Remember when software looked like glossy, rounded plastic and every device chimed ethereally when it started up? A new game wants to let you live inside that feeling. Frutiger Home launched on Steam this week, and it's a home decorating sim where you build a house out of pure Windows Vista-era nostalgia.
The game is all about the Frutiger Aero aesthetic. That's the term retroactively coined by Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute co-founder Sofi Xian to describe the glossy, glassy, gleaming visual language that dominated tech and UI design from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. Think dewy glass, verdant fields, and photographs of nature used as desktop wallpapers. In Frutiger Home, sharp corners are an aberration. Every surface that can be polished, will be polished.
When you load into an empty home to start decorating, you'll find walls dominated by screens showing things like clownfish and dandelions. You can swap those out for a collection of citrus slices, because of course you can. The furniture looks like it was extruded straight from the dimension where sans-serif typefaces live. It's all about that optimistic, dreamy lime green and ocean blue vibe.
Step outside and you'll find yourself in a field where the impossibly green hillsides of that Windows wallpaper—you know the one—stretch into the distance, forever. It's a full retreat into the security of yesterday's software aesthetics, a psychic cocoon made of rounded corners and ethereal chimes.
Frutiger Home is available now on Steam for $5. It's a small price to pay for a trip back to 2007, when we hadn't yet heard phrases like 'live-service' or 'large language model.' So if you're ready to pretend it's 2007 for as long as you need to, you can join in. There are even two chairs with loops for legs waiting for you.
Will you be picking this up to build your own nostalgia-filled home?
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