This article is sponsored by Frozen District.
It’s been about five years since the world at large fell in love with House Flipper. It was 2018, and everything seemed much simpler, back then. Even the development team at Empyrean didn’t expect the original game to find such a dedicated, loyal following as it was giving everything a lick of paint and sanding down the coving in the days leading up to launch.
But House Flipper – a small indie project about renovating houses and flipping them for a little wedge of cash – caught on. Media interest whipped up around the game near launch, and a huge community was soon magnetised to the busywork of making humble abodes into luxury pads for the rich and famous. Console ports in 2020 followed the meteoric success of the 2018 Steam release, and for two years, House Flippers across the globe have been content with beavering away on their projects on PC or console.
But now, a new age has dawned. Bigger, better houses are here – with more materials and options than ever for eager homeowners looking to leave their own indelible mark on the property ladder. Everything from the visuals to the gameplay has been overhauled, and even the minutiae like quality-of-life details have been rethought, refitted, and reinstalled. House Flipper 2, in every meaningful way, is an improvement of the original House Flipper.
As it was five years ago, the aim in House Flipper 2 is to purchase houses, renovate them, and sell them on, pocketing a generous amount of net profit in the process. But within that formula, you can let your imagination run wild; do you want to make a scandinavian-inspired coastal getaway? Convert your semi-detached suburban house into a popular local caff? Slap an annex onto your bungalow so granny has somewhere to live nearby? The world is your proverbial oyster in House Flipper 2 – and you don’t have to stay attached to just domiciles.
If you’re more narratively-inclined, you can enjoy a peculiar story set between the mountain tops and the endless sea, in the sleepy little town of Pinnacove. Here, per the game itself, is a place “where time slows down, and the friendly residents are ready to entrust you with their homes”. Getting everything fitted up-to-scratch here will help you uncover peculiar stories and watch slice-of-life anecdotes unfold, providing a surprisingly charming backdrop to all your hammering and spannering.
Fixing up houses isn’t all demolition and spirit levels, though; there’s a wealth of other odd jobs you’re going to need to do in order to get these habitations inhabitable. Whether you reach for your paint roller, your vacuum cleaner, your refuse bag, your sledgehammer, or your cleaning tools, you’ll never be in want of something to do when working on your project.
Each of these tools works (and feels) better than they did in the previous game, giving you more precise control over their functions and allowing you more utility when each is equipped. Painting, in particular, is less of a chore, thanks to the ability to slap down tape markers so that you don’t accidentally ‘paint over the lines’ and ruin hours of previous, diligent work.
It helps that everything looks the part in House Flipper 2. It keeps you in the game, helps secure your mind inside the house you’ve been tasked with bringing up to code. The developers at Empyrean had more development experience under their belts with this game, and have decided on a more distinct art style in order to make everything feel more unified when you’re playing. The result? A more cohesive in-game asset library, and a better foundation for the vast community to supply more items to the game as time goes on.
Enter Sandbox Mode; a free-for-all mode added into the game to placate the creative fans that want free reign to play how they want – for as long as they want to play. Here, players can use the same tools as the developers themselves when making and flipping their houses – it’s deep, it’s granular, and it’s incredibly freeing. If you see any house in any trailer for the game, you can make it (if you practice long enough). Just try not to lose track of the time.
House Flipper 2 launches December 14 on Steam.