Moviehouse takes The Movies' reverence for all things film and transplants it into a Game Dev Tycoon-shaped mold. If you, like me, are obsessed with these types of games and adore cinema, that might be enough to sell you on this. Unfortunately, it kinda blows.
Moviehouse takes the streamlined auteur fantasy of Game Dev Tycoon to excruciating lengths. You don't even get to see the people who are working on the projects you've assigned. Your named employees are portraits that generate points, and that's it. Oh, and there are only two types of them. If they're not named, they're part of a crew that does location scouting and creates props. How many people are in a single crew? The game never tells you. All of the work done on that side of things is just labeled under 'Crew,' and that's it. If it's not simplistic to the point of parody, it's woefully undercooked. The best example of this, outside of how threadbare the system for reviews is, is film festivals. Conceptually, I like it. All creative fantasies relating to film start at a film festival. In Moviehouse, you sign up for a festival, choose your film, wait, answer a single dialog prompt with answers that don't make much sense, wait more, do more waiting, and then you get to see which position you placed in. It manages to be less interactive than the reviews are, which is downright criminal. Progression is a bit borked, as well. Spam film festivals and accept distribution deals, and eventually, you will rake in millions. There's no variety, no sense of scale. Keep doing the same thing, and you'll be rich.
Here's a question I'd like to (rhetorically) ask these developers: what separates this from an idle game? As much as I criticized Showtime for being basic, this makes it look complex in comparison. But I suppose the writing should have been on the wall. This formula doesn't work too well with filmmaking. There's a damn good reason why The Movies still reins as the best game about creating movies. It focuses on people as individuals and not resources. Shrunk down to portraits with no personality to speak of, the excitement of the fantasy completely dissipates.
Moviehouse takes the streamlined auteur fantasy of Game Dev Tycoon to excruciating lengths. You don't even get to see the people who are working on the projects you've assigned. Your named employees are portraits that generate points, and that's it. Oh, and there are only two types of them. If they're not named, they're part of a crew that does location scouting and creates props. How many people are in a single crew? The game never tells you. All of the work done on that side of things is just labeled under 'Crew,' and that's it. If it's not simplistic to the point of parody, it's woefully undercooked. The best example of this, outside of how threadbare the system for reviews is, is film festivals. Conceptually, I like it. All creative fantasies relating to film start at a film festival. In Moviehouse, you sign up for a festival, choose your film, wait, answer a single dialog prompt with answers that don't make much sense, wait more, do more waiting, and then you get to see which position you placed in. It manages to be less interactive than the reviews are, which is downright criminal. Progression is a bit borked, as well. Spam film festivals and accept distribution deals, and eventually, you will rake in millions. There's no variety, no sense of scale. Keep doing the same thing, and you'll be rich.
Here's a question I'd like to (rhetorically) ask these developers: what separates this from an idle game? As much as I criticized Showtime for being basic, this makes it look complex in comparison. But I suppose the writing should have been on the wall. This formula doesn't work too well with filmmaking. There's a damn good reason why The Movies still reins as the best game about creating movies. It focuses on people as individuals and not resources. Shrunk down to portraits with no personality to speak of, the excitement of the fantasy completely dissipates.