House Flipper (2018)

Relaxing and mindless - this is the kind of game I play while listening to videos or talking to friends because I don't need to put much focus in.

I do wish there was more content; I think it's a genuine missed opportunity that there's no Community/Workshop integration for custom houses and levels, it was one of the first things I checked for when I started playing because I figured it would be a given. Without it, the game quickly becomes repetitive and runs out of content.

Still, for what it is, it's entertaining enough. Oddly satisfying, as most of these 'cleaning up/tidying' games are.

C'est relaxant. Le changement dans les maisons est satisfaisant.

Mais même pour 2018 les graphismes sont datés, j'ai l'impression d'être dans les sims 2. Tout a cette coloration grise, c'est badant. Genre les lits sans couettes ni oreiller pour économiser quelques polygones alors que le pc chauffe devant un jeu optimisé a l'arrache...bof.

Et malgré tout ça, on arrive à être trop restreint dans le choix des meubles. Bien entendu chose qui est suppléé par la possibilité d'acheter des DLC, on perd pas le nord.

Mais ce qui m'a le plus frustré c'est le nettoyage. Combien de fois je me rends compte que je n'ai pas nettoyé une tâche à 100% qui du coup n'est plus assez visible pour que je la nettoie mais fait quand même baisser mon score ?

Bref. Ca a été reposant, peut-être deux heures. Avant d'être déprimant au possible.

• Year played: 2023
• Platform: Steam deck/PC
• Playtime: 38 hours
• Completion level: 100% (Base game + garden DLC)
• Overall rating: 8.5 / 10

Goddamn I love this game. Yes, it's glitchy and the UIs are janky and clunky. Yes, it's incredibly repetitive. But there's something so satisfying about it, I just can't put it down sometimes. I love building and decorating a bunch of different homes. And sometimes all I want to do is shut my brain off and paint some walls. It has just enough sense of progression to keep me going, and the only thing that would make it better for me is to just add more stuff to it - more furniture, more wallpapers, more houses, etc. If you're the kind of person who plays the Sims just to build houses, then you're probably going to enjoy this game.

This game kinda snuck up on me. I felt like it came out during the end of the purposely bad “simulator” games era and so I wrote it off as another janky game with about 10 mins of enjoyability before the “badness” got boring. It wasn’t till I stumbled across a few YouTube videos later on that I realized it was a legit game trying to make an honest attempt, and I was able to grab it on a sale.

One thing you’ll hear often about this game is it’s a chill game, and you’ll hear it here too. There’s no real stakes to the game, you just take jobs cleaning and repairing houses without any time limits. The game doesn’t even ask you to complete a job 100%, long as you get 75-80% of it, you’re good. That does pose an issue on occasion as you may think you’ve cleaned up a dirt pile only to realize you missed one small speck which keeps the pile counting against your total score.

The gameplay is laid back too. Most of the gameplay is find the dirt that needs cleaned or walls that need painted and hold down the mouse button to clean it. The one thing that could count as a minigame is when you install new appliances. When you put in a new toilet you have to hook up the water lines and bolt it into the floor. The only challenge there would be just figuring out which order everything has to connect together. Doing these odd jobs also helps level up your different skills allowing you to clean quicker, paint larger areas at once, or make more money off jobs.

Once you get enough money you can buy a run-down house and clean it up and flip it, hence the name of the game. You can decorate it to your heart’s content, and they give you plenty of different pieces of furniture, decorations, appliances, and etc to really customize the place. My favorite feature is the game allows you to turn your own photos into hanging pictures, finally a use for all my PS4 screenshots, besides Grouvee reviews. You do have potential buyers lined up though, so if you do plan on selling the house, it’s best to cater to their tastes for a bigger payday.

Hidden behind the calm gameplay, this game does have a fun sense of humor. You have your laptop you receive jobs from and the little descriptions of why you are being hired to clean/repair/build a house range from building a basement hovel for a mother-in-law that’s moving in to cleaning up a frat house after an all-night kegger. They are nice little additions of color to the game. The developers are also committed to this game. I think every time I log in there’s a little blurb telling me about all the new items added to the game for free. There’s a few paid DLC that add bigger things to the game, like the ability to do landscaping.

I know this is technically “House Flipper” not “Contractor Simulator”, but the ability to build onto houses and add new rooms or give us a blank plot to build a house of our dreams would take the creativity factor to the next level. As for now you are confined to a set number of houses. Granted there are still plenty to give the game length and they range from one room shacks to literal castles to doomsday bunkers. Again, this isn’t a Contractor Simulator, but I wish there was more depth & realism to the gameplay. If you want to install a toilet you have to make sure you turn the water off or when we wire up a new ceiling lamp, give us a diagram to read or let us guess how it’s supposed to be wired up. That added depth would keep the game fresher for longer playthroughs.

All in all, I enjoy this game for what it is and what it does. As someone whose favorite part of the Sims was building and decorating houses, this game is a distilled version of that. When I’m in one of those “I want to play a game, but nothing sounds good” mood, I usually fire this game up and just do a job or two painting wall and cleaning houses. This game is great for that type of play a few hours now, ignore it for 5 months, then play it for a few more hours gameplay.

This game is a mess. There are so many little things in it that stand out and are annoyances. A lot of the aspects of it dont translate into actual game design, for example: You can build and buy things that dont seem to really affect the homes value. You can also buy expensive things that a client might request that actually penalize you so yo'd be better off leaving the job 95%.

These are little things but they just add up I guess. And the core gameplay is just doing chores and work so its really not exactly fun concept for a game to explore....

I'm guessing that In true simulator fashion, this is a sandbox-style game built around an idea, and then the game itself was shoehorned in around it. The game consists of two aspects: One is where you actually buy houses and then reinvent them as you see fit to please from a pool of 10 or so clients who have particular 'tastes' as well as attractions to certain types of homes. This means you will renovate, furnish and decorate the homes to target a particular market. This is a neat concept but it falls short for two reasons. First of all, the way you please clients is very flat so really going to town and making a house 'nice' or something is pointless. Also since it is 'flat' what the clients look at it is very exploitable. Many of the clients just like certain things like paintings and pictures, or shelving for books... so you can just spam these furnitures in the house with no real regard towards aesthetic, to bilk higher prices out of them in the auction when its time to sell the house. The best way to play it is to just make a bunch of shelves and book cases for Dolan Trusks until you cannot even get out of the house. then sell it rather than to make a house fully functional.

The other side of this game is handyman mode. Handyman mode is actually a bit easier and teaches you a bit about how to do things in the game, such as tiling walls or how to knock down walls. (and knocking down walls is probably the most fun thing to do in this game) I preferred the Handyman jobs as these are these small "bounties" where you are to do tasks. Some of them are a bit creative and given a bit of thought to have variety (which is why i liked). Cleaning up the burned garden and house from a fire for instance and replacing it with a gravel more 'permanent' type artificial solution, or furnishing and old dirty office and turning it into a kindergarten center. I played this with the apocalypse/prepper expansion (silly) and the garden update.
the garden update doesnt really work in tandem with the game. You can create gardens but the pool of 10 clients dont really seem to react to them. Instead you can create something like 5 different 'kinds' of gardens and enter a separate contest which will boost the final value sale of your home by something like 15-50%
The game has a weird thief simulator vibe in which you level up certain skills to make the work done a little faster/easier. It also has a 'home' for the player that you can decorate nad check your laptop for the jobs you do as handyman, but otherwise serves no real purpose.
Not really recommended but its a unique game and if you like building stuff or making or decorating houses you'll get a kick out of this anyway cause its a unique experience. It's just quite soft on the game aspects and is a bit rickety within itself.