Now Playing: House Flipper

House Flipper is a game in which you can live out your dream of wasting countless hours fixing, decorating and furnishing various properties. As someone with plenty of actual fixing, decorating and furnishing to do in my own home, House Flipper has given me some good ideas with regard to room planning, furniture layout and colour schemes. I just wish it was so easy to actually do the work in reality as it is in the game.

You start working from a small shed accepting odd jobs via an e-mail system to go into other people’s houses and carry out various simple tasks such as cleaning, painting or installing appliances. The jobs don’t pay much but they do serve as small tutorials to introduce and unlock all the tools you’ll need to become a professional and successful house flipper.

It’s also good practice as you can ‘level up’ skills relating to these tools making them more effective. You’ll earn perk points you can spend on boosting your tools so, for example, rather than painting only 1 section of wall at a time, you can now paint 3.

These jobs are all worth doing not only to get access to and level up all of the various tools but to build up a sizeable pot of cash you can use to start buying and flipping your own properties. This is where, as Anakin Skywalker said, the fun begins.

Once you’ve purchased a property you can travel there and start work. You don’t technically have to do a thing – you can immediately put the property on sale if you want to although in most cases you won’t earn much (if any) profit. How much profit you earn is really a question of how much time and effort you’re willing to put in.

Repairing the property, clearing out trash, cleaning and putting a fresh lick of paint on the walls is usually enough to turn a modest profit without taking too much time. If you want to earn more, that’s where furnishings come in and the more you can tailor those furnishings to a specific buyer, the more money you can make. There’s a pool of potential buyers each with their own tastes and all of which will bid to buy the property when you’re ready to sell.

It does feel a little pointless though spending a significant amount of time working on a property only to sell it. I know that’s the whole point of the game, but it would be nice if you could at least save the improvements you’ve made as a template or something you could then apply for a set cost if you later decide to re-buy the property as your own office, rather than have to do all the work again.

House Flipper is very much not going to be a game for everyone. I’m sure a lot of people won’t see the appeal of spending dozens of hours painting virtual houses. But if you like designing an environment, if you like watching home improvement shows, if you’re a depressed middle-aged man with nothing else in your life then a game like this can be a great way to whittle away the hours until you finally die.

There’s a good selection of paints, wallpaper, tiles and furniture to create your perfect homes. And if you buy the DLC, you’ll get access to even more stuff to play with. I expected the Garden DLC to be my favourite because I do like a spot of gardening in reality but in the game, I’d say it’s actually the worst DLC.

Gardening is very dull in House Flipper with far too much time spent cutting grass or pulling weeds. The good thing about this game is that it takes tedious, messy jobs and makes them simple, easy and fun. In the case of the Garden DLC it takes tedious jobs and makes them even more tedious. It also doesn’t really add much in the way of value to a property, not unless you’re willing to design the garden in a specific style so it’s honestly something that’s just best ignored.

The HGTV DLC is the next worst DLC not in the sense that it’s bad but because it just doesn’t really add much aside from a handful of new jobs and properties to buy. The jobs aren’t anything special and it’s really just more of the same. The Pets DLC is good if you want a living companion to follow you around and add some life to your virtual homes. There’s new jobs, but nothing too great. I do like all the new properties though. I’d say it’s worth it for those.

The best DLC is easily the Luxury DLC. It adds new jobs and some very different and interesting properties compared to the base game. It’s the one I had the most fun with although the music in it is f**king terrible and annoying. In fact, I’d recommend turning off the game music entirely when playing House Flipper and just playing your own in the background. It’s a lot more fun that way.

What more can I say about House Flipper? It’s a game that does a pretty good job at what it’s trying to do. The visuals aren’t amazing The music is mostly awful. The DLC is, overall, pretty lacklustre, including the free Apocalypse DLC (okay, I guess) and the Cyberpunk DLC (kinda bad) but they all add more content to play with and if you enjoy the base game, you’ll still get some fun out of them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just bought a new house by a lake which is in a sorry state and I need to spend the next 10 hours meticulously redecorating and furnishing it because I have nothing better to do with my life.

7/10

Suburban Killbot: Steam Replay 2022

Steam Replay is a new and pretty neat feature that breaks down exactly how much of your life you wasted playing video games during the previous year. I thought it would be fun to share the results here and then do the same next year to see how the stats compare.

So let’s start with the basics – in 2022 I played 34 games on Steam unlocking 542 achievements. 26% of these games were new releases, 68% were released in the last 1-7 years and 6% were released 8 or more years ago.

9% of my total playtime was spent in VR games. The top 3 were Phasmophobia (68%) Into The Radius (12%) and Half-Life 2 VR (10%).

26% was playing games with a controller. The top 3 were God of War (22%) Scarlet Nexus (20%) and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (20%).

My longest daily streak was 45 days from Wed, April 6 to Sat, May 21 in which I played 8 different games.

My overall top 3 most played games by % of playtime were Phasmophobia (18%) Total War: Warhammer 3 (12%) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (8%).

January was the busiest month with 15% of my total playtime, and November was the slowest with only 1%.