Little Corners review: a diorama decoration game with a tactile twist

I had been looking forward to the full release of Little Corners, so thank you to the teams at Secret Sauce and Meteor Pixel for sending me a game key for this review!

Little Corners puts a different spin on the diorama decoration genre that has been growing this year with releases such as MakeRoom or Small Spaces. While many of these games make use of 3D objects and spaces, Little Corners goes for the deeply satisfying tactile feeling of peeling stickers from a sheet. Better yet, unlike with real stickers, you can flip each item horizontally to match your composition. As a big fan of hand-drawn art in games, this title immediately caught my eye when I saw the trailer for the first time.

I am following a different structure today for this review since it’s a sandbox game. I hope I can help you decide if this is a game for you!

Gameplay & What I liked

Little Corners gives you a good variety of different spaces to create and decorate using sticker sheets, with 8 corners that range from a witchy cottage kitchen to a samurai residence. Each corner gives you one starting backdrop to work with and tons of stickers, way more than you can use in the same design. This is great because you can decorate the same space more than once and it will look completely different each time. There’s a lot of replay value there which I always like to see.

The art style really appealed to me. It has a hand-drawn feel, but clean and polished with a lot of attention to small details. The colors are vivid but not harsh. All spaces follow a similar art style, even if their themes are different. Besides, there are frogs, cats, dogs, monkeys and other animals, which is always a plus in my book.

The sound of peeling out each sticker is highly satisfying. The mechanics of placing and ordering stickers are intuitive: you use the mouse wheel to bring a sticker forward or send it to the back. You can flip a sticker horizontally (mirroring the image) by clicking with the right button of the mouse. There are also undo and redo options.

Something I found really fun and original are the hidden stickers. The game gives you a hint about how to unlock special stickers for each corner, and then it’s up to you to get them through trial and error. If you struggle a bit with pure sandbox games, this gives you small goals to work towards even though you’re still free to create whatever you want. Steam achievements are tied to finding these hidden stickers, which is a nice addition for players that like achievement hunting.

After you’re done with a corner design, you can save it in a separate file (and there’s no limit of save files as far as I observed). You can also export them with a little composition, picking some background options.

What I didn’t like so much

The background music gets a bit repetitive since there are only 3 tracks that alternate during your session. The game would definitely benefit from having a few more tracks.

It’s a shame you can’t rotate stickers 360 degrees, as sometimes I wanted to create a little corner inside my little corner (get it?). That said, I understand this would require a lot more assets, and I’m not sure the tradeoff in performance and the increased complexity of this mechanic would actually be worth it.

This game would be perfect for the Steam Deck if you could drag and drop the stickers using the touch screen. Even though the game does run on the Deck, it’s not a good experience if you’re not using a separate mouse and keyboard. I would also love to see MacOS support to make the game accessible for more players.

It would also be nice to have a larger variety of backgrounds and color options during export. I would LOVE if they matched the theme of the different corners! Just imagine a cherry blossom-themed backdrop for the samurai house?

My final thoughts & Who I think this game is for

Personally I am loving Little Corners. It’s the perfect type of game to unwind with, playing casually or in-between sessions of other games.

If the gameplay sticks out to you, you should give it a go. The game has enough content to make you busy for hours, not to mention the low price point for that much replayability.

But if you’re the kind of gamer who doesn’t like the freedom of sandbox games or you need to have a clear goal or progression in your gameplay to stay engaged, this one is probably not for you.

Last but not least, here are some of my creations!

Thank you for reading,

-Luna