You might call LittleBigPlanet a cosy game, depending on how you define the sub-genre of games that can help you relax after a stressful day, but one of the leading minds at the studio that came up with Sackboy and his instant classics - Media Molecule co-founder Mark Healey - finds cosy games can get boring.
Speaking in an interview with The Game Business about working alongside old boss Peter Molyneux for Masters of Albion, Healey explained that while he understood the trend of cosy games during COVID, he wished some of them were a bit more engaging.
"There's a lot of people that like cozy games - I think they became really popular during COVID, actually - but I find them incredibly boring," Healey said. "I can understand the appeal of them, but I'm like, it's so much nicer if you just mix in a bit of extreme violence as well, just to sort of balance it out a little bit."
Masters of Albion has two sides to its coin, as it's "cosy by day and chaos by night," according to Healey. Russell Shaw, another former Lionhead employee who went onto work on other titles before returning to Lionhead, is also back working for Molyneux with Masters of Albion, and agrees with Healey that it offers an experience unlike any other.
"Peter explained that he was doing this game, which was a mixture of Dungeon Keeper, Black & White and Fable. I did all of those. And I said, 'it's got to be me'. And he agreed," Shaw said. "Just the whole idea of a nostalgia trip for people who loved our previous games, to bring those together into one game in its own right... it appealed to me massively."
Masters of Albion launches on the 22nd of April for PC.