In the past decades, if you wanted something repaired or some technical or mechanical work to do, you would contact someone who does it, a laborer, plumber, electrician, etc. But now is the era of DIY (do it yourself). You can find guides and manuals for DIYing stuff on your own. It is another thing if you succeed or not! If you bring this aspect to the gaming, I think that it would be offensive not to mention House Flipper. House Flipper is a DIY game developed by Merge Games and Frozen District. The game released for PC in 2018. As for Nintendo Switch, House Flipper released on the 12th of June 2020. The game developers took a multi-platform approach by releasing it on PS4 and Xbox One too.
House Flipper is a game in which you are a one-man renovation crew and your tasks are to renovate. You can carry out all your favorite house renovations which spending a penny from your pocket. Interesting! Right? House Flipper’s idea does match to The Sims game. She also loved to construct properties, renovate, and final them by doing a deal, and then moving on to the next one. The main difference here is that you are not loaded with other responsibilities. You will not be raising a family, going to school, or heading to work here. All you need to do is flip houses.
The game starts with you in a small house which is also your office. It does not look quite good and you cannot repair anything in it as your pockets are empty at the very start. You must go and learn some technical skills by completing tasks. You would certainly say that this doesn’t define the game title or me saying ‘flip houses’? You are right for the moment but be patient! I have answers to your questions. The game also has a real scenario to it as you are out of money at the start. You do have a little chunk of it, but useless as you cannot do anything properly with it. You get money for doing work at people’s homes and then gather it to buy houses. That is when you turn them upright. This extra money you get for working as a technician is for renovations, such as paintwork, furniture, and decoration, etc.
Getty Images/DigitalVision/Henrik Sorensen
One of the charms of House Flipper is its in-built store too. It is where you go to buy things. There is indeed a lot of variety to select your things from. There is a lot of variance in plants, furniture, decor things, wall panels, floor panels, and paints, etc. Its all very well organized, like a real-life store except the Other section where you would find most of the Decoration section stuff, but not placed there. There are some matched sets for some furniture. For example, you can find the chairs, table, bookcase, sofas, etc. for a typical type of design with matching in between. It would also be amazing to see some stuff sorted and added by future updates. The game does need updates as some things like there is only standing shower with a single design etc.
House Flipper’s graphics quality was not the most amazing you would have ever seen. It was more than acceptable somehow. I personally would have liked a more of ‘GTA’ feel to roaming. When I played it on the PC too, it was really resource hungry as you will not be enjoying it on low graphics. The houses seem basic. I also did like how we had to reach some portions of the house after buying that scaffolding ladder and climbing to reach them. Small details and animations are nice. The game does not have a lot of sound detailing. You would listen to moving, painting screwing, etc. But no major soundtracks. Background music was indeed soothing and added to the game feel.
Having some displeasures in some tiny parts of the game which can be resolved timely by updates, I literally enjoyed House Flipper a lot. I was into FPS games lately and after getting tired from them, I tried this one and it really was fun to play. You would easily spend more than 2 hours at some time without knowing. Some things are repetitive and become old after some time, but it somehow gets you going. Due to the excess number of things in store, you try to check different approaches to the look, which is not really possible for an average person in real life too. Removing some bugs and adding some features would turn House Flipper into a must-buy game and easy to recommend. I would say that it is a very enjoyable and very good game for a change of genre or mood. With some little rework, it would become perfect.