Transitioning from Competitive to Cozy Gaming Experiences

Competitive gamers often overlook the joy of relaxing, cozy games that offer stress-free enjoyment and personal growth.

### A Competitive Gamer's Journey into Cozy Games
* 🎮 A competitive gamer, known for playing titles like Rust and Overwatch, reflects on his gaming journey and the shift towards **exploring new genres**.
* 🏝 Introduced to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020, he initially resisted playing the game due to its **departure from his usual competitive choices**.
* 💰 The gamer's experience with Animal Crossing led to a newfound appreciation for **"cozy games,"** defined by **low stress** and a **cute, welcoming art style**.
* 🌱 Trying the game Dinkum with a friend, they found enjoyment in its relaxed gameplay, focusing on activities like **fishing, cooking, and island expansion**.
* 🏗 Progression in Dinkum felt rewarding without the pressure of traditional competitive games, allowing for a **more laid-back gaming experience**.
* 🔚 The gamer reflects on the need to **move on from his intense focus on competitive titles**, acknowledging the importance of **exploring different genres**.
* 🎥 He plans to stream a **variety of games** on Twitch, embracing a more **diverse gaming experience** beyond his previous preferences.
* 💬 The video concludes with an invitation to **join his Discord community** and **support him on Patreon**, while also promoting **Raid: Shadow Legends**.

so I'm a very competitive person, and so much so that if you were to sit down and ask me, Hey friend, what games do you like to play? the only response you'll get from me is me pointing to my ungodly amount of hours on competitive games: Rust, Sea of Thieves, Counter-Strike, Overwatch. Goddamn dude, like you hate yourself, don't you? Actually, never mind [__] that game. I know there's other games out there besides what I had listed on that clipboard, but believe it or not, I was actually a bit adamant about trying any other game. I wasn't always like this though. I used to play all sorts of games as a really young kid. I remember waking up at my cousin's house after a sleepover, took a little bath, and brushed my little baby teeth, had breakfast with the fam, sat on the couch, and whipped out my PSP to play some Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters or Little Big Planet. I'd share it with my cousin, and he and I would play for hours.

and looking back, those were the days. So where does that leave me now, 12 years later, making a YouTube video about a genre of game that I have never played in my early life, and all because shortly after the age of 10, what was in my hands was then replaced by this. Oh, hold on a second. Winter is the perfect time to cozy up in your home with some hot chocolate and also play a mobile game that you enjoy that's also available on PC. In this game, which is also completely free to play, there are over 800 Champions to collect from different factions, ranging from what is that lizard creatures, elves, Orcs, demons, and my favorite dwarfs. There's also billions of different ways to customize and build your Champions, so you can adjust them to your liking. You should also highly consider adding Torm in the Cold to your collection. He's my protector 'cause he's a dwarf and I like dwarfs. He's also really useful for dealing AOE and clearing waves of enemies, and Jorid the Breaker easily won.

of the hardest-hitting Champions available in the game. Very strong, and I also have them on my shelf, but my favorite Champion would easily be Sorus because he looks like me. I'm just kidding. I wish I looked like that. Also, check out these graphics. No bad quality here. And since it's the holidays, Raid also has a present for you to unwrap. The Curse City update is one of Raid's biggest features since the Doom Tower, with 100 stages to complete, including stages where you need to take down two Raid bosses at the same time. Complete its quests, and you can get your hands on a mythical Champion. Also, make sure to click my link in the description or scan my QR code. Only via my link, you'll get two epic Champions with my link. Not one, but two at once. First is Lightsworn, a very strong epic champion from the Sacred Order that keeps your team alive. And the second is Epic Juliana, after reaching level 15, an epic champion and a boss killer from the Sacred Order.

once you're in, you can come find me under the name Angel, and then you can join my clan, Angel's playground, and we can be Legends together. So hit my link in the description, and I'll see you on the battlefield, friend. I'll bring my Nutcracker. Yeah, it wasn't actually a phone that made me not want to play these; it was this, the good old PS3. Hey, what's wrong? And you want to know what game I love to play [ __ ]? Say what you want about video games not influencing children, but these are the only types of games I play now, and not once did I ever stop to think, you know, know what if there's other games out there that don't make me feel like I've just finished a 30-day Mr. Beast challenge, only to find out that it's actually not Mr. Beast, it's Nick A30 who gives you 5 million in v-bucks for winning. Cozy games were completely out of the [ __ ] question. It feels like

I've been trapped by the eldritch gods and have been indoctrinated into thinking that this is all there is. The cutesy art style and calm and relaxing environment here take this gun and start shooting people, be the best player you can be, and do it over and over again until you damn near cry. Get the [__] off Hanzo, you [__] suck. I've been trying to C Diamond dude F [__] competitive games can be really frustrating sometimes. I was getting tired of it. God damn it man, I got like a wife and kid. So in 2020, Animal Crossing New Horizons released, and it just so happens that I also had a girlfriend at the time. What game is that? Animal Crossing. I think you should play with me. Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing, the game about walking around and talking to animals and collecting bells to expand your village. This isn't something I'd play. I play Shooters. I'm not. I don't.

think I'm going to like this. Yeah, sure, I'll play it. Clearly, I did it for the sake of just spending some quality time with my girlfriend. I bought a whole Nintendo Switch just to play this game, and I was really tempted to think that this was going to be a terrible experience. But I was also tired of playing shooters all of my life, and who was I to judge? Who knows, maybe it's a good game, and I know that it is now, but I'm really stupid because I really wish at the time that I could have just played like a regular person. I ended up playing for all of the wrong reasons. How many Bells you got? Oh, 4,000. I got 50k. What's up? I'm about to sell more of these tarantulas. What's that? Donate bugs to BLS. What is that? Was there anything else out there for me? Was I just stuck as a comp dweller for all of eternity? No, no, my life is limited. I can't do this my whole life. I'm sick and tired of this. I

I can't. I need a game where I can just sit down and relax, no stress, something fun and colorful, a game where I can feel at peace with myself and others. I'm tired of screaming at the top of my lungs, so I talk to the gods. Please, please let me play something else. Holy [__] [__]. I'm tired of this. I want something different, and don't tell me to go outside again. I swear to God if you do. I just, just recommend me something else, please. What do you got for me? Oh, what is that? It's a little bit silly to make a video on a topic like this, but this past year, I genuinely was getting sick and tired of the competitive scene. It's also why I made all of my OverWatch content private and stopped uploading videos on it, and started making videos on games that I actually tried and liked a lot, and that includes even the ones that I thought weren't well suited for me, one of them being this cute little

game your little guy or gal on an island. The more you expand your island, the more enticing it is for people to move in. The more crowded it gets, the more stuff you get, and in order to buy stuff, you need dinks. Dinks make the world go around. This is your currency, okay? Be frugal with them, please. I'm responsible, I swear. Is that a [__] fly? Oh my God, it is. That was annoying. I wonder if I can sell you. How much are you worth? Probably nothing, but I'm so poor. I'll take anything at this point. 72 dinks. Hell yeah, brother. Let's go. Thank you. I'll be honest, at this point, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I figured it was like Animal Crossing back when I played it years ago, but I was so clueless on how these games worked that I was just sort of [Music] frozen. Okay, so why have one person on an island when you can have two people?

on an island. What's up, my brother? How you doing, my brother in Christ? What's up? Uh, I think the point of the game is that cannot take your character seriously. I think the point of the game is to get money. I think that's what that. I think that's what it is. That's the point of every single game, bro. Oh my God, we're [__] progress. Yeah, not a good idea to invite someone who not only doesn't play these games either but is also completely erratic and needs to constantly be doing something. And my assumption right off the bat was that he was going to get bored of the game real fast. Okay, so get some fruit and sell that to get perk points. This isn't to say that the game was bad. It was just not something both of us were used to, you know what? It's actually also really funny because the game actually started to pick up for us the moment we found out that we could kill things. I can kill one hit. Nice. All right, let's kill the

children now but safe to say that we made progress in the game. Though I had no clue what type of progress it was, but it was progress nonetheless. Come here, Jen. I made you a table saw. You can use it to dude. You literally deforested everything around us. Holy [__] true American, true American. Who needs the Amazon if we have Amazon, am I right? A what a cute family photo. And it was at this point that Jan started to mess around with some settings. Hey yo dude, do you hear me? Do you hear me in proximity? Yeah, I do. Let's do voice activation. You oh my God, my mouth even moves. My MTH moves, not my idea. And I wasn't too fond of it either because I could barely hear him, but I didn't have the heart to tell him because he wanted to use it so badly. Actually, do you want to craft the hammer instead? The hammer does more damage. It's I read. Okay, bye. Regardless, everything was going pretty good. I got a mining license.

which allows for the ability to mine minerals in the world, which then in turn allows me to build tools or create more materials, all for the purpose of expanding your little island and putting some fashionable decorations. What the [ __ ] Jan made a hammer and decided to kill everything he saw in sight, and then I decided that I wanted to actually expand my island, upgrade John the shopkeeper's home from a measly tent to a store. But in order for me to do that, I needed money, money that I didn't have, and materials that I also didn't have. So I went fishing. I fished a little bit and sold the fish for dinks because I was broke. 950 dinks, only freaking scam. And then Jan told me to go to sleep for the next day, but then I found a fossil that we couldn't figure out how to sell. Dude, look at this [ __ ] [Laughter]. Bro, there's a huge difference in pacing when it comes to these types of games that I'm not used to, and when I say

these types I'm referring to a cozy game, which if you take a look at the tags for Dinkum, it's not there because the term doesn't actually exist on Steam. When someone talks about a cozy game, what they're really referring to is a game that allows for comfortability, something stress-free with usually cute and welcoming art style and setting, which can be defined differently from person to person. Who knows, maybe Terraria fits in that category for you. They're mostly designed to be for everybody, to have a low barrier of entry, as opposed to the stressful and skill-hungry setting that a shooter most of the time offers. A lot of people don't really want to sink hundreds of hours on a video game to progress. You can spend all day playing Counter-Strike to try and rank up, and the only progress you'll make is going from Silver 4 to Silver 2. I lied, you've made no progress. As a matter of fact, the only progress you've made is getting one step closer to an aneurysm. Dinkum doesn't do that. It makes

you feel like you're being productive, regardless of what you're doing. And even if you aren't being productive, it's still really fun to just do anything, even if that means sitting around and cooking food you collected on the campfire and listening to the sound of it cooking, or doing your in-game daily milestones to collect license points to save up for that building license you wanted, or diving into the ocean to find shiny pearls to turn a profit at the shop later. It's really refreshing to play a game where I can just sit down and know that I don't have to worry about losing all of my items or worrying about what the next objective is to progress. And there's obviously progression, but it's not shoved in your face where you feel like you have to do it right that second. And speaking of progression, John's shop just opened up. Look, look, Goods John Goods, a shop that allows us to sell the fossils I found earlier along with some other expensive items we found. Oh my God, I'm

rich and the money was instantly used to free the debt that we accumulated to purchase John's shop. Look at us, we were doing well, and so well in fact that I decided to spend my time cleaning our Island a bit, removing Jan's hard work and replacing it with my own. A couple of minutes later, Jan decided to invite me on a boat he built for himself, and for a moment, everything seemed perfect. Just two buddies hanging about on a game that we really still had no clue how to play. J, there's literally nothing here. Why do we go out this far? I don't even think I could fish on here. There's no fish. There's literally... Evidently, me and Jan never really got out of our competitive nature, even in this cute little game. Oh my yes, what the [ __ ] you killed me again. Tired you, you killed me three times. I think we have, I think we have to go. And I've also played enough with Jan to know that this was sort of the end of our playtime for that day, but

regardless, I've had a change of heart, and I know it's just as unserious as someone complaining about someone cutting in line, although I actually think it's pretty serious to me. It's not often that I talk about how I feel about some video games, but I felt the need to explain what was going on, especially since I have a channel that is kind of showing a timeline of games that I've thoroughly enjoyed since making my decision to stop what I was doing. Rather than just spending my time feeling miserable, I'd rather spend my time looking for quandong on trees. I really do like Dinkum and so many other games that I've tried since I've stopped obsessively playing only a handful of games. Not that competitive shooters are the worst thing ever; they still have a place in my heart, and I'm still fairly good at them. I just think it's time to close that chapter of my life, at least for now. Maybe something's wrong with me; I don't know. I should go outside; it's

been a while, or maybe not, who knows. I'll be streaming a lot of games I play on Twitch very soon, and thank you to all over on my Patreon who have been supporting me in my work. If you want to find me, I'll be there, and I'll also be in my Discord. That's where I live. Links will be down in the description. Uh, you should go watch my other videos. I think they're pretty cool. Don't forget to use my RAID Shadow Legends link in the description, or you can scan the QR code that I'm going to pop up on the screen right now to get insane bonuses for new players with an epic champion.

Cozy Games Are Not For Men*

Angyl

From Competitive Gaming to Mobile Adventures

The narrator has a competitive gaming background, with a focus on titles like Rust and Overwatch.

They reminisce about their childhood gaming experiences with a PSP and their cousin.

Now, they promote a mobile game with over 800 Champions to collect, offering unique customization and a holiday update with special rewards.

I found my gaming identity under the name Angel, leading a clan called Angel's Playground.

Despite my initial reluctance, I was drawn into playing cozy games like Animal Crossing for the sake of spending time with my girlfriend.

This shift from competitive shooters to a more relaxed game made me question if there was more to gaming than just intense competition.

The speaker is seeking a stress-free, fun, and colorful game to play, expressing frustration with the competitive scene.

They discover a cute island game where they expand their island, attract residents, and earn currency called "dinks.

" The game becomes more enjoyable when they realize they can kill things for progress, leading to a funny and chaotic experience with a friend.

The narrator and Jan are making progress in the game Dinkum, despite the chaotic methods, like deforesting the area.

Jan's experimentation with voice activation and crafting tools adds to the game's dynamic.

The narrator is trying to expand their island and upgrade the shopkeeper's home, while also navigating the game's unique pacing and stress-free gameplay.

The game offers a relaxing experience, allowing players to be productive at their own pace without the pressure of losing items or rushing through objectives.

Progression is present but not overwhelming, with the opening of John's shop providing a boost in funds.

The gameplay fosters a fun, competitive dynamic between friends, making for memorable moments together.

A Change of Heart: Embracing New Gaming Experiences

The author reflects on their shift away from obsessively playing competitive shooters to exploring a variety of games, like Dinkum.

They express gratitude for their Patreon supporters and announce plans to stream games on Twitch and engage with their community on Discord.

The author also promotes their other videos and offers a RAID Shadow Legends link for new players.