Dressmaker: the GORN studio releases a game about sewing dresses, and you pet the cat

Free Lives means Broforce, GORN and Anger Foot. Games whose common point is a certain idea of spraying blood.

Today, under the Cozy Lives label, they publish a sewing game whose final advertised feature is: pet the kitty.

I do not know what happened at that studio, but the result is very good.

The precision, which is the good surprise

I was expecting a dress-up game. This is a garment-making game, and the difference is enormous.

You choose the fabric, you arrange and cut out patterns, you sew the pieces, you add decorations. And the game takes every step seriously.

The detail that convinced me, and which is not decoration: whether your pattern is aligned to the grain or cut on the bias, the result changes on the finished dress. How you arrange and cut your fabric is what appears on the garment.

For anybody who has held a pair of dressmaking shears, that means something. For everybody else it is simply a mechanic that gives weight to an action that could have been made decorative.

You also control which fabric goes on each panel of the garment, which opens the door to pairings and to deliberate failures of taste.

The full chain

You buy from a range of fabrics: cotton, linen, wool, silk, velvet.

You design and colour your dress in a sketchbook, adding fabric samples and appliqué.

You arrange and cut the pattern, preview it on a mannequin, then sew. The fabric literally feeds through the machine.

And you decorate: buttons, bows, appliqué, lace trims and accessories placed wherever you like, with complete freedom.

And there are customers

That is what stops the game being a mere sandbox.

A whole town is hoping to fill its wardrobes with custom-made dresses, tailored for important events and to individual tastes.

So you create to impress somebody specific, or you display your own designs in the shop window to sell off the rack.

Delivered dresses earn reputation and coin, which closes the loop cleanly.

That is the right structure for this kind of game: the customer constraint gives you a reason to leave your aesthetic comfort zone, and the shop window still lets you do whatever you want.

What to know

The game launches today, developed by Cozy Lives and published by Free Lives, with no price displayed and no reviews as I write. It is single-player, fully playable with a mouse, with no timed input whatsoever.

My reservation belongs to the format. A repetitive crafting game lives on the variety of its orders and the depth of its customisation. If customer requests resemble each other after ten dresses, the interest falls away regardless of how good the sewing simulation is.

But the idea of making the final result depend on how you cut the fabric is excellent, and technical enough to make you want to remake a dress simply to cut it better.

Was your first failed dress a fabric problem or a taste problem? We are not judging on the InsertCoins Discord.