Collector's Cove

Cozy games appear to be a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to farming games. Since the overwhelming success of Stardew Valley, independent production of farming games has been ramped up (along with the spiritual predecessors of that success, Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons). 

Now, farming games need a strong unique selling point to stand out, and a lot of them still succeed. Rune Factory: Guardian of Azuma recently re-invented to decades old Story of Seasons spin-off with Harvestella-like gameplay and storytelling. Spiritfarer included heartbreaking narratives and a 2D building perspective with farming on a ship. Ritual of Raven took a coding-like approach to caring for crops.

Now Collector’s Cove from VoodooDuck, indie studio from Duisburg, enters the field. The studio self-publishes their second commercial title after Growth, which had been published by Assemble Entertainment.

At first glance, Collector’s Cove shares some similarities with Spiritfarer, albeit in a 3D engine. Players own a ship which is carried by a mythical sea creature, and both player avatar and creature can be freely customised. The creature drags the ship around archipelago maps, through which players can explore islands and exploit the environment’s resources. These in turn must be used to upgrade facilities on the ship and build new crop fields, upgrade tools like axes, shovels and fishing rods and complete certain quests. 

Two things make Collector’s Cove stand out tremendously positive amongst the crowd of farming games. First off, everything in the game feels perfectly smooth. Harvesting is fun, watering crops is fast, resource gathering feels snappy. A lot of care went into the game feel of the most essential mechanics: Collecting, farming, fishing and exploring. A lot of farming games have interesting mechanics around their farming gameplay, but fail to make the core systems feel good. VoodooDuck excel here, with the basic movement just being cleanly animated and fun.

The other great thing that will make me keep at it in Collector’s Cove is how cleverly all gameplay systems interlock. Part of the interaction with the mythical beast is a caring and bonding mechanic, in which the creature has to be fed mythical versions of fish and crops. These mythical versions have to be produced through certain actions while the crop is growing or during fishing. To find out these conditions, crops need fertilizer and fish need bait adjusted to each variety. And to find these bait and fertilizer variants, a certain amount of fish have to be caught and a certain amount of a specific crop has to be grown first. Afterwards, the fertilizer needs fish to make, while bait often consists of crops. For the crop fields, flower pots and facilities, raw resources are needed, and those in turn can only be collected by upgrading tools. To round out the circle of mechanics, upgrading the bond with the mythical creature gains players new skills, like time-limited blessings which collect more resources or more overall proficiency when fishing. Everything in Collector’s Cove is interconnected with everything else, and combined with how good everything feels, this neat little package of a game always feels pleasant to play and to achieve progress in.

Collector’s Cove releases 12 March 2026 for Steam, Epic Game Store, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5.