At last: I can build a home out of raw Windows Vista-era nostalgia

Imagine for a moment: It's the year 2007. All software looks like glossy, rounded plastic, dewy glass, and photographs of verdant fields. Every electronic device makes ethereal chimes when it starts up. You've never heard the phrases 'live-service,' 'large language model,' or 'prediction market.' It's safer here, amidst the dreamy lime greens and ocean blues. It's better.

And now, thanks to a new house-builder that launched on Steam this week, we can live the definitely-healthy fantasy of retreating into the security of yesterday's software aesthetics. Frutiger Home is a home decorating sim where you can build an impregnable psychic cocoon out of the finest design elements of an era where technology could still feel optimistic, and not like perpetual cognitive radiation poisoning. Hooray!

All its architectural themes, available color swatches, and interior accent pieces are inspired by the Frutiger Aero aesthetic—a term retroactively coined by Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute co-founder Sofi Xian to describe the glossy, glassy, gleaming visual language …