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Woods, snow, a warm fire, and soft critters are the definition of cozy. Developer Pine Creek Games and Publisher Noodlecake bring all of these quintessential qualities together in the woodland survival game, Winter Burrow, to make for a nicely paced, albeit short experience that is best experienced in a few comfy gaming sessions. 

Sitting down and deciding what to do with your precious free time can be hard. There’s a wealth of options, with experiences ranging from the most competitive face-offs with other gamers hell-bent on ruining your day, to the easiest gaming tasks accomplished whilst bundled up and sipping on a delicious coffee. All of these games have their place, just like the one I had the pleasure of moseying cozily through recently for this review. Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim is exactly that; a simple yet satisfying coffee shop simulator where you’re the owner, decorator, janitor, and barista, all at once. What makes the experience special though is not just the addictive gameplay loop, but the lovely cast of characters that make their way through your doors and into your hearth.

Shoot-em-up top-down airplane games are some of the most classic gaming experiences in history. A simple formula that can be built upon in so many ways to produce a variety of challenges. Usually, this format is used to shoot bullets at armies of enemies whilst dodging a hellstorm of bullets. Air Hares puts a swerve in the expected style by having you be a bunny in the skies equipped with seeds and water shots, charged with defending and replanting their vital crops for the cities below. It’s a solo or co-op retro arcade treat that doesn’t have too much in the way of content, but doesn’t try to be too grand in scope to where it forgets its charming identity.

Welcome to The Furry Game Awards 2025, presented by Gaming Furever! Every year, we come together as a staff and decide on our most beloved, most played, and most exceptional games from the past year of new gaming experiences that include anthropomorphic animals or animals as a focus of the game overall. The number of high-quality games that have animal influences shine seems to grow every year, and 2025 was no exception. Here are our Furry Game Award Winners for the year 2025!

NOTE: Nominations were voted on by GF Staff, and criteria for inclusion included having animal and/or anthro animal focus or character(s) for the majority of the game, along with the games having to have been played by the staff member who nominated it. Because of this, some games you may expect to see aren't listed. Other fantastic furry games released this year are listed below the awards!

UMAMI is a simple game idea executed perfectly. You put back together deliciously crafted wooden food puzzles that have been scattered across colorful culinary canvases, complete with adorably fluffy furry animal characters throughout. Each level provides its own theme and foodstuff, like a bee-topped honey waffles stack, or a lovey-dovey bear cake, or a garden vibes bunny baked beauty, just to name a few of the 15 puzzle environments. I was easily whisked away into the cozy cooked comforts with a calming soundtrack, fun little tactile interactions throughout the artfully crafted dishes, and lack of stressful goals like timers or mistake counters. UMAMI is truly about sitting down for a sense-satisfying session of blissful no-stress puzzle solving.

If you haven't played Squirrel with a Gun, you've been missing out! Our team at Uncivil Gamers very much enjoyed the time we spent with it during our Uncivil Weekly Release Party video recording. Squirrel with a Gun today received the Varmint Collection update, now playable on Steam, Epic, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with Nintendo Switch 2 to arrive soon, announced publisher Maximum Entertainment and developer Dee Dee Creations. The brand-new free DLC adds a slew of mischievous critters to the game’s squirrely action. Take a peek at the Varmint Collection’s wacky additions in today’s trailer: 

The world inside the indie hit BROK the InvestiGator has more to give, as solo developer COWCAT (Breton Fabrice) brings the new standalone title BROK: The Brawl Bar to consoles and PC. The Brawl Bar is a wild party beat ‘em up that features over 60 varied and surprising arcade-style “Event matches” (à la Smash Bros) that range from easy to difficult to complete. Throughout your pursuit of knocking out all of these challenges, you’ll get to know a few of the patrons and staff in this “brawl bar” you find yourself drawn to as you try and rekindle those fighting flames your gator-y self used to love sparking. Though I took my lickings in some of the harder stages, BROK: The Brawl Bar was an exciting game to punch, kick, and finesse my way through.

There can never be enough cooking games, and Abra-Cooking-Dabra, the newest gaming foray by developer Door 407, helps prove that theory. You’re whisked away to a mysterious new restaurant in London, where you must help an eccentric suave cat serve any customer that strolls up to your establishment. What makes this game different is the methods and challenges you’ll face along the way, all whilst using a card-based cooking system to make and serve meals. It’s as wild and weird as it sounds, and yet feels neatly crafted and comfy in execution, requiring harvesting all of your forethought and planning to perfect it.

Everybody’s got work to do, so why not make those tasks more fun and connected? Feeling like you’re enjoying yourself (even just a little) while getting things done is a very recent trend, but one that I’m glad has grown so much. I wish I had the benefit of lo-fi tunes and little temporary visual treats like the demo of On-Together provided when I was in college. Developed by GigaPuff and Future Friends Games, On-Together is a Virtual Co-Working multiplayer productivity game that occupies a section of your screen, allowing you to keep up with whatever tasks you desire to work on while also enabling socialization, communal focus-keeping in-game locations, and little doses of dopamine with cute emotes, fishing, and engagement motivators. The demo is live now, and the full game was just announced for release on January 19th, 2026.

I really enjoyed my time padding around in the demo, and I’m actually using it right now whilst I write this preview article. You’re able to customize your character (up to 3 slots of pre-saved outfits), which includes plenty of adorable animal designs, including various tails, ears, and colorful “fur” choices. Some choices require earning and spending coins within the game itself before they can be equipped, which can be achieved by casual fishing, playing quick interactive activities, chatting and interacting with other people on your chosen server, or completing your own set up tasks within the game. Those coins can also be spent on little trinkets, drinks, and other fun items within the game. These can give your character fun visual effects, things to hold on to or wear, along with a nice discoverable set of interesting time-spenders during your breaks. Earning these little prizes made my next set of timed work sessions that much more enjoyable and focused. Of course, the included radio of calming, light background music was a huge plus, and one that will get heavy usage by yours truly. I’m looking forward to continuing to spend more time in On-Together, and believe it will be a cornerstone of quite a few people’s work process in the coming months, if it's popular demo population is any indication.

Steam has just debuted the "Steam Animal Fest" for 2025, and it features over 2100 games, either already released or upcoming, that have animals of some sort in them. Of course, there are way too many games for us to list all of them here, and luckily Steam gathered them all together conveniently already. We're sure to cover many of these games in the coming months here on GF!

New Steam Points Shop Items for Animal Fest 2025 are also available!