The world moves fast, with hustle culture highly prioritized. Having to work, especially if you a running a business yourself, can be exhausting, cumbersome, and tedious . . .
But what if, just maybe, running your own business could be an enjoyable, relaxing experience? Spellgarden Games’ Sticky Business gives us all the opportunity to develop our own startup by creating cute, little stickers and going through the motions at one’s own pace. What’s not to love about stickers?
Sticky Business is a cozy, fun, sticker-crafting experience full of vibrancy and charm. This title can be played on Steam and on the Nintendo Switch.
Create, Complete, Sleep, Repeat
First thing’s first: you must give a name to your business.
The game asks players for their own name, and then requires a title for your sticker business. Name it anything, the world is your oyster! The tutorial of Sticky Business thoughtfully shows you how to proceed throughout the day. First, players must design a sticker. There is a wide variety of shapes and words that are already given to you to use, such as a skull, leaves, a sleeping kitty, and the word “handmade.” The stickers can either have a white or a black border, and can be made larger or smaller, rotated, and some allow players the option to change its color.
After creating your initial sticker, it is advertised on the player’s online store. Customers can view this webpage and make their purchases! The next step is to print the sticker you crafted, which costs about 10 coins per printed page. You will want to fit as many copies of a sticker on one page as possible in order to be cost efficient.
After printing, players will receive phone notifications that the customers have made purchases. You then proceed to package the requested amount of stickers, fill it with colorful packaging and crinkle paper, and voilà! The packages are ready to ship. Players end the process by clicking the mailbox icon in order to send the boxes off to the recipients.
Become a pro sticker artist
There is so much charm and delight within Sticky Business! Players have quite the range of customization options. There is an “upgrades” icon that allows you to make new purchases, such as more sticker options and colors to mess around with, and even more printing paper options that could make your stickers shimmer and sparkle.
There is also a bit of leverage when it comes to personalizing the online store. Players choose their business name as mentioned, which is displayed at the top. You can also choose the background color and design of your website. Unfortunately, these options are limited, and players are not able to customize their avatar that is displayed next to the business name. Oh well. I do believe that adding more personalization options to the webpage would be a big plus for a future update.
Players can also innovate with the packaging of the stickers. I personally enjoyed using rainbow-striped packing paper and green crinkle paper, which looked like grass. My stickers heavily revolved around witchy and plant themes! Players can be diverse in their sticker designs or focus on a certain theme, such as holiday, animal, food, and music themes.
Endless creativity and innovation
In order to upgrade your shop, players need coins and hearts. Coins come from customers buying your stickers, which grants you access to more kinds of printing paper, packaging materials, and even little candies. Coins also buy more available slots on your website, which are used for advertising your stickers. Customers can only buy what is listed on the site–so make sure to save up money for more slots!
Getting hearts comes from leveling up certain sticker designs. These level-ups occur the more you utilize and sell enough of certain sticker categories (e.g., plant stuff, shapes, words, holiday stuff, and more). Packing candy into shipments can also boost XP, as well as adding extra freebie stickers! Of course, you do not accrue more money with these little extras, but it sure makes customers happy.
This kind of process may seem slow, but it is efficient and easy to handle. Sticky Business truly operates as if you were your own little seller on Etsy. You, as a seller, want customers to support you and return to your shop, so be nice! Offer extra treats. Everyone loves that, and you will receive more XP in return.
Adorably addicting
A big aspect about this game is that players can only do so much in one day. At the bottom left corner of the screen, there is an icon that shows you how much time there is left in the day. Creating stickers, printing, packaging, and shipping all take time. At the end of the day, players sleep, and you will be shown a rundown of your successful and failed sales of the day, as well as accrued money and XP. You can choose to sleep at any point to end the sales day, but you must do so once it hits nighttime.
A lovely additional aspect to Sticky Business is the (majorly one-sided) interactions with customers. Buyers will text you, perhaps giving a simple thanks, or maybe a full rundown of how your stickers have brought light into their otherwise miserable week. There are so many little storylines happening with your customers and they may share their lives with you. While you cannot directly interact with them, it is a nice, emotional touch. Reading about someone’s bad day may influence you to add little extra treats to their purchase–and they might acknowledge this too! Sometimes customers will ask if you will be making more of certain types of stickers, and if you proceed to do so, they will thank you for it.
Final thoughts
While the time mechanic and possible heaps of orders may seem stressful, it certainly is not. Sticky Business is fantastically slowly-paced and offers a cozy, casual experience for players . . . with highly addictive qualities. Honestly, I had a hard time putting this game down, becoming fully immersed as my creative juices were flowing.
Players become invested in the characters’ lives and become enamored with the plethora of options that can be worked with. Sticky Business is a near-perfect casual game, but I will admit that I wish there were a bit more online shop customization options, as well as the potential for replying to customers, even with a simple thank-you note. Also, sifting through all the stickers one has created during the packaging phase can be awkward. In this case, I wish that there was another option to organize them better by “bestsellers” or something.
Otherwise, I now admittedly feel like a professional sticker artist!
