Mazey Village: Build your own village from the ground up in this maze-puzzling cozy game

There are a lot of games out there that offer you the ability to customize and personalize your own village/town/miscellaneous other location, but they all suffer from the same issue: They get boring quickly, and eventually, you have a design that you’re happy with, with no further changes needed. Then what? 

Mazey Village, developed by Slappy Inc., is a game that takes all of the village-personalization features that you’ve come to expect from the cozy genre, but throws in a puzzle aspect that goes a very long way to keep things feeling fresh and enjoyable outside of customization options. It’s utterly adorable, surprisingly challenging, and there’s a demo available to try right now.

A whirlwind of a puzzle experience

The basic story of Mazey Village is that a tornado has torn through the village, and they need help rebuilding from the ground up. As a cartographer, you have a set of specific abilities that allow you to traverse weirdly confusing areas that are out of alignment, moving the tiles back to where they need to be to reach lost items and trinkets. 

In each of these areas, as well as in the village itself, you’ll encounter an ever-growing number of NPCs who have lost their items during the freak weather event and need them returned, and it’s your job to head into various mazes to get those items back. Returning items to their rightful owners invariably rewards you with one of two things: new customization items, such as clothing, or a new building to place in your village to welcome that NPC as a resident. 

I will say that, when it comes to the mazes themselves, they actually pose an unexpectedly high challenge level. They’re like 3D versions of those old sliding puzzles where you can only move certain pieces up, down, left, or right, and trying to figure out what needs to be where requires more forward-thinking than I anticipated. Still, that does mean that each completed maze feels truly satisfying, even if you get there in an unorthodox way.

Real-time elements

If you’ve played Animal Crossing or Disney Dreamlight Valley, then you’ll probably already know exactly what I’m about to say. Once you begin to unlock shops and vendors in Mazey Village, you’ll quickly learn that they have a rotating stock that changes daily in real-time. While I love this mechanic because it promotes daily logins and longevity for the game itself, it does pose a problem when it comes to collecting everything. 

With games that have this mechanic, there’s always the ‘fomo’ element: The constant fear that missing out on logging in for a day will result in you missing out on something that you’ve been looking for to complete your collection. While not a problem for everyone, this is a lot of pressure for some players, especially in a single-player game such as Mazey Village.

Still, it’s hard to hold that against the game, especially when there are so many NPCs around the place who will offer up cosmetics and items for completing their quests and finding their objects. That does at least negate some of the frustrations that this real-time element could cause, although perhaps not all. 

Full creative control

While in the village, you can press CTRL at any point to open up the decoration and building menu, and you can place anything pretty much anywhere. The only exception to this creative freedom is buildings, which will demolish any others they overlap with. You’re free to add as many tiles as you like to grow the village from its humble (and decimated) beginnings, and you decide whether those tiles (or the existing ones) will be grass, water, or other types of terrain. 

As if all of that wasn’t enough of a power trip for creative types, you can also pick up everything that is originally in the village after you arrive, and I do mean everything. You can steal the furniture out of the ruined front gardens of your neighbors, pick up fallen trees, and even store away entire buildings if you don’t like the look of them or want a fresh start. 

All of those items go into your inventory of stuff, and they can then be placed freely anywhere you like, really letting you stretch your creative design skills. There are ample Halloween-themed items within the demo, including skeletal corpses that you can litter the ground with if you really want to. If that’s not your particular aesthetic, then that’s fine; you can place down flowers and pretty furniture. 

Side note: I’d recommend not sneaking a peek behind my house if you want to avoid a view of the boneyard.

Ever-evolving exploration

As you step through a portal and enter a new area, you’ll find that it’s pretty small, at least initially. All of the portals lead to previously uncharted territory, so you never know what you’ll discover with each expansion of the area, or who you’ll end up meeting. I have no idea how or why these people are just wandering around in uncharted lands, but their side quests and rewards are always worth seeking out. 

You can also have some non-quest-related fun while you’re out exploring. Each animal that you meet can be petted. Petting an animal will then cause it to follow you, and you can create a lovely menagerie of critters following you everywhere you go. You may need to use this mechanic to complete certain quests for NPCs, but it does create some joyous moments of charm while your animal train is on your heels. 

Mazey Village is still in development and will enter early access on August 5, 2026. If you want to try your hand at designing your own village or challenge yourself with the mazes on offer, you can head to Steam and get the demo right now.