The old games you buy in Parasol Corp’s Cozy Game Restoration arrive filthy, and it’s up to you to get them clean.
Cozy Game Restoration. Credit: Parasol Corp
Cozy Game Restoration from Parasol Corp (solo developer Adam Stormhardt) is a video game restoration simulator with impressive attention to detail. The old cartridges and discs you buy arrive filthy, so you painstakingly clean them as rain gently falls outside your window. The problem is that there’s little to do and no real sense of progression.
You begin the game with all the tools already at your disposal. You have a cotton swab, a toothbrush for those pesky cracks, tweezers to remove stickers, solvent to clean adhesive residue, a tube of disc polish to fix scratches, a heat gun to dry wet spots, and a special light that reveals remaining dirt. Similar games let you upgrade tools or buy completely new tools to make your job easier, but here what you start with is what you keep. That kind of progression is sorely missing from this game.
The very first cartridge you clean looks like it came out of a landfill, and so does every one after it. The games never get any dirtier or more complicated to restore, so there’s no gradual increase in challenge. It makes the game very flat. There are plenty of games to collect, but cleaning the twentieth one feels just like cleaning the first.
Cozy Game Restoration. Credit: Parasol Corp
Cozy Game Restoration. Credit: Parasol Corp
The restoration itself lacks tactility. The toothbrush feels floaty as you scrub away dirt, with no resistance as the brush moves across a surface. I also don’t understand why I couldn’t freely rotate the games as I worked on them; they lock to fixed angles. It doesn’t help that the sound effects just aren’t satisfying. The lack of feedback only makes boredom set in more quickly.
The poor playfeel is shocking given how gorgeously realistic the presentation is. The games look just like classic cartridges and discs, and the level of detail in the textures and dirt is staggering, even when you’re zoomed in super close. It’s deeply disappointing that the game doesn’t feel as good as it looks.
The one exception is peeling packing tape from the packaging your games come in. Ripping it off was satisfying every time. Peeling stickers off the games was another thing entirely. For whatever reason, they stretch without ever ripping, and pulling them off was almost always frustrating.
I’ve restored a lot of classic games myself, and I had high hopes for Cozy Game Restoration. It’s truly a pity how quickly nostalgia gives way to tedium here. The visual richness and realism are admirable, but they don’t mean much when your game design is so poor.
Cozy Game Restoration
Cozy Game Restoration gets the look of old cartridges and discs right, but scrubbing them feels so insubstantial that the work quickly becomes tedious. There’s no sense of progression either, since your tools stay the same and the jobs never get any harder.
The old games you buy in Parasol Corp’s Cozy Game Restoration arrive filthy, and it’s up to you to get them clean.