Cleaning is a chore that some find tedious, draining, and tend to put off until it piles up. Others bask in a job well done and love an excuse to not be a couch potato. For those who find themselves in either the former or the latter, though, cleaning simulator games have taken the gaming world by storm this decade, from the onset of PowerWash Simulator to the fantasy of Spilled. Both the sense of accomplishment and the ease of entry make it an addictive genre and one that I find myself stepping into whenever I need a break from other titles. Enter Cozy Game Restoration, out now.

The retro game market is still abuzz in 2026; I frequent a Disc Replay to check out PS3/360 games that have been delisted/are hard to find. These disc-based games are scratch-free thanks to the store’s guarantee policy. I always wondered how they get these discs and cartridges up to snuff, and Cozy Game Restoration peers into how it’s done. In this game, you’ll nab some old hardware and wipe its dust, remove stickers, and buff out scratches to get them in tip-top shape for either display or resale. There are 100+ unique games across a handful of game systems, each with unique methodologies to fully clean them.

With Cozy Game Restoration, there’s a brief learning curve in figuring out how to navigate the camera, how to pin down where the dirtiness lingers, and maintaining that muscle memory of which implement is where on the left. In less than an hour, I was able to handily maneuver the tools, map out my plan of attack, and cut my cleaning time into a fraction of my first few fixes. Even if the act of cleaning can feel monotonous, I was glued to the game for hours in my first sitting, thanks to the ever-persistent feeling of getting better and better at actually cleaning each game that came across my desk.

When you’re not cleaning in Cozy Game Restoration, you’re managing your finances, rearranging your game display’s feng shui, and deciding on which game to pick next, only being able to see which genre and platform it’s on.

There are rarities involved with each day’s purchase, influenced by your display’s arrangement, but the catch with Cozy Game Restoration is that amongst the 108 games, there’s the possibility of opening a box and having to clean a game you already have. This artificial time inflation only serves to add to the game’s runtime and really spoils the fun of the constant discovery of each new game. I can only imagine that in the endgame, this will be even more frustrating.

Despite my one gripe, Cozy Game Restoration has a glorious gameplay loop that makes it devastatingly hard to put down. I loved that if I didn’t want to fess up with my third pesky cartridge in a row, the game lets you end the day and gain some passive income with no penalty, offering up new selections the next day. While I don’t plan to trudge through straight to the end off the get-go, I can certainly see myself keeping Cozy Game Restoration installed to plug away at when I’m winding down or bored. At just $14.99, it’s a sure thing for fans of cleaning sims or admirers of retro gaming.

A PC review copy of Cozy Game Restoration was provided by Parasol Corp for the purposes of this review.

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Cozy Game Restoration

$14.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Tantalizingly Satisfying
• Excellent Camera Control
• Impeccable Attention to Detail

Cons

• Potential for Duplicates