Cosy decorator Twinkleby floats onto our screens today. It’s made for fans of The Sims, Animal Crossing — basically any game that lets you decorate, babysit tiny people with bizarre base desires, and live in a pastel-coloured fever dream. It’s sort of Sims-lite; less stress, fewer needy neighbours, but still plenty of delightful scenery and some smooth muzak to keep you company while you decorate.
Starry Night indeed
First off, Twinkleby is very cute. You can fiddle with the weather, seasons, backdrops, time of day, floor colours, and wall paints. If you’re the kind of person who takes “interior design” seriously in digital worlds, you’ll have a lot of fun. It’s not as sprawling as The Sims or as relentless as Animal Crossing, but it’s still easy to lose a few cosy hours arranging tiny chairs just so.
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Decorating earns you Stellars (falling stars), which is currency for unlocking new islands, buying shop items, and sometimes cracking open floating chests that drift by like celestial loot piñatas. Bigger chests = bigger rewards, naturally. Any Stellars you miss just orbit lazily around your island, which is a nice little “oops, but not really” safety net.
Your Friends and Neighbours
Here’s where things get divine — you’re basically God. Your job is to keep your Neighbours (the tiny island folk) happy with the right combo of time, weather, and decorations. They want to garden? Throw down some plants. They want to read? Plop in a bookshelf. They get too annoying, and you want them to cry and leave forever? Chuck their bag off the island, and they’ll float away on a sad little Mary Poppins umbrella. It’s unreasonably satisfying.
Furniture works the same way: don’t like it? Yeet it into the void. It’ll magically reappear in your inventory, sparing you from tedious tidying.
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Some Neighbours are unlocked only when you meet their particular decorating standards. (Picky, much?) I stumbled upon Vincent (Van Gogh), who had a few of his personal items in my inventory.
When you do please a Neighbour, they’ll serenade you with a cute, wordless tune before handing over goodies like Stellars and map fragments. Eventually you’ll have a whole island choir, which is equal parts charming and slightly cult-like — in the best way. You can skip it if you don’t like it, don’t worry.
Some black spots
I gave Twinkleby a go on the Steam Deck since it’s advertised as Deck-ready, and yep, it runs beautifully. But when I tried to load my PC cloud save… nada. Not sure if that’s on Valve or the devs, but I started a PC save anyway. As usual with decorating games, mouse-and-keyboard is probably easier for precise placement, though the Deck holds up nicely for casual play.
That said, a few decorating quirks broke the illusion: disproportionate grandfather clocks and lamps, and the age-old decorating-game struggle of “WHY can’t I place this perfectly in the middle?!” Some characters also got stuck between furniture and you had to free them. Minor annoyances, but worth noting.
A freecam or “walls down” decorating mode would also be nice — The Sims figured this out ages ago, and it’s a lifesaver for us precision gremlins. Losing a whole wall view isn’t the end of the world (your Neighbours don’t care), but it messes with the vibe.
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Twinkleby is a delightful little god-sim for when you want to decorate, chill, and occasionally banish whiny neighbours to umbrella exile. It’s not going to replace any of your other life sims, but it doesn’t need to — it’s charming, cosy, and quirky in its own right. It’s out now on PC via Steam.
Quest Daily scores Twinkleby:
8/10
A copy of Twinkleby was supplied to Quest Daily for this review.
