Hozy is a 2026 game developed by Come On Studio and published by tinyBuild. It’s a cozy furniture arranging game: you pull stuff out of boxes and set up your house. It’s part of the broader genre of cozy games, so-called, where there are no timers or points or strict win/loss conditions. These games are offered as spaces to inhabit rather than competitions to defeat, and the domestic environment often emerges as a key site of play. Within the cosy genre, Hozy is most immediately based on Witch Game’s 2021 title Unpacking, a soft narrative game about moving into a new house. In Unpacking, you unpack boxes and find places to put everything, and each new house has a slightly different set of belongings. The narrative, such as it is, comes from seeing those items change over time. As the character grows from a child into a young adult, her kidsy toys are replaced with books and college degrees. There’s a pink pig plushy who comes along through twenty years of new homes, getting older and more beaten up each time. There’s sort of a shock encountering the pig – because you don’t know what’s in each box, you’re just pulling out the next thing – and at each new house, you find yourself pulling out this pig that’s a little different, a little older, a little more frayed. It speaks to the jump in time, accentuating change and the loss of how things were before. It uses juxtaposition to shock you into a new present moment. The bright pig that used to have those shiny button eyes – it’s a little more grey. The ribbon around its neck has been lost. There’s a lot to say about Unpacking – maybe I should just be writing about Unpacking.

Hozy follows in the same vein as Unpacking. It has less of a narrative focus, and more of an element of cleaning – you come into these dusty abandoned rooms, clean out all the garbage, paint the walls, replace the floors, and then move in all your furniture. There’s technically a narrative thread, as you move through rooms relating to different characters who are all part of a family, or related or connected in some way, but that aspect’s not as prominent. Where Unpacking has a clear temporal progression through a grounded fictional world, Hozy is a little vague. It’s framed more like a cluster of memories. In the ‘Dark Music Hall’ level, you move into a loft space where a musician used to live. A group of mystical gnomes cluster around a freestanding fluorescent tube, and little markings on the wall suggest they’ve been waiting for his return: “We wait … come back please”. The temporal jumps indicate similarly that you’re moving through memories rather than a continuous world. The level selection area has a road with most of the buildings veiled under drop sheets, like they’re in storage. As you unlock each new level, that building’s drop sheet is pulled away. These are memory-spaces. In one level you see an artist put up pictures of his sister, and then another level is his sister’s flat on her first day of college, and another the treehouse the pair shared as kids. It’s a network rather than an arc.

Within the memory-space, the cleaning and restoration at the start of each level functions as metaphor. You’re dusting off old memories. There’s a softness to the renovations that tinges them with nostalgia rather than fiddly effort. When you paint the walls, you can’t accidentally run over onto adjoining surfaces. You don’t have to tape over the skirting board or windowframes. You pull up the old floorboards, but you don’t have to nail in the new ones. There’s a mountain of rubbish, but it all fits into a single 20 litre bin. The whole process is softened, sanitised. The few little wrinkles that are left in tend again towards the nostalgic. If you pick up too much rubbish at once, a piece or two will fall to the ground. When you’re painting the walls, your roller will run out, and you have to refill it. They’re gentle little details that add pace and incidental moment. They evoke the ideas of cleaning and renovation. That softness ties in with the idea of the houses as memories: you remember these places fondly, as idealised spaces. It takes some work to refresh those memories, but it’s sweet, idyllic work, not complex labour.

Where Unpacking focuses on narrative progression, Hozy is concerned with stuff as portraiture. Unpacking is concerned with stuff over time – it’s interested in what changes, what stays and what goes. Like Florence, it’s interested in how stuff fits into somebody else’s space, as when a new couple moves in together. Hozy is less interested in change. It’s a series of discrete portraits. The stuff that you see is broadly expressive of a personality at rest. The artist’s attic has tools, paints and sculptures, easels, a woodworking table, and then canvas chairs, an old radio, and a motorbike outside. There is a person sketched out by the collection of all these items. You can triangulate the figure at the core. Even the season sometimes contributes. The artist’s attic is set in autumn: you sweep up yellow leaves and set out carved pumpkins, evoking an artist who wears plaid and corduroy and smells of sandalwood. Each detail is an aspect of the hidden person. The room as a whole is a synthesis of their character. It’s environment in place of person. There is one marked moment of change – the father’s penthouse, where you switch off the monochrome flatscreen, clean up his empty booze bottles, and help him move forward into a new phase of life – but every other level focuses on a fixed moment of discrete personality. Stuff is the mediator of that personality. It is the artist’s ink.

It’s worth noting here the joint nature of stuff in Hozy as both symbol of character and product of the artist. There’s a display of skill in how the artists and animators manage the 3D modelling. It’s a display of artistic talent, reminiscent of the paintings of the Dutch Masters, where portraits of the wealthy were crammed full of stuff – symbols of the subject’s wealth, of course, but also reflections of the artist’s virtuosity and skill. In the sister’s apartment, the fridge is a satisfying lime green. The proportions give the sense of something cute and diminutive but not slim. There’s still a sense of the claustrophobia of the rented space, the packed New York apartment where everything intrudes. The childish purple desk, the adolescent’s battered piano, and the young adult responsibility of owning your own fridge – these aspects are balanced against each other to create a portrait of someone just out of home. They are, in their way, an artistic achievement: their visual design, their selection and juxtaposition, speak to the talent of the artists.

That focus makes sense given that Come On Studio advertises itself as a graphic design company. Their website is a highlight reel focused on UX and 3D art. There’s a point where Hozy is simply about the pleasure of modelling 3D objects. It’s about figurative art. Helen Molesworth writes in her essay ‘Work Ethic’ (collected in Open Questions) about the shift in contemporary art towards ideas and away from figurative painting, pointing to Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ and the genre of ‘readymades’, art objects that are not created by the artist. They’re everyday objects created for normal usage – like a urinal – and elevated into art by the artist’s decisions. Molesworth sees that shift as reflecting broader changes in society as large, as the loss of manufacturing and the rise of white-collar work is paired with the artistic shift away from painting as a technical skill and towards art as a “realm of ideas”. Duchamp didn’t make the urinal for ‘Fountain’ – he wouldn’t know how. It’s what he says and thinks about the urinal that’s important. Hozy, by contrast, is a display of technical ability. It’s not ambitious or dramatic, it’s not huge – it’s not the sweeping pyrotechnics of a Call of Duty campaign – but it’s modelling for the sake of modelling. The blurb on Steam tells you to “enjoy the little details”, because little details are really at the heart of the game. Hozy is about the skill and craftsmanship involved in creating its objects. It’s a return to the pre-modernist conception of art as the realm of the aesthetically pleasant.