The children yearn for Microsoft Bob - which took this idea a bit further:

"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."

In the last century, there was an app for Apple's Mac OS (before MacOSX), called Kaleidoscope[0]. It allowed massive customization.

Fun, but most themes were basically unusable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)

Some samples: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709175639fw_/http://www.kal...

(The one I used the most, was Ozymandias II).

Some level of skeuomorphic design is quite nice, like what we saw from Apple during the Forstall era. It seemed to strike a good balance.

Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.

I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.