Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games - Persona 5
When Cozy games don't quite work for you, there are always other options.
Today I start a new series about how I, and probably many others, find comfort in games that don't usually qualify as cozy/comfort games. They can be dark, dramatic, filled with some really depressing themes, but if you play them over and over and find comfort in them, they become your own cozy games. This will be a multi-part series where I go over several different games that I personally am attached to and then in the final article I will go over why all of this matters and why comfort in games is subjective and that's okay.
Introduction
There's a genre that has flourished in recent years, or even a decade, the Cozy Game. This is a genre that I'm sure all of you know, one where you are doing simple more mundane tasks in a cute environment that allow you to kinda turn your brain off and just enjoy the cute, basic task filled experience. It's something I've never actually gotten into before. I'm just not super interested in doing things I could do very easily in real life, like going outside and tending my garden, making sure my peppers are all watered and growing.
That doesn't mean I don't have comfort games, however. I just don't find comfort in Cozy games. What I do find comfort in is the same kind of comfort I gain from movies and TV shows. Comfort in already knowing what happens in a story with characters that I care about and enjoy. This article is not meant to trash Cozy games, of course, I'm glad people are able to enjoy them. No, this is about going over what games I find cozy. What games I find comfort in when I'm having a rough time. That I go back to around once per year to re-experience.
Today we discuss the game that I have played far too many times ( and also recently wrote a small blurb about it in a massive multi-writer collaboration with Harrison Polites of Infinite Lives about videogame music found here), Persona 5 Royal.
Enter the Metaverse
Persona 5 Royal, for those of you who have never gotten around to playing it, is about a group of teens who fight to fix the corrupt system before them. They do this by going into a metaverse that allows them to infiltrate Palaces of corrupt adults who have had their desires take them over and have started to punish and influence the real world around them far more than the average asshole. Think Elon Musk.
Royal has such a wonderful basis behind it, it has this idea of the metaverse being a parallel world that exists alongside our own at its core and that world is so intriguing. The game came out after things like a Metaverse had entered the cultural lexicon so it took this idea that many had become familiar with, and turned it into something new.
More so, it took a very real feeling that the world, the system itself, is broken. It takes the feeling that many people have where they just desperately want to be able to impact the world, to fix it, to change it for the better even if it's not going to be perfect. Royal is capable of doing this because of its underlying anarchist and revolutionary themes. It introduces core concepts of those without diving into depth about them like a political science class would do. Instead, it draws you down the path of those ideas along with the kids.

It introduces you to the idea that power corrupts and that we shouldn't trust those with it in the first bad guy you meet, Kamoshida. It introduces the idea that maybe we need to overthrow the established order because it's broken when it gives you the mob boss bad guy, Kaneshiro. The game is also based around the very anarchist idea of thinking local first. The Phantom Thieves, the name for the group of teens, start with improving their school and then work bigger. Eventually they're changing the entire government because of their actions and those they are changing the hearts of.
The game is filled with political themes and ideas that don't make themselves known unless you know about them already. You're not getting Morgana, the anthropomorphic cat, going "Joker, we should overthrow the established structure of society because it's broken and doesn't deserve to survive." Instead it teaches you about these ideas at the same time the group is learning about them. It makes you feel for these characters and, consequentially, identify with the ideas and desires that fuel them. The fact that those things adhere to anarchist and revolutionary themes is all subtext.
Note: Anarchism is a very complicated ideology and isn't the idea of just pure chaos as some think. It's more akin to simply localized collectives working together for the greater good of the many. This is why you can be an anarchist and still believe in having universal free healthcare, or roads. I'm personally not an anarchist though so I can't do the best at arguing their ideas as I could my own ideology.
Okay, but why is a Comfort game for you?
This is a question that came up recently because of my partner talking about how I should keep playing something new instead of starting a new Persona 5 Royal playthrough like I had done (because the music blurb I wrote had gotten me in the mood for it). Surprisingly, it's a lot more complex than just a simple "I like it".
Let's first look at comfort television, specifically, we are going to look at one of my favorite shows to watch, Psych. It's a murder mystery show with fake Psychic Shawn Spencer solving mysteries and crimes with his BFF Gus. Many people like murder mysteries but why is Psych so damn good?
It's simple. Because it mixes predictability, drama, and comedy. Plenty of murder mysteries have the first two but few have comedy. Psych is comfort television because you know that Shawn and Gus almost always get the bad guy. They manage to solve the mystery, do the cops jobs for them, and mix in some fun jokes and bits before the credits roll. The show is comfort because it's fun to watch no matter how many times you've seen the episodes.
Back to P5R, you can apply these same aspects. You have a mix of predictability (the Phantom Thieves will almost always figure out what is wrong with the bad guy and will steal their treasure and change their heart and they will change the world), drama (there are dark moments where the gang has issues arise that put them at risk and make you worried something might not quite turn out for them), and comedy (the team are still teens and make jokes, have lunch/dinner together, have parties, celebrate holidays, and just have fun teenage moments that lighten the mood even if they're going through heavy moments). P5R is so comforting because you get to experience all of these things, you get to know that these things are not going to go too wrong. That, despite having depressing and dark moments, things aren't going to absolutely fall apart and destroy the world around them.
You're not answering my question, why is it a comfort game for you??
Alright fine, if you're really going to twist my arm about this and make me stop gushing about the things that just work for the games comfort in general, I'll tell you why it's a comfort game for me.
Have you seen the world right now? Especially if you're neurodivergent or queer? Yeah, it kinda fucking sucks. P5R is a game that takes a world filled with corruption that we've already discussed, mixes in the themes we've already discussed, and then let's you have an impact which we've already discussed. Having the feeling of being influential. Going from being filled with the feeling of helplessness to feeling like you're capable of changing the world even just a little. It's a wonderful feeling.
P5R is a game that is capable of making you feel powerful and influential in a time when so few people are powerful and influential. So when it becomes a comfort game, when you've played it 5 times, you start to feel the same way each time. You start to be comforted that the world is capable of being improved even through incremental change. You get comforted with knowing how it'll all end and that maybe, just maybe, you can retake your own personal power back from those that have taken it away from you.
Add in that Persona 5 is also a really important game for me. It came out at the exact right time. For those that don't know, I have MS, a neurological disease that really fucks with my ability to walk (although I've been stable for a while and walk without problems now even if I use a cane just in case). I went through multiple periods, over several years, of being in the hospital with multiple exasperations of my symptoms causing me to have significant issues walking and forcing me to have to retrain myself to walk despite the pain and weakness. This was fucking rough for me. I have memories of being stuck in my bed and having to use a wheelchair to even get to the bathroom. Of having to go to leg and arm group to exercise them so that I didn't lose too much muscle mass. Of getting shots in my stomach to make sure I didn't get blood clots while I was stuck in my bed for so much time in the day. I went through a lot. Despite that, I still went to college for a film school degree.

In 2017, when the original Persona 5 came out, I had literally just gotten out of the hospital after pushing myself so hard during my semester at college that I just ended up falling apart because of pain in my legs. So I'm stuck at home, dealing with increased pain and needing to do something to occupy my time besides just reading. Persona provides this in droves, my first playthrough took a whole month and then I immediately started it up again after finishing it. Persona 5 became a comfort game because it was there for me when I needed something most.
This is similar to what happens for most people when it comes to their own comfort shows. My mom finds a ton of British murder mysteries as comfort because when she was at one of her lowest point during my parents divorce, Masterpiece theater was always there to provide an interesting murder mystery story that was engrossing and always had a happy-ish ending. My sister finds 30 Rock to be comfort, or at least did for a time, I'm unsure if she still does (if you're reading this you should let me know), because when she was dealing with a lot during her time teaching English in Indonesia, 30 Rock was there. We as humans find ways to comfort ourselves when we need it.
For me, the original Persona 5 filled my need for comfort in the exact right way, providing me a feeling of friendship, of power, and of fighting back against things out of your control. Without it I would not have recovered as quickly because I would have been too depressed. When Royal came out it ended up being similar because I had just gone through a rough fucking break up, playing back through the game with the changes involved really allowed me to feel the exact same amount of comfort as I did years earlier.
I found comfort in a game that has seriously mature and sometimes depressing themes. It was there for me, and no matter how many times I play the game, it always will be.
The Conclusion
Cozy games, as I discussed at the beginning are meant to provide a feeling of warmth and comfort without any strings attached. it's meant to make you feel better when you need it. For some it's Stardew Valley that does that, for others it's smaller games like A Short Hike that do it, but for me Persona 5 Royal is what does it.
I hope this will resonant with some of you. I think it's important to know that not every game you find comfort in has to be a "cozy" game. Sometimes the best comfort is simply derived from games that were there for you when you needed them most.
Next Week on...
Persona 5 Royal is one of my favorite comfort games but there's another game that fits really well into the same idea. That was there for me when I needed it and that has allowed me to play it differently every time. That has allowed me to play as myself, a queer trans person. Next week we will jack in and talk about Cyberpunk 2077.
Meow,
Cat
Totally get imagining youre in Leblanc. It's such a cozy place filled with warmth, being there would be a nice and chill experience.
I think P3, despite it not having as much refinement as later Persona games, can definitely have a theme that resonates if you have an experience relating to death when you play it. Personally, I didn't have as much a connection to that one, but that's probably partly because of the less refinement that exists in it. But I'm still glad you have that as a cozy game! My first time playing P3 all the way through was with Reload and even though I had my problems with it, it was still a good experience. Even if it lead to me just replaying P5R and P5 Strikers.
This is a beautiful article, thanks for sharing.
I absolutely agree with the idea that a "cozy" game can be any genre, as long as it provides the warmth and comfort you mentioned. I personally played P5R just this year and it's so good, such a warm game bursting with personality. I enjoyed every second of it. I listen to its OST very often. When I hear that piano, I imagine that I'm in Sojiro's cafe, drinking his famous coffee.
Personally, my comfort Persona game is Persona 3, especially Portable (and well, Reload too). Like with you and P5, I played P3P at the right moment in my life, when I needed it. Its themes resonated with me, however bleak it may seem at first glance. It was my entry point to the franchise and I don't regret it one bit.