The Sims is always at its finest when it lets you live your best life. Whether that’s playing out domestic picket fence dreams or leaning into the series’ wildest fantasies, few environments so adeptly allow a person to explore what their life might look like without the obstacles of real life.
In the case of The Sims 4’s latest content release, that perceived obstacle is the budget and maintenance necessary for erecting a small jungle in your living room. With Blooming Rooms, your Sims can now live in a swamp without ever going outside. The content kit adds eight new furniture pieces and 16 houseplants to your Sims’ Build Mode options, all of which are designed not just for the plant lover, but for the botany enthusiast: think propagation stations, funky cages with hanging planters, and window covering made of vines. If you’ve ever wanted to give off serious “San Francisco plant lady” vibes (which I do), then this is the content kit for you.
Blooming Rooms is the eighth of EA’s new “Content Kits”, which were introduced in early 2021. Supplementing the traditional expansions, game packs, and stuff packs of The Sims post-release content cycle, they offer smaller collections of Build/Buy Mode items that all fit within a theme. Courtyard Living, for example, focuses on Moroccan culture. Incheon Arrivals, curiously, introduces outfits inspired by Korean airport casualwear. And Blooming Rooms seems to be for the green thumbs, going beyond the Home Depot Garden Center offerings of the base game to provide items that seem to be intuitively selected for people who actually grow plants. For a self-professed plant junkie like myself, it’s a wonderful addition to what I’ve already built with expansions like Eco Lifestyle and Cottage Living. While many of the pint-sized, aesthetic-based pieces of Sims content are more for fashion than function, their visual value is high. A well-chosen houseplant can be as vital to a cohesive style as a textile pattern or a piece of furniture. And the pieces in Blooming Rooms are distinctive enough to act as the centerpieces of both interior and exterior designs.
In fact, the only drawback of a fun, reasonably priced Build Mode pack like this, is that it’s hard to actually use all the items that are included without redesigning from the ground up. Most Sims houses are too compact to afford any density when it comes to decorating. The hours I spent with Blooming Rooms were a bit dampened by my inability to fit in some of the most beautiful objects, like the Sunny Days Citrus Tree. But at only $5 for 24 items, the content kit is more reasonably priced than most of the other Sims DLC, which eases the sting. And the pre-set Styled Room it comes with, the Plant Lover’s Patio, is a tasteful way to use those items without starting from scratch, if you prefer to just plop something down and be done with it. Overall, I’m pleased with the value, if a bit sad that there just isn’t room enough to jam them all into my Sims’ home.
The Sims 4: Blooming Rooms is now available through the EA Store.
Holly Green is the Community Editorial Coordinator for GameDeveloper.com and the former assistant editor for Paste Games. She is also the author of Fry Scores: An Unofficial Guide To Video Game Grub. You can find her work at Gamasutra, Polygon, Unwinnable, and other videogame news publications.