

The ‘simulator’ part of this game’s title is a tad misleading - this isn’t an intensely detailed recreation, but more of a storybook version of beehood. To call its tone ‘twee’ would be to undersell how honey-sweet it is - your character’s name is ‘Beescuit’, and no questionable pun on the word ‘bee’ is left unexploited as you island-hop from pollen source to pollen source.

Some of the controls can be a bit bumbling, though, and moving up and down feels jerky at times, as though your bee’s just woken up from a long nap.

The best part of the game has to be the stirring, romantic soundtrack from Mikołaj Stroiński, who worked on The Witcher 3. The whole atmosphere is unbeatable for a sunny Sunday with no commitments, perfect for a chilled barbecue. BYO-Bee.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

Summer fun must be approached with caution. A family game of swingball can, in an instant, turn from a moving Enid Blyton illustration into the beginning of a bloody lifelong vendetta.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker may lure you into a comparable state of unstable relaxation. On the one hand, it’s frankly adorable, inspired by Japanese hakoniwa, small boxed gardens which often have miniature figures placed inside them.

On the other hand, it won’t give your brain an easy ride. If a toddler watches you play this game, twisting miniature dioramas so that a joyful cartoon mushroom can uncover their beloved stars, they might be lulled into an afternoon doze. What they’d be missing is the steam coming out of your ears as you try to reverse engineer Nintendo EAD’s intricate primary-coloured Rubik’s Cubes.

Even as you put your noggin to good use, the stakes are gloriously low. Captain Toad can’t jump, nor is he very inclined to move quickly. There is no Kingdom-ending danger here, as the yelping, fluting, whistling soundtrack will assure you. Captain Toad is just a fungus who’s up for a challenge, as we all should be.

Buy Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for Nintendo Switch from Amazon

Eastshade

It’s a great time to raid your savings and book a flight to any country which has rolling vistas more appealing than a Morrison’s car park. If your overdraft’s a bit imperilled, though, we can heartily recommend Eastshade, which will see you becoming an itinerant painter who’s shipwrecked on an aesthetically pleasing island, occupied by a range of bawdy animal-people.

The coast of Eastshade is a sedate one, and the activities it offers are as soothing as aloe vera on a sunburn: you’ll spend time crafting canvases, conversing with eccentrics, and framing your next masterpiece. The questing here has the feeling of the downtime in Majora’s Mask or the Elder Scrolls - you’ll be doing neighbourly, entirely non-stressful tasks like giving dating advice to a merchant, or painting a heroic portrait of a chicken, while wandering hallowed woods adorned with butterflies.

Eastshade is gaming as aftercare, guaranteed to lower your heart rate. If you’ve had one too many ciders at sports day, then daubing a portrait of a woman with the head of a deer might be the only thing you can deal with.

Chibi-Robo

The release of the Switch 2 and its accompanying online GameCube library has prodded a few undervalued classics back into the gaming public’s consciousness, not the least of which is the bonsai-sized android simulator Chibi-Robo. Sadly, Chibi-Robo isn't out yet, but we hope it will be soon, as it would be perfect for this summer!

At 10 centimetres tall, the titular robo is a half-pint-sized hero with a plug on his tail that will need the occasional charge to restore full vim and vigour. The story places this metal housekeeping droid to look after the young girl of a family, a little like if Robin Williams’ Bicentennial Man were shrunk to pocket-sized proportions.

In this case, your owner Jenny is a rather eccentric girl who only speaks in ribbits - and while this isn’t a work of gritty social realism, there is a little thematic complexity to the story as the Sanderson family’s ‘moolah’ problems become clear. To begin to sort out their issues, you’ll have to make do with what you kind find on the floor - a toothbrush, a spoon, a dog tag.

It might be too hot to do your real chores - but in this case, it can be incredible fun to deal with someone else’s.

Spyro 2 (Spyro Reignited)

Spyro the dragon with an ogre in the background — Just look at those summer fireflies. Toys for Bob, Insomniac Games, Iron Galaxy

Of all of this violet reptile’s wild gem-chases, Spyro 2 is perhaps the summeriest. Our scaly protagonist’s holiday is quickly ruined - not by midges, Ryanair, or chafing running shorts, but by the large-headed dinosaur Ripto, who plans to conquer all lands which lie before him.

There’s a Saturday morning nostalgia about this game, with its mild cartoon peril and heady surreal mixture of spelunking mice, nonchalant fauns and bumbling monks. It’s a sort of gentle Piriton fever-dream, so don’t expect everything to make sense. Why does the amply-winged Spyro need to learn to climb ladders?

No, this is a place beyond rationality. Summer Forest, the first hub world, is a demi-paradise, where sheep spring, waterways tumble on, and your dragonfly assistant Spark can, against all the logic of the food chain, eat as many frogs as they like. Calming exterior aside, Spyro 2 will occasionally test your mettle, like when it impels you to charge into several gyrating hula girls in a row.

You might think that the dragon’s name comes from fire - ‘pyro’. But this is a game that you can put on to steady yourself, a dragon world where nothing can go too wrong - so maybe it’s more like the Spanish ‘espiro’ - to breathe.

Bear and Breakfast

Bears haven’t roamed Britain for more than a millennium now, but they’ve had a long life in our culture. Sometimes they threaten, as in Shakespeare’s stage direction ‘exit pursued by a bear’. But usually they’ve become more adorable as time has gone on - think Paddington, Rupert and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Bear and Breakfast certainly subscribes to the cutesy model of ursine life. The title gives a big clue as to the game’s setup - you control Hank, a bear with insomnia who comes into possession of a B&B via a creepy shark he meets in the woods.

This is a management game that’s laid-back, even when you start to operate a small chain of wooden establishments. It’s not too open-ended, with a clear linear story which sends you on a raft of errands - like helping Charlotte, a witch who’s also a crocodile, who’s run out of charcoal lilies for her pickle juice.

‘Humans are wack,’ says Will the drunk bird, ‘I read it in a magazine’. Even so, they have disposable income, and if you’re serious about acquiring the bear necessities then you’ll need to run a tight ship as a hotelier. And all of it is very enjoyable, but why they didn’t choose the title ‘BearBnB’, we may never know.

Dave the Diver

As the sun gets more aggressive, many of us pine for the ocean. Dave the Diver is the next best thing - probably the most respectable ‘pixellated scuba diving/sushi bar simulator’ in the business.

The setting is the Blue Hole, a mystifying patch of water which morphs its contents and geography every time you come back for air. In these diving sections, you’ll have to collect fish for the evening’s service - via the most satisfying harpoon gameplay ever created - as well as constructing underwater firearms, investigating the civilisation of the Sea People and hoovering up bits and bobs for eclectic characters.

By night, Dave is a sushi server at Bancho’s diner - carefully sloshing green tea into the cups of expectant customers, building a tempting menu and choosing which stools go with which lamps for optimum profit.

This waterlogged game is filled with lapping waves, charming dialogue and shirts which might have been rejected from Miami Vice for being ‘too loud’. So if you can’t get to the beach, this is the place to jump in, head-first.

Spiritfarer

Summertime’s not all about whipping your shirt off at a Sean Paul gig - there’s room for a touch of melancholy, as Lana Del Rey took pains to remind us. So let’s set sail on a more reflective summer adventure.

A ‘psychopomp’ is the name for a mythological role which has existed in many cultures - it means someone who’s a spiritual guide to the afterlife. Anubis; the Valkyries; Heibai Wuchang - all of these figures offer to hold your metaphorical hand and lead you to the next world after your clogs are popped.

If this sounds a bit too morbid to be classified as ‘cosy’, you’ve not come across Spiritfarer yet. In this award-winning effort from Thunder Lotus Games, you and your delightful pet cat inherit the role of metaphysical ferrymaster from Charon. As you go, you’ll invite departed spirits aboard your boat, each with their own backstory to unravel and characterful minigame to unlock.

In charting the far corners of the sea and tweaking your boat, the gameplay settles into a well-realised genre combo of platformer and city builder. The art direction is sumptuous - warming, charming and redolent of your favourite animation from childhood. More than anything, Spiritfarer feels like an emotionally nourishing game - it’s like a long hug at a funeral, encouraging the player to embrace loss and to find the love behind grief.

George Orwell called Britain in summertime the "sleekest landscape in the world". As you adventure into the balmy countryside, he says, the cities fall away, "a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface".

We are an island, he reckons, of "railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows… and then the huge peaceful wilderness".

It’s not always possible to grab your pop-up tent and disappear into the summer, but thanks to the almost boundless creations of modern gaming, that heady feeling is only a few button presses away.

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Andrew Tucker Leavis