Things get cozy, cuddly in Wholesome Direct 2023

Very early on in this year’s Wholesome Direct, there’s a trailer that pretty much encapsulates the whole hour-long show. It’s for Pekoe, a game where you play as a cat and you have to build and run your own tea shop. If you were to watch the Direct with a bingo card, that one game would check off a whole bunch of squares. Anthropomorphized animals? Check. Management sim? Check. Puns and wordplay? Check? Tea? Well, duh.

Of course, over the course of Wholesome Direct 2023, there were plenty of other games that would probably also check off a lot of those same boxes. Mind you, with more than 75 games mentioned during the showcase, there was plenty of everything you’d associate with the Wholesome Games movement. While you can watch the full Direct below, some of the highlights:

• Frogsong, a 2D RPG where you play as a frog battling bugs and trying to find your place in the world
• Smushi Come Home, an open-world nature exploration game where you help a mushroom find its way home (in a game that looks awfully similar to Mail Time, if I’m being completely honest)
• Word Factori, a word/puzzle game where you start out with the letter I and have to figure out how to manipulate it into other letters, and use those letters to form words
• A Tiny Sticker Tale, the newest game from the creators of Lonesome Village, where you use stickers to alter the world around you
• Botany Manor, where you explore the grounds of a 19th-century English manor as you learn what plants you can grow — and what qualities those plants contain
• Flutter Away, a photography adventure where you take pictures of the flora and fauna in an Amazon rainforest and befriend a capybara

Of course, that’s just a fraction of the games that were mentioned during the Direct. There are links to everything shown during the showcase on the Wholesome Games website, as well as info on what platforms the games are coming out on (spoiler: lots of these games will be coming out on PC and Switch over the next year or so). You can also head over to the Wholesome Direct Steam page, grab some of the games that are already out, and wishlist those that are still to come.

Join Wholesome Games on June 10th at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET for Wholesome Direct, hosted live on YouTube! See the future of cozy and uplifting gaming with an hour of exclusive footage and announcements from 70+ amazing indie games!!