Sticky Business Review (Game, 2023)
Sticky Business is a gentle, fun, creativity-driven simulation game about running an online sticker shop. You produce your designs, print them on various kinds of sticker paper, sell them in your webstore, and package each order individually.
No detail is too small. This is an aesthetic experience for people who want high levels of creative control with minimal risk of punishment in a simulation game. There are hundreds of sticker elements to unlock and combine in your original designs, as well as up to 100 slots to sell sticker designs from. You also get to customize tissue paper color and pattern, shredded or popcorn-style packing material, and candy giveaways for your shop with each order.
You can put as much effort as you want into your shop and your desired aesthetic. There will be an audience for your stickers, even if some designs are more popular than others. You will not be punished if you choose a polka dot versus a solid color tissue paper, or a candy chew instead of a lollipop. All of those decisions are up to you.
What you need to pay attention to is your inbox. Every day, you wake up to new messages in your inbox. This is where all your orders come from. These messages will tell you how many of each sticker a customer wants so you can pack their order. If you make a mistake, you don’t earn points and money from that order at the end of the day. That’s the only level of consequence in the game. You would have to purposely mispack every order you receive to struggle, and even then, new orders will still come in.
The inbox is also where the narrative of the game comes into play. You’ll have repeat customers who share little details about their lives as they order. One customer is trying to make new friends at work; another is trying to recover from burnout. A detective hunts down a vandal and young customers fall in and out of love. As your shop grows, you help more customers bring joy to their lives with your stickers. Occasionally, they’ll ask for something specific (my kids love dinosaurs, plants are beautiful, etc.), but that’s the limit their preferences place on your creativity.
The sticker design interface is easy to use. You drag and drop the different categories of stickers onto the build area. You can layer them however you chose, resize them, change the shape/style/weight of the border, and even recolor certain elements. There are also multiple styles of sticker paper to design for, such as cardboard, glitter, and holographic patterns, that have different animations and textures to stand out in the shop. You then layout the finished stickers on printer paper and manage your inventory for the shop. These sticker sheets can also be exported from the game to share online.
Sticky Business is a gentle, relaxing simulation game with great interactive elements. The game released with Twitch integration that allows for viewers to become your customers and order stickers. Viewers can place orders during the sleep screen and become part of the story. You can also upload a custom text file of users (one name per row) to incorporate your community on any streaming platform.
I’ve put in a lot of hours into Sticky Business so far and see myself returning again and again over time. It’s a unique and cozy game in a growing market of gentle simulation titles.
Sticky Business is available on Steam and itch.io for PC.
