This game is exactly what you think it is. You clean up houses and sell them. That's it. You clean up trash, fix the place up and hope to make a profit. Repeat over and over. And over. It's fun at first, but gets quite old quite fast.

While this game is kind of a bridge between dry work simulators and more videogame-feeling, it does lean more to the dry side and there are a few too many tasks that are quite boring and didn't need to be like that. Buying parts is literally a web shop and you have to actually type in what you want and scroll through search results, and things really didn't need to be that dry.

And there really didn't need to be so much painting. This really is Painting Simulator 2018 with a side of cleaning and moving walls and a dash of re-decorating. Paint, paint, paint, a decimeter at a time.

It started out fun and I loved the missions at first, but fully flipping your own house immediately felt like a chore, and I felt over the game after only maybe ten hours of doing more or less the same thing in every mission. There is a lot of content here for those that like it, but it's too tedious and dry for me.

Was never one for “comfort games” or games where you complete menial tasks, but I really enjoyed the time I spent with House Flipper. It was a super casual cruise through home improvement, making me feel like my very own renovation expert.

The game invites you to two different pathways of objectives. One is where you respond to emails and complete jobs for people wanting some form of renovation for their homes (painting, cleaning, repairs, installation, demolition, carpentry, etc. and usually some combination of these things), and the other, much more eponymous path, is buying houses, renovating them, and making a profit selling them to buyers. And unfortunately, even considering which of these the devs chose to name the game after, I much preferred the hired jobs, as they felt much more variable. These emails can contain little stories that are sometimes funny, sad, happy, bittersweet, or somewhere in between, and fit nicely with the houses that reflect the context behind them in visual storytelling. However, the discrepancies between email and job can also be entertaining. Some college student emailing the player being like “ummm, i made a wittle mess >x< pwease clean it up (^_^*” and going to the place to find mountains of garbage and cockroaches is genuinely hilarious, whether the juxtaposition was intentional or not. As for the house flipping side of the game, making a profit from buying and selling houses, feels way too same-y and arduous, even when there is a bit of strategy that goes into it, lying in having different ideals when renovating their homes to accommodate the needs of possible customers monitoring the house’s renovation (there’s about 10 total). For example, one of the possible buyers is a 20-year-old college student, so you must keep in mind things a college student would need in a home and the extent of those things, like how you’re probably not going to install a sauna in there. But other customers may want a sauna, so you must keep that in mind. A lot of these mechanics end up being kind of moot, as you just design the house whatever way you want and give it to whoever offers the most money for it, but the intent is there, at least. There should be some sort of incentive to want to renovate/sell to certain customers besides, like, achievements. Anyhoo, both of these pathways did feel a little short in content but fit together pretty nicely.

As for the gameplay itself, it’s pretty menial, but it clearly understands that and gives the player some creative freedom in how to go about completing tasks. A lot of the actions vary in their tedium and satisfaction which brings enough variety to outings that they don’t all feel too samey. I always get excited whenever I can demolish walls and satisfyingly watch all the bits crumble down, but scream inside whenever I have to mount another fucking sink. That Swedish guy who made me mount like 4 sinks in his new house (also including a shower, a couple of radiators, a couple of toilets, and a washing machine) can go to fucking hell. The game slowly weans you onto upgrades which make you think “Ok? So I can do these things we’re all acknowledging as menial yet the bulk of the game, but faster now?” and then you realize how well the game immerses you into playing Da House Master since you so easily give in to these upgrades. I don’t know what it is, cause it’s certainly neither the music nor the graphics, maybe it just taps into the deep human urge to just squash down our negative thoughts by cleaning. In that case, ggwp House Flipper. No matter how ugly and ridiculous people’s requests were (like the Swedish guy wanted his whole painted white, that’s weird), I would be there to fulfill them.

The payment you get for completing some of the houses is super inconsistent in some cases, and I’m feeling like some of the missions were scaled way differently. If some guy pays me $10k to clean his garage and move some things around, then you think this teacher hiring me to turn an old 6-7 room office complex into a kindergarten would be paying me at least like, six figures, right? Nope, $25k. Keep in mind that the profit you get from these jobs require you to deduct the amount you spent on furnishings, fixtures, paint, decorations, etc etc etc (which come from your own in-game bank account) from the money you get for completing the job. What was WAY worse was the mission where I had to spend at least an hour completely renovating this guy’s 12 room winter getaway (it was a big reference to the music video for Last Christmas by Wham!) and I only got paid $7k for it, which was easily a net loss due to how much the client wanted to spend on new decorations. At least it was a nice locale. The worst part was I didn’t even know it was a Wham! reference until I was re-reading the letter and seeing the signage “Mikey George” and picking up on stuff like “Unfortunately, the events of last Christmas spoiled it for me” and “This year though, I’ve met someone special”. Bummer.

As for sound, the ambience of the surrounding neighborhoods is pretty quiet and simple but fine. More could probably be done to feel like I’m not operating on a house in an abandoned neighborhood, but whatever. But for music, it has this illusory nature at first of being relaxing and wholesome but starts to get irritating the more you hear it, more so when I think to myself “What would I be listening to if I were cleaning right now?” as well as “Why do I feel like this is music from an inspiring NowThis video?” which led me to turn it off and turn on whatever music I had for the background. I recommend Kiss Of Life by Sade as an absolute S+ tier cleaning song, the whole Love Deluxe album is fantastic as well, but I could’ve been listening to anything playing this. Some randoms in my shuffle included Ski Mask the Slump God, Necrophagist, Donny Benet, The National, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Compton’s Most Wanted, Machine Girl, Madvillain, LCD Soundsystem…this has nothing to do with the game. Moving on…

There’s not much to be said about the graphics and art style, as the game was made in Unity, so. The lighting can be pretty good in some cases when you’re in a house during the night, bathing the walls in light to see your work from a new perspective. In other cases, the lightning can make 0 sense, like being in a dark closed basement with 0 lights on, I don’t feel like I should be able to see everything perfectly for no reason. Most of these problems lie in the limitations of Unity so I’d like to see a hypothetical House Flipper 2 be built off of something else that’s capable of much more, maybe like UE4 or something.

I’m genuinely and unironically disappointed you can’t seem to make your own house, as, while a good few of the houses/missions are inspired by houses in pop culture (TV shows, movies, other games, anime, fucking MUSIC VIDEOS), I really wanted to remake my own pop culture houses like the mansion from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or even just my own real-life place. That would be meta. But being a bit more genuine, despite being able to buy a new house, set it as your new office, and renovate it to your heart’s content, I’m sad you can’t construct your own floor plan for your own house, or at least select one from a series of templates. Speaking of, my final hours with the game consisted of buying the “MAKE HOUSE” which was an obvious nod to Master Roshi’s house from DBZ, and renovating it for just myself, making the great discovery that you can import your own pictures into the game to turn into paintings. It was quite cathartic to do the renovation for myself after ~25 hours of renovation for other people. I’ll probably keep the game installed so I can go visit my island home from time to time. Thus it shall be my base of operations if I cop any of the DLCs.

One of my favorite things recently has been looking for similar assets and props between games made on the Unity engine/toolbox. There’s a cabinet I noticed that also makes an appearance in both House Party and Phasmophobia, so my headcanon is now that not only do these games take place in the same universe, but they’re actually a trilogy, starting with HF, then HP, then Phas. Obviously, there are three different protagonists and the time between the games doesn’t matter but could be thousands of years (a la Dark Souls). The first installment sees the “Flipper of Houses” renovating and selling a house to Madison and Ashley from House Party, the second installment shows, through the eyes of the “Bearer of Debauchery” the party at that house that incited an indescribable, well-known event/disaster, and the third installment shows paranormal explorers, headed by the “Hunter of Souls”, investigating the house for any supernatural clues on what really happened that night.

But yeah, this review hasn’t been amazingly positive or anything so I’m kind of at a bit of an impasse as to why I liked it as much as I did. I think it understood exactly what it was coupled with the fact that, as I alluded to earlier, it scratches that primal cleaning itch. Despite its casual nature, I don’t think this game will be for everyone, for that reason. And if you don’t have that itch, I’m gonna assume you live in filth, you dirty motherfucker. I’m kidding.

Anyways, not sure if I see myself checking out any of the DLCs, but I’ll keep them on pricewatch. It’s entertaining that HGTV collaborated with them for one. For the price I paid and the time I spent, the game was relaxing and fun. Enough to write 1700 words about it, I guess.

For me, the appeal of games such as House Flipper is the capability of being able to transform something run down and awful into something you feel looks great, and being able to do this with a fraction of the time and effort feeds into an almost feeling of total escapism. This is why I end up feeling that these types of games can very much be worth it, blending that line between realism and video game conventions in such a way to essentially provide a version of reality that allows us to perform tasks that feel insurmountable outside of it. With this said, I cannot say that I felt House Flipper hit this in a way I considered sufficient enough to actually make the tasks of flipping a house feel anything other than bland and tedious. Most of this comes down to the fact that while certain elements of the game, such as wall destruction and cleaning, feel as if time has been taken to make them feel sufficiently satisfying, quick and separate from reality, being quick, painless and clearly transformative, there are other parts that fall more in line with being a painfully bland chore simulator. This is especially true for the painting and tiling sections of the game, which feel as if you proceed through them at an absolute snail’s pace, and ultimately will be spending over half your time within any of these houses or special missions you encounter just doing this. It’s overall just an incredibly tedious process where they should have either made the player not have to constantly walk back and refill their resources, or just generally make each application of the paint or tiles cover a much larger area. In its current state, it just ends up being such a tedious task that every mention of it ends up becoming another tedious slog where one’s able to garner next to no fun out of it or even play much into the sandbox aspect of the game due to the fact that most of it is just spent repeatedly having to do this same task without variation, greatly discouraging players from further experimenting or trying out different things, as they know how much of a time sink it will end up being.

All of this becomes an even larger problem when the clients you need to cater so many of these houses towards are just so bland and boring. It’s one thing to be renovating houses at all and auctioning them off to these NPCs, but it’s a different story altogether when it feels like you’re essentially making the same house every time with some minor alterations. Despite attempting to be a game that encourages creativity and to let your own imagination run free, there’s very little here that actively encourages it at all, not special and meaningful design considerations to make, too much time in order to properly experiment and mess around to make something a bit more out there, not even enough variety in a lot of respects, there’s so much that feels not quite equipped for a game such as this. This ultimately makes this feel like a game that’s just very middle of the road in what it asks of the player, with anything else just being optional but not even something that there’s any much point in doing, since often trying such things could just punish you instead due to the way it doesn’t fit the natural conventions of interior design or anything. The game feels as if it wants you to just make a more or less totally normal house interior for almost everything with not enough variety in what you can do for there to be any reason to spend time flipping more than a couple of houses, if that. There was certainly a lot of potential for House Flipper, but it ultimately feels for naught, due to the way so much of it feels like a slog to actually get through being counterintuitive to a game that wants the player to be at all creative. Definitely a game I think is best experienced through watching YouTubers play it as opposed to actually taking the time and effort to try yourself, it’s just not worth it at all to me, not even as a veg-out, easy and relaxing one.