Small Spaces

I don't usually gravitate toward pure decoration games - my spreadsheets track unit compositions, not throw pillow arrangements. But I put a few hours into Small Spaces and came away genuinely impressed by how much decision-making is packed into a single Tokyo studio apartment. The constraint is the mechanic. You're not given a mansion and infinite shelving; you're given a compact, architecturally specific floor plan and asked to make it liveable for a real fictional person with real requests. A student who needs a workstation and a painting corner. A couple sharing their first place together. Those briefs sound gentle until you realize the room genuinely doesn't fit everything at full size, and the item-scaling tool becomes your best friend. The three launch cities - New York lofts, Berlin bay-window apartments, and Tokyo minimalist flats - each carry distinct architectural DNA, and the furniture catalogue leans into that. Over 500 items at launch, spanning Scandinavian beds, modern Japanese lamps, record players, modular kitchens, wall panels, and indirect lighting rigs. The progression loop is light but functional: complete a space, earn a star grade, spend those stars to unlock new material packs and tools. Terrazzo flooring, various wood finishes, loft ladders - these unlock at a pace that keeps the first several hours feeling fresh. The top-down planning view switches cleanly into a first-person walkthrough, and watching your own design catch golden-hour light is the closest this genre gets to a payoff screen. Here's the honest Early Access caveat, and it matters: nine apartments is the current content ceiling. Community feedback flags the lack of an undo button as a genuine frustration during placement work, and a few item-placement bugs - objects migrating between floors, mirror sizes not matching sink options - add friction that a solo dev will presumably address. Gamepad and Steam Deck support are on the roadmap but not present yet, so this is mouse-and-keyboard only for now. The developer is transparent about what's missing, has a public roadmap with a tiny houses update planned, and built the game on demo feedback from over 100,000 players - which is a healthier Early Access foundation than most. The comparison to The Sims 4 build mode is accurate but slightly flattering. Small Spaces is narrower - no simulated residents, no neighbourhood, no life systems - but that narrowness is also what gives it focus. It doesn't try to be a life sim. It's closer to a space-planning puzzle with aesthetic stakes, and within that scope it's executed with real craft. The hand-illustrated iconography and the ambient audio keep the mood consistent in a way that a lot of cozy-labelled games fail to achieve. If you can accept that you'll exhaust the current content in a weekend and then wait for updates, the core loop is solid enough to justify the entry point.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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