What is it? A casual building sim about restoring houses and selling them for profit.
Expect to pay $40/£35
Release date Dec 14, 2023
Developer Frozen District, Empyrean
Publisher Frozen District, PlayWay S.A.
Reviewed on Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060
Steam Deck TBD
Link Official site
You can see why the original House Flipper was such a hit. Its cosy fantasy of home ownership and fulfilling work was a soothing balm after a miserable day at the office, and that fantasy is only strengthened in this sequel. The basics remain the same: jobs appear in your email, from simple cleaning tasks to full-on home renovation, and you can use the profits to purchase properties from the auction house, ready to be glowed up and flipped for even greater profit.
Accept a job and you'll appear outside the house with your bag of tools. Bin bags to collect the piles of rubbish, one measly cloth to wipe down floors, walls and ceilings (weirdly, the first game's mop tool is nowhere to be found), a roller and scraper for painting and wallpapering, and so on. I haven't played the previous game, but the interface for managing all these tools seems neater and easier to grasp here. It's no longer mimicking an in-game tablet, so menu icons are free to be a little more gamey: larger and more colourful, easier to identify at a glance.
In each room you're now given 'quests' to perform, although I'm sure Tolkien would raise an eyebrow to hear 'bag all the rubbish' and 'clean all the dirt' being described as such. You can even use your new Witcher senses—or whatever the game calls them—to highlight interactables in gold. This is a godsend when it comes to finding every miniscule speck of junk.
