I’ve gotten some pleasure out of a couple of tinyBuild’s games, namely Streets of Rogue and Drill Core, and I’ve been on the lookout for something new, so when I saw that I Am Future: Cozy Apocalypse Survival was on sale, I figured I’d give it a shot.

I didn’t much like it. Maybe I just don’t get along with the genre well enough, or I think of “cozy” differently than most people, but…

The first time I booted it up, it crashed hard enough that I had to restart my computer. That’s the only technical problem I had in my time with the game, but other players have reported crashing at startup or “every 30mins or so”, uncompleteable objectives, and other bugs. (YMMV.)

Then I got into the game and found myself on a building’s overgrown, litter-strewn roof; my first task was to get past the pile of trash boxing me into one corner, which required finding my detached cybernetic hand, which someone had attached to a backscratcher and left dangling from a nearby tree. Narrative WTFery aside, in game-mechanics terms this meant mousing over every little bit of cluttered level within reach until an object that looked very little like a cybernetic hand showed the appropriate tooltip.

Then, once I had two hands again, I had to pick up some junk to get access to a slightly larger section of roof and the next few tasks. One task required me to find the battery for a fridge, which was in a random little box amongst all the other junk; another had me disassemble a campfire and rebuild it instead of just relighting it, but first I had to break up some wooden junk for materials, and before that I had to do another mouseover tooltip-hunt for the rusty saw and dismantle a couple of other pieces of trash to be able to get to it.

And the movement controls were mildly pissing me off. I’m a PC gamer, so I shouldn’t be this irked by WASD and camera rotation, but it just feels so sloppy. It would have been nice if I could click on items (or on the open ground next to them) to move to them, as long as I was mousing over every damned thing on the map anyway as part of the core gameplay loop.

Meanwhile, the hunger meter was being a bastard. I wouldn’t call going from a half-full belly to the burning-muscle-mass stage of starvation in a day cozy; a better word would be overtuned.

And outside of a couple of slowly respawning berries and dandelions, you don’t have access to food or the means to grow food until you open up more of the map, and maybe kill a couple of leeches to get the ink to get the blueprint to know how to make a rain barrel to water the raised garden bed that you don’t have because you also haven’t found the bag of fertilizer that’s hidden amongst the piles of trash in the next barricaded section of rooftop…

I exaggerate only slightly. There is a slightly less annoying way to water your garden once you find the fucking fertilizer, and it involves finding a bucket in the clutter, finding the one spot you have access to salt water, and then using some of your limited wood to desalinate it. (Do the scrub trees regrow when harvested? They might, slowly, but I’m not sure…)

In hindsight, I might have screwed my playthrough by not using my limited gardening capacity to grind up enough Nutritious Salads to exchange at the convenient rooftop vend-o-mat for a hammer that I could use to break down more debris into resources… but I was already supplementing my diet with “biomass” and had no food surplus to divert to other production.

Oh, and there are also crop-eating giant leeches, which make the already bad food situation worse. And they damage you if you deal with them the wrong way, in case you thought this game was “cozy” because it didn’t have zombies or monsters in it.

Does this sound like layer on layer on layer of funless grinding under a punishing time limit? Does it also sound like a series of tedious hidden-object puzzles disguised as a farming or building game, with that same punishing time limit? Because that’s what it felt like.

Maybe it opens up and gets more engaging later, but since I couldn’t stand slogging through enough of it to get to the mid-game, I’ll never know.

I think the next time I’m in the mood for a cozy game, I’ll just fire up Minecraft and build myself another nice little fortified island. I don’t recommend I Am Future.