Little Corners Review (PC)

Little Corners peels, sticks, and illustrates a depiction of tranquility in an origami diorama. With stickers and inkblots, paper-thin cardboard cutouts and a trove of crafty materials, it doesn’t just offer you the freedom to create fantastical worlds; it grants you passage to your adolescent years—a period during which you threw whatever coins you had in your back pocket to obtain more sticker packs for your collection of blank pages. It brings you there, to the foot of a simpler time in which problems weren’t a concern, and the worlds that you conceived with glue and paper were paramount to your imagination. It finds its balance there, and honestly, it does a marvelous job of keeping the scales from tipping over its short time on the pedestal.

It’s a bit like Unpacking, only, you don’t allocate books and furniture to a series of cubbies in a home, but peel stickers from a book and place them on one of eight paper worlds. With thousands of stickers to choose from and a unique collection of locations to fill, Little Corners doesn’t just tell you how to work; it hands you the keys to unlock your inner creative, and then gently places a book and a sticker sheet in your palms for you to create your ideal picture-perfect landmarks. Again, like Unpacking, but with a few more stickers and some medieval infusions to elevate its diverse spirit.

If you’re curious to learn more about Meteor Pixel’s Little Corners, then be sure to stick with us a while longer as we peel back the veil of its adorable stick ‘em up sticker book world.

Stickers & Glue

Little Corners settles for the simple act of presenting you with sticker books and vacant spaces to decorate and embellish. Granted, it doesn’t do much more than that, but it does make such a simple pleasure a lot of fun to work through. There are no overarching goals to accomplish, nor are there any strict requirements or time limits to dampen your progress. Instead, you have a clean slate, thousands of sticky decorations and items—doors, windows, and stacks upon stacks of intricate set pieces, for example—and the creative freedom to unleash your wildest creations. And if you think that sounds a little too easy, well, that’s because it is. Yet, Little Corners doesn’t beat around the bush with its transparent composition. No, it gives you the tools, and it lets you stick till your heart’s content.

There are eight backdrops to work through in Little Corners, including a cozy candlelit tavern, an alchemy lab, and a swashbuckling captain’s quarters. In each of these locations, you have one simple goal: peel the stickers from a sheet, and stick them wherever you think is appropriate. Again, there are no quarrels to confront, and there are no slaps on the wrist for minor mistakes that you may or may not make. Here, it’s just you, a canvas, and a lo-fi score to keep you company as you gradually sift through the pages and transform liminal worlds into booming pages of tiny details and personalized cubbies. It’s clean, straightforward, and oh-so addictive. Really, what more could you want?

Adorable & Comforting

Little Corners adopts an incredibly simple sticker application system that, frankly, doesn’t take a genius to figure out. Truth be told, there isn’t a whole lot here for you to learn, as it’s more or less the case of taking one sticker and adding it to a page. Moreover, the game allows for you to tailor your canvases with various scrubbing tools and workspace background customization options. In other words, it makes the process irresistibly simple to understand and work through. Honestly, I can’t complain about any of that.

Although there are only eight levels to complete here, Little Corners does, in all fairness, makes an effort to cough up numerous incentives for those who want to return to earlier stages to rekindle a few flames, so to speak. Again, with thousands of stickers to play with, it’s unlikely that you will experience every last inkblot in the first handful of sessions or so. Could it do with a few more locations? Absolutely. But then, for a small indie game that clearly has the capacity to evolve its cozy quarters, it wouldn’t surprise me if it eventually decided to add a few additional pages to the catalog at some point in the foreseeable future. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Verdict

Little Corners sticks out as an absolutely adorable peel-and-present sticker-centric sandbox game that feels incredibly satisfying to fill out and captivating to explore. It’s cozy, simple, and more to the point, rewarding enough to keep you coming back for yet another batch of booster packs. It’s still a little short, and it could do with a few extra pages to really help bulk out its binder. Having said that, Little Corners is a game that has the potential to flourish and evolve into something even greater with the aid of some well-needed DLC in future updates. As for whether or not it will ever come to fruition is another question. Either way, I wouldn’t turn a blind eye to a few extra stickers.

Given that Little Corners adopts a clean palette and a smooth gameplay experience that feels comfortable to comb through, you shouldn’t bump into any major snags in the creation process here. Thanks to its lack of technical mishaps and audiovisual bugs, the game more or less captures a buttery finish that looks and, more importantly, plays well. And to be honest, that’s just another reason why I’m so drawn to it.

With all of the above said, Little Corners has a lot of heart, and it’s evident that its creators have poured a great deal of effort into fleshing out its every crag and crevice to establish a warm and inviting atmosphere. Needless to say, then, that if it’s a wholesome sticker-loving sandbox that tickles your fingertips, then you should definitely take the opportunity to peel back the veil of Little Corners’ gluey dreamscape.