The Nerdy Type

In the cozy gaming world, one of the most popular types of games outside of life sims are those that offer players the chance to decorate and customize their own spaces. There’s something infinitely satisfying about taking an empty room and putting your touches on it, turning it into something that shows off your taste and personality. 

In today’s world, with the Earth’s population ever-increasing and space at a premium, tiny homes are becoming more and more popular. Small Spaces, an indie game by Niklas Tomkowitz, is capitalizing on that popularity in a beautiful and endlessly satisfying way. 

Tiny spaces, big ideas

With a huge chunk of the population stuck in rental houses and apartments, the dream of being able to fully decorate a space can seem out of reach, but Small Spaces gives you a tiny little virtual home to customize. Each different property has residents with different requests and needs, and it’s up to you to fulfill these needs while making the space appealing. 

The textures and lighting in Small Spaces give everything an incredibly realistic feeling, and it’s easy to forget that you’re playing a game and haven’t stepped into an interior decoration magazine, especially when you enter first-person mode and take a tour of the space that you’ve just decorated. 

The smallest full apartment that you’ll need to furnish in Small Spaces, not including the room in a shared apartment that acts as your tutorial, is just 333 square feet. In that space, you need to fit a full kitchen and bedroom, as well as an optional terrace and home office, complete with all of the furniture items that are necessary to make those rooms functional.

That’s a big ask, but thankfully, Small Spaces is packed with features that make the process just a little bit easier. 

Maximising potential, minimizing waste

As you progress through the various spaces and successfully meet the criteria of the clients, you’ll gain stars that can then be used to unlock new items or features. You can unlock platforms to create distinct spaces within a tiny apartment by utilizing split levels. New types of furniture, such as antique or Scandinavian style pieces, also become unlocked as you earn more stars. 

And all of these pieces can be freely rotated using the scroll wheel, and there are further options to resize, flip, or change their orientation along the bottom of the screen. This opens up a whole world of decorating potential, and making furniture smaller is definitely useful in these spaces, even if it renders the furniture realistically unusable by anyone other than a toddler. 

You can also change the feeling of a space by applying different textures to the walls and floors, a feature that’s also unlocked using stars. With all of these new items and features becoming available later on, Small Spaces is endlessly replayable, and you can experiment with layouts and additional items as you progress. 

Additional content on the horizon

With Small Spaces now out in early access, Niklas is now free to work on additional content for the game. There’s a roadmap available to view on his website. 

There are further furniture packs, new levels complete with their own themes, and a whole bunch of content set to arrive in Small Spaces before the end of 2025, and Niklas shows no signs of slowing down in 2026, either. The first update, adding three new Container Homes and a slew of new items, arrived in June 2025. 

If you’re itching to stretch your interior design skills and up for the challenge of packing all of your ideas into tiny spaces, then you can download and play Small Spaces from Steam right now.