Back in October of last year, I came across a demo for a cozy crafting game called Dressmaker. I enjoyed it so much that I ended up writing a game diary about my experience. Although the demo was short, the potential for a fantastic finished game was obvious. It was wonderfully creative, engaging, and relaxing (when I wasn’t struggling to sew straight). So, when one of our lovely editors mentioned that the full version was being released this fall, I couldn’t wait to revisit it!
Dressmaker is inspired by Sabrina Becker, a costume designer. Becker was forced to give up her costume designing practice after being diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which causes severe joint pain and fatigue. Her long-term boyfriend, Jonathan Hau-Yoon, a developer at Free Lives (makers of games like side-scrolling shooter Broforce and strategy game Terra Nil), “wondered what [dressmaking] would be like in game form.” The couple began developing Dressmaker as a way for Becker to reconnect with her practice, but it quickly gained traction when Hau-Yoon shared a clip of gameplay concept footage on social media.
Encouraged by the game’s positive reception, Becker and Hau-Yoon joined forces with fellow developers Ruan Rothmann and Sara Laubscher to construct a prototype. The team put a demo together in just three weeks, and released their prototype on itch.io on July 31, 2025. It quickly attracted an enthusiastic player base and garnered extremely positive feedback.
Fans of the game took its (at the time) limited capability and ran with it, making unique and show-stopping dresses — and they wanted more. The demo was so successful that Hau-Yoon’s employer at Free Lives was convinced to proceed with the production of a full game under a new studio sub-label: Cozy Lives.
Less than two years after ideation, the game is complete and available for aspiring dressmakers to download, open up shop, and get sewing! For my review, I’ll explore my experience with the full game — while we also make a dress.
Let’s Make a Dress
Step 1: Meet the Client
Congratulations: You are the newest (and only!) seamstress in Twillford! Your shop in Dressmaker is quickly overtaken by eager clients requesting commissions, each with varying style ideas, fabric preferences, and budgets.
Dressmaker is filled with gorgeous illustrations, credited to Jonathan Hau-Yoon (lead artist), Sara Laubscher, Luc Wolthers, and Ben Geldenhuys. Every client is unique and instantly recognizable, and it’s clear that a great deal of love has gone into their designs. Their body types and colorings are also very varied, which is wonderful for experimenting with dresses for different silhouettes!
The shop itself is equally lovely, peppered with little details that make it feel personal and lived in. There’s always a cup of tea on the desk, posters and paintings on the walls, potted plants and, of course, Bertie the pigeon and Buttons the cat. Even your equipment has so much character — the black sewing machine with its delicate golden swirls, the elegant Victorian Gothic scissors, and the decorative flower designs on the journal pages. It’s all gorgeous, and the aesthetics give the game that coveted cozy feeling.
Your day begins with a client arriving. Clients will describe what kind of dress they’d like, then it’s over to you to get their measurements and start designing! Let’s try to make Adora the “green and playful” dress she wants.
Step 2: Get Creatively Clever
Every dress begins with your journal, where you can choose between different collars, bodices, sleeves, and skirts to construct the perfect garment for your client. You’ll unlock more of these by increasing your friendship with each client, and they’ll usually match that client’s personal style. Each aspect of your design will affect its characteristic ratings; a more revealing dress, for example, will score higher in the “Risqué” category and lower in “Cute.” Some of these ratings will have a required level that you must reach for your client to be happy with the result.
When you’re happy with the structure of a dress, you can drag fabrics and accessories onto the page to see how they’ll affect your ratings, and use the pencil tool to experiment with color combinations! The commission brief is also always displayed in the top left, in case you need a reminder of what your client wanted.
While I think the journal is already very cleverly designed, I would love to see this feature improved upon further. Being able to “draw” specific fabrics onto your dress design, rather than just flat colors, would be incredibly helpful for envisioning your final piece! Adding more customizability for dress parts would also give players a little more creative freedom — let us alter where the belt sits, or how much the skirt flares!
Luckily, the joyful and jaunty vibes help fuel creativity as much as possible. Back in the Dressmaker demo, there was only one music track on a constant loop while you played, composed by French musician Meydän. As you can imagine, having just one song got a little repetitive, but it matched the feeling of the game perfectly and was pleasant and relaxing to listen to. The full game has several new tracks, also composed by Meydän, and all of them are equally lovely.
The soundtrack feels nostalgic, somehow, like you’d expect to hear them crackling out of a gramophone in a ballroom. Some characters even have their own themes that play when they appear! Vivian, the possibly-a-vampire who only visits at night, has a spooky yet playful theme that periodically plays while you work on her commissions. Meydän clearly understood the comforting and joyful feeling that Cozy Lives aims to provide with Dressmaker, and he encapsulated it brilliantly within his music.
Step 3: Find Fabulous Fabrics
Once you’re happy with your design, you can draft your pattern, adjust your mannequin to the client’s size, and move on to buying your materials. The journal gives you an approximation of how much fabric you’ll need in total, so you can use that as a guide while you shop. Some fabrics are more expensive than others and, especially in the early game, you can find yourself running low on money. Completing commissions is the only way to further the story, but you can earn extra cash by selling dresses “off the rack.”
Off-the-rack dresses have no specific requirements, so you can make them as creative, simple, gorgeous, or horrifying as you like. I’ve seen a few players cover dresses in all of their leftover accessories to drive up the price, which works, but definitely results in some interesting finished dresses!
As you work your way through the game, you’ll gain prestige, which gradually unlocks new designs for each until you’ve got more than you know what to do with! Filtering by color, material, and characteristics allows you to isolate the fabrics you need for any specific commission, which makes it much easier to search through the stock. There are a few quality-of-life features like this throughout the game, which really demonstrate the care the developers have for their players’ ease and enjoyment.
Step 4: Measure Twice, Cut Once
With your materials purchased, you can move on to cutting out each panel. Thankfully, this is far quicker and easier to do in Dressmaker than it is in reality! You start by dragging each template onto your chosen fabric, positioning it so it aligns with any grains or patterns, then click to cut it out.
Aligning your templates properly isn’t essential, but not doing it will lower the overall quality of your dress. This irritates the perfectionist in me. Cutting everything out is likely the most time-consuming part of the dressmaking process, and it can get a little repetitive. But, in the same way power-washing or fixing retro electronics can be, the fabric cutting feels oddly therapeutic. It’s also satisfying to try and fit as many templates as possible onto as little fabric as you can.
Step 5: Meet the Mannequin
Once all your panels are ready, you can begin to construct your dress on the mannequin with pins — this is where your design starts to take shape! If you’re unhappy with how anything looks, you can return to the cutting board at any time to redo it. Unfortunately, I had to do this quite a lot. Not because I didn’t like how it looked or because I’d lined it up wrong, but because the fabrics I’d chosen weren’t meeting the client’s requirements.
Every fabric, just like the different dress designs, has different characteristics. A green cotton fabric might have a “Cool” rating of 50 and a “Cute” rating of 10, but a “Risqué” rating of 0. Because the fabrics are so varied, it’s very difficult to approximate how much of a fabric you’ll need to use to meet a required rating, especially if you’re using multiple of them, so I frequently had to go back and recut to include more or less of a fabric.
This was my biggest issue with the game; I often found that client requirements were more limiting than I would personally like, and I was forced to make several dresses that were truly crimes against fashion. And colors. And people with eyes. Being able to test more specific amounts of fabric in the journal would have been really helpful to avoid this, and likely would have saved me a lot of time!
Step 6: Sew Lovely and Accessorize
If you’re happy with how your dress is looking on the mannequin, it’s time to sew it together. I found this part of the process difficult to master in the demo, and this continued in the full game. Luckily, the developers have come to the aid of the coordination-challenged among us by adding a sewing assist option, which you can enable or disable in settings. It doesn’t do it all for you — you still have to watch your speed and sometimes redirect the fabric a little if you want to get your stitching perfect, but it’s a huge help and made the game much more enjoyable for me.
Now it’s time for the finishing touches — accessories! Much like the design and the fabrics, clients will often have specific requirements for accessories, too — a certain number of bows, or the inclusion of trim, and so on — which you’ll need to include for them to be satisfied with the final garment.
You can do so much with the accessories. Many players have even “drawn” their own designs onto their dresses by using trim ribbons. I had actually missed a button that allows players the ability to resize accessories, which gives players much more freedom and open the door for more intricate designs. Because it’s such an in-depth design game with so many options, some of these controls can be easy to miss. I imagine the developers will keep refining the UI.
Once your piece is complete, you can take a picture and present it to your client!
Step 7: Dress To Impress
Although Dressmaker is predominantly about, well, making dresses, I found myself getting sucked into the high society story immediately. In “crafting” games like these, I often speed through client interactions without paying much attention.
But the dialogue in Dressmaker is so delightfully well-written; it’s genuinely entertaining to read. Many of the interactions you have will drop hints about larger parts of their lives and tease potential plot twists. It keeps you just curious enough to want to know more and pay closer attention, turning you into every bit the observant, if somewhat nosy, dressmaker whose role you’ve stepped into.
Throughout the game, major events are recounted to the player through the newspaper, aptly named “Spilt Tea.” Much like the dialogue, the newspaper is witty and entertaining, and also serves to give you an idea of how your dresses were received by the public and how your clients fared at the latest social gathering.
Dressmaker’s writing is credited to Kerstin Hall, a South African sci-fi and fantasy author with multiple published novels under her belt. Being such an accomplished writer, it’s no wonder that Hall has done such an incredible job bringing heart and emotional depth into the game.
My only complaint here was that I would have loved for my decisions to have more of an impact on the story. I want the consequences of me keeping, or not keeping, a client’s secret to affect their life. I want our conversation to impact whether or not they’ll go to a dance. Or if they’ll have the confidence to confess their love to the object of their affection! As it stands, your choices do affect the story in small ways, but giving the player a little more power would add some extra drama and excitement to the game!
The Finished Product
Dressmaker has quickly evolved from a potential-filled demo to a delightful, fully fledged game. While there are more things I’d love to see (perhaps in a future update?), it’s a wonderful play as it is, especially for the price point. Dressmaker is already loved by thousands of players and has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam.
I’ve had an amazing time with Dressmaker, and I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone with a passion for fashion, design, or creativity.
Score: 8.2/10
Dressmaker, developed by Cozy Lives and published by Free Lives, released on September 21, 2026, for PC and Mac. MSRP: $14.99. Version reviewed: PC.
Disclaimer: A review code was provided by the publisher.
Darcy loves anything fantasy, sci-fi, or adventure. Her dream is to finish her degree and write her own fantasy book, hopefully squeezing in a few games as she goes. She’s a big fan of games where she gets to fight with cool swords, befriend cute animals, and get lost in the story.
You can read more of her writing on her website: https://darcymaunder.com/
wow i love this review. thank you for taking the care to include the developers’ story (that’s so cool) and i love the steps of making the dress. the part i was most unsure about from the prototype was not having a sewing assist so i love knowing they’ve implemented that! i’ll have to check this out