There is no question that this is a well-designed game, and that I enjoy playing it. Even the challenge of choosing good furniture within a limited budget is genuinely engaging.What I find more problematic, however, is the cultural contradiction at the heart of the game. It presents settings that are supposedly elegant, high-end European interiors, yet the designs are ultimately judged by a largely American mass audience who may never have experienced such places, nor necessarily have the cultural literacy to understand the context they are being asked to evaluate.Occasionally, I put considerable thought into a design and feel quite confident about it, only to receive a surprisingly low score. I then look at the designs that received five stars and find rooms filled with bizarre, contextually inappropriate pastel colours and excessively decorative pets—an unmistakably American aesthetic imposed upon what was meant to be an elegant European setting. It can be rather dispiriting.The same problem appears when the game ventures into the traditional styles of other cultures. There are, for example, Japanese rooms with curtains hung over shoji screens—something that immediately suggests that the creators themselves have not always paid sufficient attention to the cultures they are representing.The player is therefore faced with an interesting dilemma: do you pursue quality according to your own aesthetic judgement, or pander to popular taste in order to achieve a higher score?And while navigating that dilemma, you are constantly encouraged to spend considerable amounts of real money. If you choose not to pay, you are instead made to waste time on entirely uncreative mini-games that have virtually nothing to do with interior design.In a strange way, perhaps the game has succeeded in creating a rather accurate miniature of the absurdities of the real world: the tension between quality and popularity, cultural sophistication and mass taste, creativity and commercial pressure.Which is precisely why I find it frustrating. The underlying game is extremely well conceived and has enormous potential. It comes tantalisingly close to being something truly exceptional.