40 Best Cozy Games on Xbox Game Pass to Play in 2026
Xbox Game Pass has become one of my favourite places to find cozy games, especially when I’m in the mood to try something new without committing to another full-price purchase. There’s a surprisingly varied selection too, from farming and life sims to thoughtful indie adventures, satisfying management games and a few slightly less traditional picks that I still find incredibly cozy.
I’ve gone through the current Game Pass library and pulled together 40 of the best cozy games you can play right now. Some are genuinely calm and comforting, while others earn their place through satisfying routines, beautiful worlds, creative gameplay or that lovely ability to make you completely forget about everything else for a while.
If you just want somewhere to start, Tiny Bookshop, Stardew Valley, Mixtape, Kabuto Park, To a T and Spiritfarerare some of my favourites from the current selection, but there’s plenty more here depending on what kind of cozy you’re looking for.
And if you know what genre you’re looking for, you can check out these lists!
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More From The Pod
I’ve pulled together a full Cozy Games Directory with 200+ games across Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Apple Arcade and mobile, so you can easily browse more cozy games by platform or genre.
👉 See the full Cozy Games Directory
I’ve also created a Cozy Games for Mental Health collection for the times when you need something calming, low-pressure or emotionally comforting to play.
Cozy Life, Farming & Management Games on Xbox Game Pass
Tiny Bookshop
Developer Image: Neoludic Games
Tiny Bookshop is a gentle narrative management game where you leave your old life behind and open a tiny second-hand bookshop by the sea. Rather than staying in one place, you travel around Bookstonbury, setting up your little mobile shop in different locations and choosing which books to stock depending on the customers you’re likely to meet.
You’ll recommend books, collect decorations for your shop and slowly get to know the local community, with plenty of small stories and friendships developing along the way. It’s warm, slow-paced and has just enough strategy to make building your little bookselling business feel satisfying.
Disney Dreamlight Valley
Developer Image: Gameloft
Amazon* Physical Copies: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS4, PS5
Disney Dreamlight Valley combines life sim and farming gameplay with a world filled with familiar Disney and Pixar characters. After arriving in the Valley, you’ll help its residents recover their memories following the mysterious Forgetting, while gradually unlocking new realms and bringing more characters home.
Most of your time can be spent farming, fishing, cooking, gathering materials, decorating and completing quests for your neighbours. There are also plenty of outfits, furniture sets and themed areas to unlock, making it particularly good if decorating and collecting are your favourite parts of a life sim.
The Sims 4
Developer Image: Maxis
The Sims 4 is still one of the easiest games to lose an entire evening to. Create your Sims, build the home you want, choose their careers and relationships and then either carefully guide their lives or sit back and watch everything inevitably go a little bit wrong.
The sheer amount of freedom is what makes it such a good cozy game. You can spend hours building without touching the life simulation at all, create generations of one family or use the huge range of additional packs to tailor the world around exactly the kind of game you want to play.
Developer Image: ConcernedApe
Amazon* Physical Copies: Nintendo Switch
There’s a reason Stardew Valley remains one of the biggest names in cozy gaming. After inheriting your grandfather’s neglected farm, you slowly bring it back to life while becoming part of the community in nearby Pelican Town.
You can grow crops, raise animals, fish, cook, craft, explore the mines and build relationships with a lovely cast of characters. There’s always something else you could be doing, but very little that you absolutely have to do, which is exactly why it’s so easy to settle into your own routine and play at whatever pace feels right.
Starsand Island
Developer Image: Seed Sparkle Lab
Starsand Island is a bright farming and life sim built around escaping to a slower way of living on a beautiful island. Alongside growing crops and caring for animals, you can build and decorate your home, explore beaches and forests and get to know the people around you.
There’s a strong focus on creativity and shaping your own little corner of the island rather than constantly chasing objectives. If you want a traditional farming sim loop with plenty of freedom to wander, decorate and settle into daily routines, it’s a lovely one to disappear into.
Developer Image: Nagai Industries
inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories is a slower, more reflective take on the shop simulation genre. You step behind the counter of a Japanese convenience store, stocking shelves, serving customers and gradually becoming part of the everyday lives of the people who visit.
The shopkeeping gives you a lovely little routine to follow, but the real heart of the game is in its characters and the small conversations that unfold between ordinary tasks. There’s no need to rush or maximise profits, making it a particularly nice choice when you want something quiet and story-led.
Plate Up!
Developer Image: It’s Happening
PlateUp! takes restaurant management and turns it into something much more chaotic. You’ll choose your menu, cook meals, serve customers and gradually expand your restaurant while trying to work out increasingly elaborate ways of keeping everything running smoothly.
It definitely isn’t the calmest game on this list, particularly once the dinner rush begins, but building efficient kitchens and slowly automating your restaurant is incredibly satisfying. It’s especially fun in co-op, where half the entertainment comes from watching your carefully organised kitchen descend into complete nonsense.
Supermarket Simulator
Developer Image: Nokta Games
Supermarket Simulator turns all those ordinary little retail jobs into a surprisingly addictive management loop. You’ll order stock, fill shelves, set prices, work the checkout and gradually expand a tiny supermarket into something much bigger.
There’s something very soothing about the repetition of restocking, organising and watching everything slowly improve. The management side becomes more involved as you progress, but you can still take things at your own pace, making it a great choice if you like games built around routines and gradual progression.
Beastro
Developer Image: Timberline Studios
Beastro is a colourful cooking RPG where good food plays a rather important role in saving the world. You play as Panko, a young chef running an eatery in the village of Palo Pori, gathering and farming ingredients before turning them into meals through a collection of cooking minigames.
Those dishes also help strengthen the Caretakers heading out to face monsters beyond the village, adding deckbuilding battles into the mix. It’s a slightly unusual combination of cooking, farming, community and card-based combat, all wrapped up in a very cute fantasy world.
Planet Coaster 2
Developer Image:
Frontier Developments
Planet Coaster 2 gives you an enormous sandbox for building the theme park of your dreams, from huge roller coasters and carefully themed areas to swimming pools, water rides and twisting slides.
There’s a full management game underneath it all, with guests to keep happy and a park to run efficiently, but you can just as easily spend hours fussing over paths, landscaping and decorations. That balance between creativity and management makes it perfect when you want something with plenty to do but very little pressure to do it in any particular way.
Zoo Tycoon
Developer Image:
Frontier Developments, Asobo Studio
Zoo Tycoon lets you build and manage your own zoo filled with more than 200 animals, designing habitats, laying out paths and gradually expanding the park as more visitors arrive.
There’s enough management involved to give you something to work towards, but a lot of the appeal comes from simply creating lovely spaces and looking after the animals. You can even get closer to some of them through first-person interactions, giving the whole thing a much more playful feel than some of the more serious management sim.
House Flipper
Developer Image:
Empyrean
House Flipper is pure tidy-and-transform satisfaction. You buy or take jobs in rundown homes, clean away the mess, repair what’s broken, paint walls and gradually turn each space into somewhere you might actually want to live.
There are no frantic timers pushing you along, so it’s very easy to settle into the repetitive jobs and concentrate on one little task at a time. If your favourite part of any life sim is decorating the house rather than actually living in it, you could lose a worrying number of hours here.
Cozy Story Driven Games & Adventures
Mixtape
Developer Image: Beethoven and Dinosaur
Mixtape follows three teenage friends through one final night together before one of them moves away. As they skate, wander and get into the kind of trouble teenagers inevitably do, the night slips into playable memories covering friendship, first loves and all those awkward little moments that end up meaning far more than you realise at the time.
Music runs through the entire experience, giving each memory the feeling of pulling another song from an old mixtape. It’s funny, messy and deeply nostalgic, with a lovely sadness underneath it all about growing up and knowing a part of your life is coming to an end.
Developer Image: uvula LLC
To a T is a wonderfully weird and surprisingly heartfelt adventure from Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy. You play as a teenager permanently stuck in a T-pose, navigating school, friendships and everyday life in a seaside town where almost everything is slightly ridiculous.
The story unfolds through silly minigames, musical moments and plenty of surreal humour, but there’s a lot of warmth underneath the strangeness. It’s short, completely unique and has one of those soundtracks that will probably still be stuck in your head several days later.
Developer Image: StudioBando
SOPA - Tale of the Stolen Potato begins with the fairly ordinary job of fetching a potato for your grandmother and very quickly sends you somewhere much stranger. What follows is a colourful adventure filled with quirky characters, playful puzzles and a healthy amount of silliness.
Its Latin American-inspired world and soundtrack give it a lovely personality, while the relatively short length makes it an easy game to pick for a quiet weekend. Expect frogs, family, exploration and a potato that causes considerably more trouble than any vegetable reasonably should.
Date Everything!
Developer Image: Sassy Chap Games
Date Everything! takes the dating sim formula and makes it wonderfully ridiculous by letting you romance the objects around your own home. After putting on a pair of magical glasses, everything from your bed and smoke alarm to far stranger household residents becomes a fully voiced character with their own personality and storyline.
There are 100 characters to meet, and your relationships with them can develop in all sorts of directions. The premise is deliberately silly, but there’s far more character writing and genuine emotion tucked inside it than you might expect.
Ni No Kuni Wrath of a White Witch
Developer Image: Level 5 Inc
Amazon* Physical Copies: Nintendo Switch, PS4
Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a beautiful story-led RPG following Oliver, a young boy who travels to another world while searching for a way to save his mother.
The world has that unmistakable Studio Ghibli magic, filled with colourful towns, strange creatures and gorgeous landscapes to explore. Combat is a bigger part of the experience than in most games on this list, but collecting and training familiars, wandering through its world and getting swept up in the story gives it plenty of cozy appeal between the battles.
Hogwarts Legacy
Developer Image: Avalanche Software
Hogwarts Legacy is certainly one of the less traditionally cozy games here, but there’s something incredibly relaxing about simply wandering through Hogwarts when you aren’t busy fighting dark wizards.
You create your own student, attend classes, learn spells and explore a huge version of Hogwarts and the surrounding countryside. There’s plenty of combat and a much bigger adventure running through it all, but you can also spend an extraordinary amount of time discovering hidden rooms, collecting things, caring for magical creatures and decorating your own spaces.
Developer Image: Double Dagger Studio
Amazon* Physical Copies: Nintendo Switch
Little Kitty, Big City turns an ordinary journey home into an adorable little open-world adventure. You play as a cat who has accidentally fallen from their usual sunny sleeping spot and now needs to find a way back up.
You can explore at your own pace, help other animals, climb almost anything, collect ridiculous little hats and cause exactly as much trouble as you would expect from an unsupervised cat. It’s short, cheerful and wonderfully low pressure, especially if you happily ignore the journey home in favour of knocking things over.
Outbound
Developer Image: Square Glade Games
Outbound is a cozy open-world exploration game where an empty camper van gradually becomes your little home on wheels. You’ll gather resources, craft furniture and workstations, grow food and upgrade your van with everything you need to live off-grid.
There’s plenty of freedom to decorate and build things your own way while travelling through different landscapes and discovering what’s out there. You can head off alone or bring friends along, making it a lovely pick if the idea of a cozy road trip appeals more than settling permanently into another farm.
Developer Image: Thunder Lotus Games
Spiritfarer is a beautifully hand-drawn management game about caring for people at the very end of their journey. You play as Stella, the new Spiritfarer, travelling across the world in a boat that gradually becomes home to the spirits you meet.
Between helping each passenger come to terms with moving on, you’ll farm, cook, fish, mine, craft and continually expand the boat around them. It can be deeply emotional, but it’s also one of the warmest games I’ve played, turning a difficult subject into something gentle, thoughtful and full of love.
Unravel
Developer Image: Coldwood Interactive
Unravel follows Yarny, a tiny creature made from red wool, through forests, rivers, gardens and snowy landscapes inspired by the memories of a family.
Each area combines gentle platforming with physics-based puzzles that make use of Yarny’s thread, but the atmosphere is just as important as figuring out where to go next. There’s very little noise or clutter around the experience, making it a lovely game when you want something thoughtful, beautiful and relatively simple to focus on.
Fe
Developer Image: Zoink
Fe is a dreamy forest adventure built around listening and connecting rather than being told exactly where to go. You explore as a small creature learning the songs of the animals around you, gradually gaining new abilities that let you travel deeper into the forest.
Its world feels mysterious without becoming overwhelming, with plenty of space to wander, climb and simply see where curiosity takes you. If you enjoy games that trust you to explore without covering the screen in objectives and markers, it’s a quietly lovely little adventure.
Herdling
Developer Image: Okomotive
Herdling is a gentle adventure about guiding a group of adorable creatures across a beautiful but uncertain landscape. Rather than charging ahead alone, much of the game is about keeping your herd together, helping them through obstacles and slowly building a connection with the animals in your care.
The landscapes and sense of journey give it a peaceful, almost meditative quality, even when there’s something to overcome. It’s particularly lovely if you enjoy games where companionship and atmosphere matter more than collecting a hundred different objectives.
Keeper
Developer Image: Double Fine Productions
Keeper is an atmospheric puzzle adventure from Double Fine where you guide a long-forgotten lighthouse that suddenly awakens on a mysterious island. Accompanied by a curious seabird, you begin travelling through a surreal landscape and discovering what has happened to the world around you.
There’s no need for lengthy explanations or complicated systems. Instead, much of the experience comes from exploration, environmental puzzles and using the lighthouse’s beam to change the world in strange little ways. It’s quiet, unusual and beautifully dreamlike.
Cozy Puzzle, Creative & Satisfying Games
Kabuto Park
Developer Image: Doot, Blibloop
Kabuto Park turns a trip to the local park into a lovely little creature-collecting adventure. You explore different areas hunting for beetles, add your favourites to your collection and train them for cheerful battles that are simple to understand but still give you enough strategy to play around with.
It comes from the team behind Minami Lane, and that same knack for taking a small idea and making it deeply satisfying is here too. Cute bugs, collecting and short sessions make this an easy one to dip into.
Developer Image: Ben Esposito
Donut County is a silly physics puzzle game where you control an ever-growing hole in the ground on behalf of a raccoon with some fairly questionable ideas about waste disposal.
Each little level gives you a new environment to swallow piece by piece, starting with tiny objects before eventually dropping entire buildings underground. It’s easy to understand, satisfying to play and full of ridiculous conversations between the residents whose homes you’ve just consumed. A perfect little palette cleanser between much bigger games.
Developer Image: Dogubomb
Blue Prince combines intricate puzzles with roguelike structure inside a mysterious manor that changes every time you explore it. Each room you choose affects what might appear next, slowly turning the whole house into one enormous puzzle that you’ll understand a little better with every run.
It definitely asks more of your brain than a typical cozy game, but I found its quiet atmosphere and steady process of taking notes, spotting patterns and uncovering secrets incredibly absorbing. If puzzles are your idea of relaxing, this is one of the best games on Game Pass.
Powerwash Simulator
Developer Image: Futurlab
PowerWash Simulator takes an incredibly simple idea and somehow turns it into one of the most satisfying games around. Pick up the pressure washer and slowly strip layers of dirt away from houses, vehicles, playgrounds and all sorts of increasingly ridiculous objects.
There’s no complicated strategy and no need to rush. You just work across each job bit by bit until every filthy surface is clean again. It’s particularly good when your brain is busy and you want something repetitive enough to focus on without having to think too hard.
Little Rocket Lab
Developer Image: Teenage Astronauts
Little Rocket Lab follows Morgan, a young engineer returning home with one enormous goal: finishing the rocket her family once dreamed of building.
Doing that means helping revive the town around you, mining resources and building increasingly complicated machines, conveyor belts and production lines. There’s much more automation than you’ll find in a traditional farming sim, but the community around it gives the game a warm centre. It’s a lovely option if your idea of relaxing involves making an absurdly efficient little factory.
Tempopo
Developer Image: Witch Beam
Tempopo is a colourful puzzle adventure where you guide a group of tiny creatures across floating musical islands to rescue flowers and rebuild Hana’s garden.
Rather than controlling every Tempopo directly, you plan out actions and abilities that help them navigate each stage, giving the puzzles a lovely rhythmic quality. There are dozens of handcrafted levels spread across different seasonal environments, and the combination of music, bright visuals and bite-sized challenges makes it easy to play just a few stages whenever you fancy something gentle.
Cozy-ish Games for Chaos, Strategy & a Little More Challenge
Not everything I find cozy is actually calm. Sometimes I want a satisfying gameplay loop, a lovely world or something that completely occupies my brain, even if it comes with battles, tricky platforming or a bit of chaos. These are the Game Pass picks that sit slightly outside traditional cozy gaming but still scratch that same itch for me.
Kiln
Developer Image: Double Fine Productions
Kiln combines pottery with multiplayer battles, which is probably not a sentence I ever expected to write. You sculpt your own ceramic fighter, with the shape and design of your pot directly influencing how it moves and performs once you enter a match.
The battles add some competition, but the tactile creativity of actually making your character gives the whole thing a playful feel. Matches are quick enough that it never becomes a huge commitment, making it a fun choice when you want something creative with a little more energy behind it.
Pigeon Simulator
Developer Image: tinyBuild Riga
Pigeon Simulator lets you become an absolute menace with wings. You fly around different environments as a pigeon, knocking things over, bothering people and discovering just how much chaos one small bird can create.
There’s far less emphasis on progression or carefully completing objectives than simply playing with the physics and seeing what happens next. It isn’t relaxing in the peaceful countryside sense, but causing completely consequence-free pigeon chaos can be surprisingly therapeutic.
Developer Image: Local Thunk
Available on: PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, Xbox
Amazon* Physical Copies: Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X
Balatro might look intimidating if poker isn’t your thing, but underneath the terminology is an incredibly satisfying card puzzle about finding combinations that make increasingly ridiculous numbers appear on screen.
Runs are relatively short, the basic rules quickly become familiar and there’s a lovely focused rhythm to building a deck and discovering which Jokers work together. Add the dreamy synth soundtrack and it becomes dangerously easy to settle in for “one more run” only to realise an hour has disappeared.
Developer Image: Pinecreek Games
Winter Burrow places you in the paws of a tiny mouse returning to a childhood burrow that has fallen into ruin. You’ll explore the snowy woodland, gather resources and slowly make home feel like home again by repairing, crafting, cooking and knitting warm clothing.
There are survival systems to think about, particularly when heading out into the cold, so it isn’t completely pressure-free. But the contrast between the harsh winter outside and your increasingly warm little burrow makes every bit of progress feel especially comforting.
It Takes Two
Developer Image: Hazelight Studios
It Takes Two is a wonderfully inventive co-op adventure designed entirely around two people working together. You play as Cody and May, a couple who have been transformed into tiny dolls and need to navigate an enormous, fantastical version of the world around them.
The mechanics constantly change, moving between puzzles, platforming and plenty of complete chaos, so it can certainly be challenging. But the creativity, humour and joy of figuring things out together make it a brilliant choice if your favourite kind of cozy gaming is shared with someone else.
Developer Image: Kenny Sun and Friends
Available on: PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playstation
Ball x Pit feels closer to an arcade puzzle game than a traditional roguelike. You fire bouncing balls into waves of enemies, combine them into increasingly powerful versions and gradually discover builds that can completely fill the screen with satisfying chaos.
Runs are short and easy to jump into, while the quieter moments between them let you build up a small settlement that unlocks new benefits. It’s considerably busier than most cozy games, but the repetition and steady stream of upgrades make it incredibly easy to switch your brain off and play.
Developer Image: Tunic Team
Tunic is a beautiful adventure about a tiny fox exploring a mysterious world filled with hidden paths, difficult battles and some genuinely brilliant puzzles.
It doesn’t give you much direct explanation. Instead, you slowly collect pages from an in-game instruction manual and piece together what everything means for yourself. The combat can be challenging, so this definitely won’t be cozy for everyone, but exploring its gorgeous world and gradually understanding its secrets gave me that same lovely feeling of curiosity I get from my favourite puzzle adventures.
Wobbly Life
Developer Image: Rubberband Games
Wobbly Life is a bright open-world sandbox filled with goofy jobs, vehicles, shops, minigames and wonderfully ridiculous physics. There’s plenty you can work towards, but very little stopping you from ignoring all of it and simply messing around.
You can explore alone or bring friends along, earn money through odd jobs, buy houses and vehicles or spend the afternoon seeing how badly you can drive across town. It’s silly, cheerful and gives you enough freedom to create your own fun without taking any of it particularly seriously.
Egging On
Developer Image: Egobounds
Egging On puts you in control of an incredibly fragile egg attempting to climb through a series of increasingly ridiculous environments without cracking its shell.
Every roll and jump is governed by physics, which means one badly judged movement can undo an alarming amount of progress. Calling it relaxing would be extremely generous, but its simple premise and constant little victories make it oddly difficult to put down. One for people who find repetition and stubborn determination more cozy than actual peace.
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Burnout hit hard, but cozy games like Wanderstop helped me find calm and rest. If you need a gentle way to reset, these low-pressure games might be just what you need.