I just found this pretty in-depth thesis study on how “cozy” games games can be used as de-stressers and generally maintaining mental well-being. It also includes some interesting results from a survey with 51 respondents about if and how they’ve experienced mental health benefits from playing cozy games, as well as what elements of games were important for making them cozy, and what games the participants considered cozy. There’s a bit of discussion on what to take away from the results. I have only skimmed it so far but it seems like there’s a lot of good stuff in here.
https://studenttheses.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/20.500.12932/47430/Cozy_Games_Thesis-Leonardo_Trujillo(final).pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
I find it interesting that familiarity and nostalgia while varying a lot in importance is slightly more consistently important for people than low difficulty, and both of them seem to be less important than visuals and audio.
PS I found this from a link in this web game dev focused newsletter gamedev.js weekly
which links to this interactive game-like reuters web page about the study which was cute but a little janky and didn’t exactly work properly for me lol