When you think of a cozy game, what do you think of immediately? Farming, fishing, meeting the neighbors, taking care of animals; those all seem right! What about murder? No? What about otherworldly murder? Well, Grave Seasons combines cozy farming simulators with horrifying murder mysteries for you to solve.
You start your journey on a boat, making your way to the island where your new farm is located. When you arrive, you spend one night in your house and wake to meet a nice neighbor who gives you some carrot seeds and says he’s a little shocked to see someone has already moved into the house after what happened to the previous owner. What happened, you might ask, to no answer right away.
The demo was only 20 minutes, but I got a great look at two different vibes. The everyday cozy game style gameplay, and then the dark and gritty murder mystery. The cozy farming simulator has everything you need. Farming of all kinds, including crops that can only be planted in specific areas of your farm. Tree cutting to get wood. Mining to get minerals. The stuff you’d generally expect is all there and works exactly how you want it to if you’ve played other cozy games.
Meanwhile… We got to walk in on a crime scene where a character (I won’t say who, so as not to spoil it) was brutally murdered. Using the TAB button, you’re able to see everything you can interact with, which is VERY nice to have in a game like this one. I found some clues, and they were added to a journal that will be where you will keep track of everything you find, as well as the beginnings of how they might connect to people in the town.
The art is adorably cute, and this “I can fix him” simulator puts you in the driver's seat to figure out who might be murdering people and WHAT they might be as well. The character models are adorable, and the full art follows suit. I found characters off the bat that I did and didn’t trust from their first interaction, as some come off worse than others.
You can not only stop murders from happening, but if you take too long, the murderer will just keep killing people. Terrifying, right? It’s up to YOU to stop them. Do you have it in you to track down a killer? Or will you fall in love with them?
Even though the demo was short, I really enjoyed getting a glimpse of the vibe of the newest game from Blumhouse Games, which has become a yearly occurrence for me at Summer Game Fest! They really know how to pick their developers, and each one I’ve played has been wildly different while still being iconically horror.
You can get Grave Seasons on August 14th, 2026, on XSX, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Steam!
