Have you ever seen any of those videos that are really satisfying to watch? Painting a picture without going over the line, perfectly cutting a piece of fruit, placing the last piece of a puzzle… Those videos that leave you spellbound and feeling strangely comfortable for some unknown reason. Personally, there is a group of these videos that fascinate me, and they are those of little artists creating submissions of their own creations, all in the same shade of colors, perfectly ordered… What if I told you that there is a game to do exactly this?
Sticky Business is a relaxing sticker-making simulator and online store created by indie studio Spellgarden Games. Creating stickers in our online store while kindly serving customers will be the main goal to start building our successful business. And don’t be stingy, leave candy gifts for customers in your shipments.
You are a person who is just starting to try to make a name for yourself in the art world, and you decide to create an online sticker shop. It won’t be very lucrative at first, but it’s easy and the stickers are cool, so you decide to go ahead. Sticky Business is the perfect game if you want to relax by creating stickers of all kinds. The way the “sticker workshop” and the online shop work is very simple, accessible and functional: you create a sticker, give it a name, print it on the material you prefer and put it up for sale. Then someone will order it and you will create a package the way you want to send it. Easy, fun and very relaxing.
It’s all very cute and adorable, even though you can create some real aberrations. There are a huge variety of styles and images that you can combine, then print them with different materials and glosses, and send them in packages of different colors. And you can even put candy as gifts. The simplicity with which everything is connected, the creation of stickers and the shop, makes it so addictive. You just want to keep thinking of shapes and colors for your next sticker.
Some people, in addition to ordering stickers, will attach a message praising your stickers, congratulating you on the shop, or telling you about their personal problems. Because who better to listen to a moral dilemma than your trusted sticker artist. As you put different styles of stickers on sale, clients, private chats, and custom orders will be unlocked. Artist by day, psychologist by night.
It’s a very clever way of trying to create some kind of connection with customers, and I wish that the narrative side had been exploited more. Aside from that short list of customers, there’s nothing to push us to continue running our shop, we have no social media to interact with or real customers to talk to. Once the messages are over, so are the objectives and you just create stickers for the sake of it. I miss some kind of mission, store upgrades or social media to interact with customers on, something beyond creating stickers. I wasn’t expecting a complex story by any means, but I was expecting some fun objective that would give me an excuse to keep playing.
Sticky Business is very pretty, the designs are adorable and everything is full of colour. No one doubts that the studio’s intention was to create a cute and relaxed game to entertain players. And it succeeds, don’t think badly of it, but there are certain particularly notable absences that, if they had been implemented, could greatly improve the gaming experience.
A button to check the order would have been very nice, to make sure you have put everything right before going to the post office. More variety of designs, and above all more freedom to make our own creations, to make all kinds of stickers. This is noticeable when you try, for example, to put a hat on a raccoon, it stays on top, as if they were a hat and a raccoon together, instead of a raccoon with a hat, thus creating Secret Agent M.
And when you’ve been playing for a while, and you’ve put many of your creations up for sale, the bar to choose your stickers in the orders becomes excessively long, making it difficult to find stickers. Four easily rectifiable nonsense, which could greatly make this game even more fun.
You might think that running a shop would be a bit stressful, sending orders on time, serving customers and all that. Not here, it’s a very relaxed game. I’ve never sent a package late, and if I ran out of “time” to make a sticker, I’d do it the next day.
It’s a relaxed game in every sense of the word
There’s no penalty whatsoever, and the same goes for stickers. I could come up with a super crazy, cool design, like a sticker you’d see in your nightmares, and people would still love it just the same. Sure, you don’t feel pressured, but since there’s no feedback on anything, you don’t really feel like you have a store either.
The music, the art, and the designs of each part of our store tell us that it is a sweet, calm game that only seeks to entertain the player. And it does, but I would have liked to see some point in the game that would push me to continue creating, comments from people or missions in which you have to make a roll of only magical animals, improvements in the store, I don’t know. Something that would boost my creativity when creating stickers.
If you’re looking for a nice, relaxing game, and you like stickers, Sticky Business is a great choice. An entertaining title in which you can spend hours making crazy creations to sell in your little shop, helping some customers in trouble along the way. Although after a few hours of playing, and after completing people’s orders, the title gives you few options to continue playing, it is true that during those hours it is a real joy to make and sell stickers. A very enjoyable game that I would like to spend more time with, if they let me.
