Log Away Review

Log Away is a cosy log cabin building game developed and published by The-Mark Entertainment. Here, you'll be heading to beautiful locales away from civilisation to build your dream cabin, where you can appreciate nature and focus on what truly matters in life… on a PC with rainbow lights, likely surrounded by various devices, nerdy toys, and working electricity.

I need to go out of the city more, but until I can, this is the next best thing.

Log Away’s goal is to make you as relaxed and at ease as possible, while providing you with a nice little way to design, build, and take screenshots of log cabins located in some of the more breathtaking places one should visit in their lifetime. You’re free to use anything you want to build your dream log cabin. There’s no need to deforest hundreds of trees, no time limit to stress you out, just create and enjoy the flora and fauna in each area. You might even want to take pictures through the game’s extensive photo options.

Everything begins with building your cabin; setting down the flooring, putting up the walls, and picking the type of roof you want. After that, you can furnish it with all the pieces available (depending on the location and hobby you chose), from tables and chairs to fireplaces and curtains; you can even have pets be part of your cabin (and yes, you can pet them). Although there is a set grid where the cabin can be built in, you’re free to place whatever other objects you want in or outside of it.

The building controls are pretty good to use; I never felt that they got in the way of my creativity, but it would be nice if there was some sort of way to display your controls just in case you need them. Having to go into the pause menu and shuffle through the absurd amount of tutorials can be a bit of a bother.

However, there is somewhat of a purpose to all this: a goal to reach in the form of Cozy Points. By building and decorating your cabin, you’ll earn points, with certain items either fitting the theme you selected or synergising with each other to earn more points. While you can place as many objects as you want, too many will reduce their points to zero, so it’s best to have variety. Although I didn’t really pay that much attention to it, it was a nice little pushing force to add more things and try and figure out how to make the most out of what I had. Plus, it’s not that important, so you can ignore it if you want to.

By maxing out your Cozy Points, you unlock a trunk that possesses additional, random Keepsakes associated with the hobby you chose, with some objects having a little backstory about it. Maybe it’s a signed picture of your favourite singer, an heirloom to draw inspiration from, or just something you found nice. It’s a neat little reward for making a masterful cabin, but collecting them all might be a chore if you’re looking to complete the game 100%.

Unfortunately, I ran into a few issues that didn’t put me at ease. Please note that these might be fixed in a patch, so take my word with a grain of salt. For one thing, sometimes my framerate dropped to 20 FPS, usually after I accidentally clicked off the game window. That’s another thing: if you have a second monitor like me, you might want to be careful as the game doesn’t lock your cursor to it, so it can and will go off-screen if you move your mouse too far. I was playing on fullscreen, and it was really annoying. I keep the Steam window on there, I could’ve accidentally stopped the game!

Finally, the last notable is that the graphics on small items like boxes were very blurry despite setting the texture quality to Medium. I can’t tell what some objects or pictures were, which made it a little frustrating to try to make the decor uniform.  At the very least, the load times were very fast.

I enjoyed my time with Log Away, though I won’t say I’ll play it when I want to relax. It’s a nice little building game that you can fill your time with, and dream of actually going out into the wilderness to get away from it all, at least for a little while. Play this on occasion and take some cool screenshots, then go out and relax in a real log cabin.

If you buy Log Away during its launch week (4th December to 11th December), you get a neat Christmas-themed DLC for free, so this might be a decent way to make your own Christmas postcards. Actually, I might go ahead and do that.

...Okay, I know it sucks.