I feel like “cozy” games generally fall into two categories. On the one hand, you have cozy games that want nothing more than to be cute and cuddly, and that don’t challenge you all that much (think Catto’s Post Office from a few weeks ago). On the other hand, there are “cozy” games that use a wholesome veneer to mask something darker and more compulsive – games like Bear and Breakfast or A Little to the Left, where you have to perform a series of tightly prescribed actions and where any deviation is instant failure.
As much as Morgan: Metal Detective wants to be in the former category, I can’t help but think it ends up closer to the latter.
It has all the trappings of a cute, cuddly game, don’t get me wrong. It’s got a whimsy premise – you’re on a remote island populated by a bunch of quirky characters, and you need to find their lost items using a metal detector. There’s all kinds of cozy trappings – those characters have a very region-specific accent, and no one bats an eye at anachronisms like cassettes and a walkman that guide you on your search, and, of course, the fact you’re armed only with a metal detector to carry out your search.
As fun as it all sounds – indeed, as fun as it seems at first glance – it doesn’t take long before the forced labour begins. Searching for things with a metal detector is incredibly dull work. You walk around slowly, swinging the metal detector back and forth, waiting for its sensor to pick up a “ping” of lost items. To complicate things, the residents of the island appear to have had a compulsion for burying their trash, because you’re constantly digging up screws, pop cans, and all kinds of other debris – all things that set off your metal detector very easily. Finding specific lost items is just a matter of luck, and in the end you just wind up with a pockmarked landscape as a tribute to all your futile digs.
Weirdly, it’s not hard to imagine a world where Morgan: Metal Detective didn’t devolve into an endless trip of scanning and digging – it just would’ve taken a few less random items to come across, and you would’ve had a cute, relaxing game with fun characters and pleasant visuals. As it stands, though, anyone who picks it up hoping for a cozy respite will probably come to regret it.
Studio Morgan provided us with a Morgan: Metal Detective PC code for review purposes.
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