The Sims 4 should not be a game that makes my blood pressure spike. Decorating houses and making my Sims practice the guitar for hours is a meditative exercise in wish fulfillment. My own house is cluttered, yes, but not in the whimsically intentional way that amazing Sims builds are. And at this rate, let's be honest, my real life guitar skills will never be a 10. In The Sims, everything is exactly the way I want it to be. Except when my quirky pastel blue kitchen counters don't match the quirky pastel blue kitchen cabinets.

I experienced this deep betrayal once again this weekend when I decided to build a penthouse flat in the new Sims 4 Lovestruck expansion. Filled with modern art deco inspiration, I envisioned a floor plan with soaring ceilings and a minimalist, open kitchen concept. What better way to add whimsy than a set of brightly-colored countertops? 

I decided on the basic but flexible Harbinger counter set in baby blue, nothing too extravagant or expensive, but a nice airy pop of color in my penthouse lot. They looked great. And they would look even more great once I paired them with matching kitchen cabinets. Matching cabinets? Oh hubris, oh cruel irony, why did I think they would match?

Mildly infuriating fact: the baby blue Harbinger cabinets are just a slightly different shade of blue than their counter-parts and, worse yet, they have different colored hardware: silver metal handles versus matte white. There are in fact two sets of baby blue Harbinger cabinets in The Sims 4 and two baby blue counters. What a wealth of choices but a dearth of satisfaction. None of them match.

This isn't the first time I've been betrayed by the Harbinger cabinets, but I'd managed to forgive and forget since last time, apparently. There are even several sets of counters and cabinets that don't match each other, and in the case of the Harbinger Counter set that's currently on my shit list it's possible that this is actually a lighting bug causing these colors to appear different. There are even mods to fix the issue.

Swatch matching problems are a perennial problem in The Sims 4. Anyone who loves building homes knows the deep despair of wood tones that don't match, sometimes also within the same furniture set. 

I refuse to keep living this way, trapped in a house haunted by unmatched cabinets, so I put down The Sims 4 and spent the rest of my weekend in The Sims 3 instead. In case you've not played it—I myself had skipped over it having grown up on The Sims and The Sims 2—the third Sims game has a feature called “Create-A-Style” which allows you to customize nearly any piece of clothing, house finish, or decor object with your choice of material and color. There is a color-picker and I love it dearly. Wood trim and painted counters cannot hurt me in The Sims 3.

For those that don't want to step back to an older part of the series (though seriously, consider it) you can at least rest assured that one of the few things we know about The Sims 5—codenamed Project Rene—is that it is bringing back Create-A-Style. And if you can't wait that long, well, you can peruse my favorite Sims 4 CC finds for sets that actually match.