House Flipper Remastered Collection
Preview
Clean Things Up Your Way
by Quinn Levandoski
previewed on PC
Remastering the Game About Remastering
If you consider anything with "Simulator" in the genre description to be a tough sell these days, I totally get it. The term used to indicate a fairly serious attempt to emulate something - see games like the excellent Microsoft Flight Simulator. At some point, they started to get... weirder. Deer Simulator perhaps opened the floodgates, and now "simulator" just as often - if not more often - means zany, off-the-wall chaos behind mundane titles.
As such, having never played any of the titles in the House Flipper franchise, I didn't know what to expect. For those not in the know, House Flipper was first released in 2018 and was followed by a sequel in 2023. The games are relatively straightforward attempts to emulate cleaning and remodeling homes, with a few "for fun" elements that push things into the fantastical. The DLC packs - ranging from mundane themes like Pets to Cyberpunk and Apocalyptic expansions - experiment with a little more goofiness.
So what can players expect with House Flipper Remastered Collection? Time will tell when the full game releases, but the demo build promises a nice mix of realism and fantasy with more to offer than just prettier pixels.
What's New & What's Different
After looking into the originals, my first reaction was surprise at such a modern set of games being remastered. Then I remembered how old I am, and 2018 was 8 years ago - quite a while when it comes to games. However, this remaster isn't just about repackaging the experience with better graphics - though that's part of it. A quick glance at the House Flipper Steam pages will show quite a number of available DLC packs. All of them will be included in the full version of House Flipper Remastered, so that's immediately a pretty good value, assuming a reasonable release price. Moreover, the whole experience has been improved with added narrative and voice acting, tweaks to tools, and entirely new tools designed to smooth out some of the more tedious or frustrating elements of the originals.
Unfortunately, I'm not well-positioned to speak specifically to how any of the new features and improvements compare to the original titles. Judged on its own merits, though, renovating homes and selling them feels great. Given I'm in the constant process of working on my own recently-built home, doing more housework is a far cry from what I'd expect to have fun with. But there's a catharsis to it. It's relaxing to see an absolute mess and not be beholden to real-world necessities dictating the order and timeliness with which you address each problem. The first building, a humble shack, is a disaster, and I spent my first 30 minutes just adding new tile and wallpaper to the bathroom and walls. Did it make sense with bags of trash everywhere? Nope, but it's my fantasy, and I'll clean it how I want to.
I'll note that all of the tools were unlocked from the start in thee preview build, so I can't say how well tool acquisition feels or how repetitive, if repetitive at all, certain tasks are before acquiring them. But I can say it's nice to have a little hand tool to instantly sell objects or duplicate them. Some of the actual process wasn't immediately intuitive and required bouncing between different tools and a tablet, but I eventually became reasonably accustomed to the flow, and I'm sure more time with the full game would have made it second nature.
Lots Of Options For Play
Speaking of tools and work, even in the preview build, there are quite a lot of options. I'm not one for going too crazy debating the pros and cons of one door vs. a slightly different one, but I enjoyed the freedom to play with color, space, and overall aesthetics. Moreover, the build presented a mix of remastered locations and new ones (though they were all new to me), so returning players can do some comparisons between what's here and what they've played in the past.
As mentioned, there's a light narrative here, and the game isn't just a sandbox of fixing. Different locations should be tailored to specific sensibilities to make sales, and there's a whole meta-game of deciding not what you like best, but what the buyer will like. But I appreciate that playing that game isn't fully necessary - if you just want to play virtual LEGOs, you can do that to, and that's ok.
House Flipper Remastered Collection may be a revisit of a fairly recent game, but the suite of listed improvements and additions seems reasonable for existing fans. It's most exciting, however, for new fans, who get quite a bit of previously scattered content presented in its best form and in one package. Look for House Flipper Remastered Collection to launch in full later this year.
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