Published , by Josh Broadwell
Published , by Josh Broadwell
MySims Cozy Bundle is an odd proposition for 2024. The games market is crammed with cutesy life-sims and building games in a way that very much wasn’t the case in the mid-’00s when My Sims and MySims Kingdom – the two games in this bundle – first released. More importantly, they’ve improved on much of what the MySims games introduced, with deeper social relationships and more ways to creatively shape the environment around you. Yet that expansiveness is part of what makes returning to MySims and its small-scale take on town building refreshing, even if limitations define the bundle more than opportunities.
MySims drops you into a cute little Sim village that’s fallen on hard times. The residents are unhappy and lead empty lives, and even the once-thriving town square is but a shadow of its former self, lined with vacant lots and ruined buildings. The narrative setup was hardly original at the time and is even more cliched now, with the likes of Disney Dreamlight Valley and, more recently, Fields of Mistria adopting an identical structure. However, it works as justification to get your character busy around town, and MySims lingers little on the idea anyway. Once you’re in and learn the basics from the mayor, your task becomes making friends, and that means building things.
MySims is less of a pared-down Sims experience and more of a Sims builder spinoff. Character creation gives you a small handful of hairstyle and clothing choices and a few facial expressions to choose from, and that’s it. Your social options are limited to giving gifts, saying mean things, and saying nice things, and most of your neighbors have interests that fall neatly into six broad categories – things such as cute, geeky, or spooky.
What they really want from you isn’t friendship, but stuff. One neighbor needs a new set of chairs. Another could do with furniture for the local library. The hotel has some missing bits and bobs, and your friend down the street could really do with a new hi-fi stereo. When the mayor says you’re here to rebuild the town, she means it literally. You’re designing its new buildings, fixing problems for all the town residents, and tending to its natural life as well.
MySims might restrict social elements, but it makes up for that with a flexible building system that gives you a fair amount of control over who gets what and how it looks. Sure, you can’t get too creative with basic things such as chairs and tables, but you can liven them up with unique paint and add a touch of flair. The real creativity comes from designing homes. MySims naturally doesn’t have the almost overwhelming selection of furnishings and home styles you find in the main series, and it groups everything in those same six categories that define a Sims’ interests. It’s impressive that you can do so much even with those limitations, thanks in part to distinctive item designs, but also to the selection of scalable building blocks you can use to create a home and the area around it.
You also have complete control over where things go for the most part. Neighbor blocking your view? Shift them to the other side of town. Think the hotel needs a cute little flower stall ‘round the back? Plunk it on there. No one really minds, for the most part, so you’re free to make the town in your image. You just have to figure most of it out for yourself, since the building tutorials are practically non-existent.
You need materials to build things, or essences, to use MySims’ term for resources. Fishing, mining, chopping down trees, picking flowers – all the usual life-sim-slash-farm-sim activities are here. It’s grindy, but it’s also small-scale enough to where getting what you need and completing tasks never feels like a chore. Jobs are manageable, deadlines aren't a thing in this world, and you can do whatever you want, whenever you want it. It’s charming and easy to relax with in short bursts, but it’s not particularly memorable. Sims’ personalities are flat, and the extra locations – like Worlds in The Sims 4 – you can explore are basically just more of the same that you get in the main town.
MySims Kingdom is, essentially, MySims repackaged in a fantasy setting, though with a few improvements that make it much more enjoyable. MySims Kingdom casts you as a Wandolier, a magic wand-wielding construction worker hired by King Roland to rebuild his once-glorious kingdom. It’s the same setup as MySims, but EA leans into the fantasy flourish and brings out a sense of silliness that gives MySims Kingdom a much stronger personality. One of your first tasks as an official Wandolier is magicking up a set of shelves for Marlon the court wizard’s teddy bear collection. It may be a kingdom where magic exists, but folks still like to spend their evenings watching TV and behaving generally as you’d expect a MySims Sim to behave.
MySims Kingdom’s social setup is identical to MySims’, with limited opportunities to forge friendships. The relationships you do form are built on obligations instead of emotion, and the whole point is still to build things. MySims Kingdom tasks you with building bigger and better, though. Furnishings and other small-scale, indoor items come ready-made this time, so you can conserve your resources and Mana – used for paint and other building tasks – for the big stuff.
The kingdom’s residents are all slightly bonkers and have so much more personality than the townsfolk of MySims. One wants you to build an elaborate pulley system to power a mechanical bull. Another demands a disco dance floor in the middle of their front yard, which requires a complex network of wires to deliver power for its strobe lights and the DJ’s booth. It’s delightfully goofy, and the wildly different nature of your tasks is a welcome step up from the fairly same-y projects in MySims.
It helps that the world itself is more interesting as well. MySims Kingdom divides the sovereign’s domain into several themed islands, including a party island, the king’s administrative HQ, a nature reserve, a rocket research lab, and even an enchanted forest. It’s all the variety you’d expect from a Sims 4 expansion, and you can even make friends with the animals you meet while traveling.
MySims Cozy Bundle is fun in the moment, and I enjoyed spending small bursts of time on building projects or gathering materials. It’s just that MySims itself is really quite bland and hardly even feels like a Sims game most of the time. MySims Kingdom might just be a fantasy repackaging of MySims, but it makes the most of the foundation EA created with the first game and is definitely the stronger of the two in this bundle.
The publisher provided the copy of MySims Cozy Bundle used for this review. MySims Cozy Bundle is available now on Nintendo Switch.