MakeRoom Is a Sweet Treat of an Interior Design Game

By Bee Wertheimer | August 6, 2025 | 11:55am

Video Games Reviews MakeRoom

MakeRoom Is a Sweet Treat of an Interior Design Game

If you’ve ever made a game before, you probably know Kenney, or at least have seen his work. Kenney is a bit of a legend in the game development community; he has spent the past decade making game-ready assets ranging from art to audio to tools, all completely free to use with support from community donations. When I learned to code in game design school, Kenney’s assets were part of the curriculum.

It seems fitting, then, that Kenney’s latest game MakeRoom is all about experimenting with game assets. Aptly titled, MakeRoom is about, well, making rooms. The sandbox building game contains over 1,000 cute furniture items for you to decorate various interior spaces with, with more items to come in free future updates.

In MakeRoom, you can arrange, scale, rotate, stack, and recolor every furniture item to your liking, as well as adjust the walls, floors, scene background, time of day, soundscape, and photo capture settings of your scene. There’s also an in-game design tool that allows you to build your own custom furniture from scratch, which you can then upload to Steam Workshop.

MakeRoom

The game’s low-poly art style and soft gradient shading is utterly gorgeous, and each item is overflowing with character and charm. There is so much joy to be found in this experience, and every time I completed a room I would giddily call my partner over and show off what I’d made. There are also pets!

Once you finish the game’s breezy tutorial, you gain access to MakeRoom Island, where you can start taking on simple quests in the form of making over themed spaces. When you enter a quest room, you are tasked with cleaning up cute little puddles and deleting pre-existing furniture; it only takes maybe five seconds, but leaves you feeling like a real house flipper. The island’s rooms range from art studios to vampire castles, with very gentle guidelines and themed unlockables for each one you complete.

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Unlike some other games in the genre, MakeRoom does not operate on a grid-based structure, granting the player significant freedom in item placement. However, this also makes it a bit tedious to line up furniture items that require continuity like kitchen counters, and can cause frustration when trying to align something to the center of the room.

Another unusual choice is the game’s saving mechanic. You are solely responsible for saving your work, which you will be reminded of any time you try to leave a space. This UX is a bit cumbersome and more reminiscent of game development software than a player-oriented game. The menu contains an overwhelmingly huge grid of empty slots for you to save your various rooms to. I started saving the exact same room under different lighting conditions to separate save slots, which made me feel disorganized and stressed out. It would be nice to see a more limited, row-based version of your save slots, organized more like a gallery, with more sorting options.

One limitation of the game that works in its favor is its color palette. You are given a set of colors to work with, and that’s all you get. Not only does this guarantee every room you make looks cohesive, it also saves a lot of grief that comes from color picking from a wheel which, as a digital artist, I’ve had more than enough of. There is also a random colors option for furniture, which can introduce you to interesting color combinations you may not have thought of on your own, and provide a good jumping-off point if you’re feeling uninspired.

The game’s difficulty is a little disappointing. So-called cozy games should not shy away from the discomfort of challenge; an easy game is not necessarily more relaxing than a well-earned victory. I’m not saying it needs to be the Dark Souls of interior design, but I would have enjoyed tackling common design challenges, like managing too-small spaces, in the island quests. More creative limitations for the player to manage could add an interesting element of friction in a game that could otherwise grow repetitive.

However, this does not detract from how lovely of an experience MakeRoom is. Playing it is similar to eating a fancy pastry; it’s bite-sized, surprising, and absolutely delightful. Furthermore, MakeRoom affirms the idea that there is beauty in limitation, and its curated experience ensures that every player leaves feeling like a professional interior decorator.

MakeRoom was developed by Kenney and published by Wholesome Games. It is available on PC.

Bee Wertheimer is a games writer based in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their site beewertheimer.com.