- Choose fabrics and design dresses from scratch
- Cut, sew and customise every garment
- Build a reputation with demanding customers
Free Lives is the studio behind Anger Foot, a shooter built around kicking down doors, so dressmaking isn’t where I’d have guessed it would go next. Its cosy offshoot Cozy Lives has just launched Dressmaker on PC, though, and it’s already confirmed that mobile ports are on the way.
The team joked in its launch post that the game was so sincere and so free of violence that it got barred from Free Lives’ social media. Being barred doesn’t seem to have hurt. It went out with over 400,000 wishlists and made its development costs back in under 24 hours, which is a nice thing to read about an indie for once. We still don’t know when or which mobile platforms its heading to.
In Dressmaker, you’re in charge of every step of making a dress. Pick your fabric from cotton, linen, wool, silk and velvet, then sketch and colour the design, and finally arrange and cut out the pattern pieces.
If you’re dabbled in dressmaking before, you’ll know placement matters, whether they’re lined up with the grain or cut on the bias, since that’s what shows up on the finished dress. Then you feed the whole lot through the sewing machine to stitch it together, and finish it off with buttons, bows, appliqué and lace trims wherever you fancy.
A whole town of customers wants custom dresses for important events, each with their own tastes, and turning in a good one earns you reputation and coin. Keeping them happy is the idea, although sabotage is an option too, for anyone with a grudge against a regular. You can also display your own designs in the shop window and sell dresses straight off the rack.
Dressmaker is out now on PC via Steam, with mobile versions confirmed but undated.
Until Dressmaker’s mobile version turns up, our list of the top simulation games on Android has a few more ways to make things with your hands.