How to Screen a Cozy Game Yourself in 20 Minutes

You don’t need my full process to catch the obvious problems in a game you’re eyeing. That process exists for the games that turn out to be genuinely ambiguous — but most games aren’t ambiguous. Most games either clearly pass or clearly don’t, and you can find out which in about twenty minutes with four checks and a few tabs open.

This is the fast version. It won’t catch everything the full method does, but it’ll catch almost everything that matters before you spend money.

The four things you’re checking for

Magic — spellcasting, witches or wizards, enchanted objects, potions or alchemy. A robot isn’t a wizard, so sci-fi is fine.

Spirits and religion — ghosts, spirits of the dead, gods or goddesses, shrines, offerings, worship mechanics, fortune-telling.

Violence — weapons used on people, blood, gore, hunting. Cartoon, non-lethal silliness is fine.

Holidays — anything built around a named holiday driving the story or calendar. A temporary seasonal event or optional DLC pack doesn’t count against it.

The 20-minute version

Five minutes: the store page. Open the game on Steam and read the full tag list — click the “+” to see the ones hidden by default. Tags like “Horror,” “Dark Fantasy,” or “Zombies” are your fastest red flags. Then scroll to the DLC section; if a DLC name jumps out as themed around a holiday or something spooky, note it separately rather than failing the whole game over it.

Five minutes: the wiki. Search “[game name] wiki” and skim the Characters and Locations pages if they exist. This is where magic systems, deities, and combat mechanics get named plainly, usually faster than the store page will admit to any of it.

Five minutes: the forum. Use Steam’s community forum search for the specific words you care about — “ghost,” “combat,” “witch,” whatever applies. Ten minutes of scrolling isn’t necessary; a search box does the work.

Five minutes: the achievement list. Open the full achievement list, including hidden ones if the page shows them. Achievements describe late-game content no store page or trailer will, and they’re usually the fastest way to catch something that only shows up in an endgame twist.

Where this version falls short

This gets you a confident yes or no on most games. What it won’t do is catch the genuinely ambiguous cases — a DLC-only occurrence, an optional seasonal event, a plot beat that only shows up in the last twenty percent of the game. Those are exactly the cases where a quick tag search says one thing and the real answer is more specific than that.

If you want the process I actually use for those — the full nine sources, in order, plus four worked examples and a fillable worksheet — that’s what The Screening Method walks through. It’s $9, and it’s built to be run on any game, not just the ones already in my database.

Or if you just want to see the standard those checks come from, it’s public: How I Choose Games.