It’s Easy Making Stickers in Sticky Business on the Switch

When you get a game that involves small, intricate movements or adjustments, you may find yourself wishing for a mouse to ensure everything looks the way you want. Likewise, ones with a creative element might beg for a means of saving those items in other ways. Sticky Business, originally a PC exclusive involving creating stickers, fit the bill perfectly, yet even so it ends up being a delight on the Nintendo Switch.

As a quick refresher, Sticky Business is about running a digital storefront that makes stickers. You design all your works of art. You prepare and ship orders. You can even adjust your shop to alter what merchandise is available or slightly change its appearance. As you level up designs and place orders, you get money and hearts. These can be used to increase the design elements you can use, types of sticker paper available, amount of items you can stick, included bonuses for packages, color palettes, and so on. 

Sticky Business is a very relaxed affair. There are very few penalties for messing up orders. Usually, you’ll just miss a shipment or need to sell more of the stickers you already have to progress. My concern coming into it on the Switch is how involved the process can be. While there are light shop management elements, that mainly comes down to ensuring all of the day’s orders are fulfilled. The bulk of the experience comes down to making stickers, and I was worried the Switch lacking some of a PC’s finer controls could prove an issue with the Sticky Business port. Especially as I’m someone who 95% of the time uses the system in handheld mode.

It turned out to be a baseless concern. Yes, it can be a bit difficult sometimes to perfectly align some images using only the Joy-Cons. However, this Switch port nails the controls. You use the directional buttons to switch between areas in your hub, the sticker creator, the printer portion, and the shipping section. This makes it easy to switch between sticker elements, placing items on paper to ensure you’re getting the most stickers for your money, and going through different parts of the packing process. Considering how many tabs there are, I’d even say it’s a time saver compared to the PC release.

There are some niceties from the PC version of Sticky Business that made making stickers easier that are absent in the Switch version. For example, it’s much more difficult to line up stickers exactly. The option to quickly copy an element you placed in the field, then have an identical one to arrange, is absent. The frequent use of hotkeys to swap between elements and areas also meant I would unintentionally switch to an entirely different segment of the sticker creator as I got accustomed to things. Even once I was familiar, I still found myself making the error occasionally. But also, the PC version had a lovely option that made it easy to save your creations to show or perhaps even actually make later, and that’s absent here.

Still, considering everything, Sticky Business really is just as lovely on the Switch as it is on PCs and is an inviting creative outlet for piecing together virtual stickers. There are some sacrifices that needed to be made, of course. But it’s incredibly easy to put together elaborate creations. You don’t need a mouse. The shortcuts make sense. Plus, it’s fantastic in handheld mode. I absolutely recommend it for if you have 15 minutes and want to design something adorable.

Sticky Business is available for the PC on Steam and Nintendo Switch.