Twinkleby is a floating dollhouse village sim with a touch of Animal Crossing
From the creators of Book Of Travels
Every now and then I abandon all of my responsibilities and go for a walk in Book Of Travels, a “tiny MMO” from Might And Delight. While a bit Orientalist in ways I’m still unravelling for myself, it’s one of the loveliest video game spaces I’ve ever inhabited: huge, picturebook horizons, molten shades of greenery, tiny wanderers keeping pace with beautifully combed clouds.
Might And Delight’s just-announced “cosy decoration game” Twinkleby doesn’t have quite the same magic, so far – it’s less mysterious, more wholesome. But I do enjoy its focus on antique dollhouses. Here’s a trailer.
In Twinkleby, you build cutaway houses on floating islands and decorate them with furnishings such as sofas and lamp posts. In the process, you’ll attract vagrant bobble-head people, who will arrive in astral sailboats and make requests you can fulfil for additional rewards. It reminds me of how you'd turn wild creatures into residents in Viva Pinata.
The campaign is a procession of these breezy pastelcore asteroid conversions, with map fragments to discover that unlock hidden islands. You can also collect shooting stars and spend them at a place called Molligan’s Antiques, which I’m hoping will turn out to be a proper vintage toy emporium born of some designer’s extra-curricular obsessions. There are, needless to say, no lose conditions and no game-overs: this is about tricking out dioramas as you please.
Every “wholesome” game needs its undercurrent of darkness, especially when the name has you picturing some kind of gerbil butler. Animal Crossing has the concept of a mortgage; Twinkleby has the option of throwing everything and everybody away like a spoilt child. Just lob anything you're displeased with over the side of the island and it'll return to your inventory.
“Expand your collection, discover antique secrets, decorate, and when you change your mind – evict everyone and throw their furniture into space!” sings the Steam page. The jarring choice of "evict" here makes me suspect that Twinkleby is some kind of Molleindustria black op. Perhaps the bobblehead people will eventually form a co-operative and depose you.
Look out for Twinkleby sometime in 2025. The only thing I outright dislike about the game so far is the familiar choice of sound effect when you place objects – that delicate "kiss pop" which, as I noted in my write-up of Islanders: New Shores, has become ubiquitous in cosy building games, and which I now find repulsive for its dopamine-milking inoffensiveness.
I didn’t know it was possible to feel patronised by a sound effect. It reminds me of those automated doors in The Hitchhiker’s Guide that were made sentient specifically so that they could sigh in satisfaction when you walk through them. We need a next gen of “kiss pop”, cosy game developers. Musical fart noises? The clattering of actual dollhouse furnishings?