Make Room Review – Cute Concepts With Frustrating Controls

Cozy gamers love a title where creativity is in the hands of the player, and Make Room seems like a love letter to The Sims fans looking for something with fewer stakes. However, while the graphics are adorable, the game isn’t exactly the cozy escape I was hoping for.

Make Room promises a simple style of gameplay. Players will use over 1,000 items to create stunning escapes by placing items, furniture, and decorations over a pre-made space. The game offers a sandbox mode and a “campaign” mode driven by requests.

When jumping into Make Room, I was anticipating a cuter, softer, less noisy version of House Flipper 2, where I could choose to build a dream room or follow a simple storyline through requests. While the game does deliver on these things in theory, I found myself struggling to enjoy them thanks to a very clunky interface.

Key Details

• Developer: Kenney
• Publisher: Wholesome Games
• Platform: PC via Steam
• Price: $9.99
• Review Code Provided: Yes

A Campaign Mode Missing The Details

If you are like me, you enjoy a campaign mode when diving into these types of games to get to know the ropes. Unfortunately, Make Room‘s campaign mode is less of a story-driven adventure and more of a confusing open-world map where an pushy house barks orders at you.

When you first interact with the “Requests” menu that stands in as the campaign mode, players are brought to a map with a handful of present areas. One of these is the ‘tutorial’ map, but it isn’t clearly shown which is these is going to act as your introduction to the game.

Right from the start, the entire menu of items is available, which makes finding the requested items for the tutorial a chore to find. The search function becomes a must.

Additionally, the functions to manipulate furniture aren’t super clear. When players click on an item, a menu pops up that allows deletion, color customization, and size toggling, but the ability to rotate the orientation of the item is nowhere to be found. The process of searching and then trying to arrange the items quickly becomes tedious.

A Lack of Grid Makes For Frustrating Placement

Unfortunately, the issues continue with grid problems. When trying to place items, the grid structure can be unreliable in Make Room, with items phasing through walls if not placed at a specific spot. I was able to place cups on the wall, chairs in other chairs, and at multiple points, items just phased into blobs.

Ultimately, the combination of frustrating UI and a “campaign” mode that lacked any direction other than telling players what to place down created a tedious space that wasn’t very exciting to explore. I found myself spacing out or just scrolling aimlessly through item menus, uninterested in trying to make the small house happy.

Sanbox Mode Is Campaign Mode With Less Structure

After moving on from the requests in Make Room, I decided to try out the sandbox mode. In this version of the game, players can choose between a room, van, or garden. The spaces are completely empty, and there are no requests for items that need to go in.

For fans of decorating sims, this is probably the most enjoyable way to play Make Room. Here, you can build out spaces, play with decorations, or spend hours color-coding everything however you might like to.

Unfortunately, gameplay becomes just as tedious after several hours, when the same rooms and items begin to blend together. The game lacks core variety and purpose that would help keep players invested.

Final Score – 6/10

Unfortunately, Make Room isn’t a game I would recommend for most cozy gamers. It’s cute, and the art style is interesting, but the lack of direction, frustrating UI, and limited spaces give off the impression that this game is in Early Access, and not a full release.

Make Room would benefit from an overhauled request mode, more room types, and a more intuitive interaction map for items. It might also be helpful to get a quest board with a breakdown of all the items needed in a space when doing the requests. This would give players more creative freedom and also allow them to keep track of what they need to place.

Make Room isn’t a bad game, it’s just not the cozy, designer paradise I had been hoping for.

**Bonus Action was provided with a PC Steam code of Make Room for the purpose of this review**

For more cozy content, check out our walkthrough for Whisper of the House or Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar.

About the Author

Laura Gray

Administrator

Laura Gray, known as Ezra when not putting pen to paper, is a D&D enthusiast with a love of all things written. They are a collector of fantasy and sci-fi novels, a lover of cooking weird food, and a player of farming sims and Pokémon games. When not engrossed in a re-read of Anne McCaffrey or a deep dive into the Adventure Zone: Balance, they can be found sniffing the cats and napping in half-finished crochet projects.

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