| Quick Verdict: MakeRoom is a fantastic buy for those who enjoy designing rooms and objects. I have a few qualms, but none that are a deal breaker. I will say, however, that if you’re the type of person (like me) who will only design a room once, this might be a pass. A lot of the $10 price tag value comes from the replayability of designing rooms. |
| Game: | MakeRoom |
| Developer(s): | Kenney |
| Publisher: | Wholesome Games Presents |
| Review Score: | 8 |
| Cozy Score: | 10 |
| Price: | $9.99 |
| Pros: | Extreme ability to customize everything, a good spread of different room types to make, and great for people who want to relax without worrying about furthering a story. |
| Cons: | At the beginning of each room, you’re prompted to put certain items down and if you exceed that number before it’s asked of you, it won’t register. The rooms won’t save; you’ll have to be sure to save manually if you want to keep your room and load it in when you want to see it. |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Sandbox, Building |
MakeRoom is less a game and more of an experience geared more for people interested in designing and furnishing rooms. It’s still a game in the technical sense, but there’s not much gamefied here, other than two Steam achievements. So, if you’re looking for something with progression or gameplay, then this won’t be the one for you.
In MakeRoom, you’re shown a small town map with several locations on it; each of these locations will give you rooms to decorate in the style that best suits you. These rooms range from a garden retreat to a spy’s hideout and even a vampire’s castle.
Each room has its own vibe and you’re guided in a bit of a direction by the house mascot that pops up to let you know that the room either needs some cleaning or certain items for it to fit the criteria. As far as I can tell, you have to do these things for the mascot to leave, but then you can delete the things that don’t suit you.
Just be careful while the mascot is engaged. One of the rooms wanted you to build a fireplace and I preemptively put down logs in the hearth and added extra logs nearby. So, when the mascot eventually told me to put logs down, it registered that I already had 3 of the 2 needed. I added upwards of 9 logs and it still prompted more. Luckily, the easy way to fix this is to just delete down to the required number and it’ll register as complete.
When decorating a room, you’re given a box-shaped diorama to play with, where you can manipulate pretty much everything. You can change the shape of the floor and walls, you can change the colors, direction, and size of everything, and you can even change the environment and sounds going on outside.
MakeRoom is designed with ultimate freedom in mind.
There are over one thousand items to decorate your space with and you’re not limited to just their preset design. If you like a table, but want another layer to it, then you can add that to the table to make it entirely unique!
With such a hefty number of objects to juggle, it makes sense that things can feel a little jumbled, even when they’re in categories of their own. Luckily, there is a search function that makes it incredibly easy to find what you’re looking for.
In terms of changing colors, there is a good range of hues for the colors that will allow you to build a more dynamic color story for the rooms. All of the items can have the colors shifted around, and sometimes multiple facets of an item can have the shades tweaked.
I really like that you have the freedom to change aspects of how an item looks, but I wish there had been some easy preset options to choose from. It’s usually not a hindrance, but for objects like the books in the library room, it became a bit of a to-do in order to change all the colors of the dozens of books.
When you’ve adjusted and designed to perfection, you’ll want to manually save your room. This is important because it won’t autosave. You’ll need to make sure that you’re saving your room to one of the hundreds of slots if you want to revisit it.
MakeRoom isn’t made with creating a cohesive town in mind. Despite saving a room, that room won’t automatically have your last design saved. It’ll load the original room and reinvite you to design it again. If you want to see the room, you’ll have to load it in.
Watch the Trailer for MakeRoom!
Personally, I wish that I could make the rooms that I designed the default. As someone who is kind of terrible at decorating a room and doesn’t quite know how to design a space, I don’t foresee myself coming back time and time again. So, being greeted by my previous efforts would have been a nice little feature.
Once you’ve designed for every room, you’ll get an achievement for your efforts with the ability to go back and make new designs, or you could head over to the sandbox mode, where you have access to some tools to create even more things.
Other than a place to input a code for new items that come in the future, that’s the bulk of MakeRoom. I feel like people who enjoy isometric style building projects will get a lot of use out of this, while the casual player like me will enjoy decorating it once.
For this reason, if you’re a casual player, $9.99 might be a touch steep for a few hours of doing, basically, the same thing. However, if you think you’ll enjoy building room upon room, then MakeRoom is going to be a bargain buy.
Personally, I had fun with it, but I’m the type of person who doesn’t want to redecorate the same room twice. I found the experience to be fairly zen and loved the art studio, witch’s room, and library the most. I felt like there was a good spread for everyone’s interests here.
If you’d like to try MakeRoom, you can get it for $9.99 over on Steam. If this isn’t something you feel like you’d enjoy, you may be interested in checking out my thoughts on Tall Trails or Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks