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.