House Flipper 2 review

It’s funny, give me a job to do in real life and I’ll likely put it off. DIY in the kitchen, powerwashing the local playground, overthrowing a totalitarian dictator to liberate an equatorial paradise island. I just can’t find the hours or the motivation. But ask me to do the same job in a game and I’m in like Flynn. Which is why I’ve been so head-over-heels hooked on House Flipper 2, the perfect game to let me ignore the decrepit state of my real life house in order to fix up a slew of imaginary ones.

I’ll admit that the first House Flipper passed me by, and I’ll also admit that I don’t know what drew me to the sequel, but whatever it was it was about as easy to resist as continental drift. Perhaps it’s just down to how simple and rewarding it all feels – though it is decidedly lacking in action, so if you don’t want a game to chill to, maybe keep on walking.

In House Flipper 2, your DIY enthusiast returns to the town of Pinnacove to find work, make some money, and beautify the neighbourhood. It’s a first-person game with a colourful, cartoonish aesthetic, and a background soundtrack that works like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, lulling you into the gentle rhythm of professional cleaning up.

You’ll start with very simple jobs. Your contact will ring and advise you to check your emails, where you’ll find job offers that require you to clear a load of rubbish from a house, or tidy up the morning after a wild party. I played on controller as I was jumping between PC and Steam Deck a lot, where there’s an easy-to-use radial menu from which you can select your actions. In the campaign (for want of a better term), each job has a series of quests that tell you exactly what needs doing. It’s a case of selecting the right action and using it until the job is done, such as gathering rubbish, scrubbing stains, or hoovering up mess.

Later you’ll need to clean the windows, sell old furniture and replace it, paint the walls, lay floor surfaces, rewire the electrics, and even knock down and rebuild walls and whole rooms. Each job is geared to show you the basics and not-so-basics, which all earn you money for the real game. See outside the campaign there’s a whole housing market where you can buy a ramshackle old money pit or even a huge town house, and then work on it until you can turn a profit. This is seemingly endless, and these houses don’t come with quests. You have to take what you’ve learned so far and apply it. You can even revamp your own house and sell it, moving around like an itinerant hermit crab with an eye for pastels.

The interface is so easy, even when you need to buy new furniture and place it, right down to the individual game boxes on a shelf, or action figures, cups and plates, fruit, toys, bins and houseplants. My only issue is that placement can be a little fiddly, on controller or mouse and keyboard. It’s never frustrating, but because it doesn’t restrict how you place things or really where, it can be tough to let the game know where you want to place a particularly stubborn coffee table.

Continuously performing tasks unlocks skills along specific disciplines, improving the speed and efficiency with which you can perform them. The variety of layouts and tasks in each house is enough that I never got bored employing my skills, and the advancing skill trees always made me feel I was moving in the right direction. Being able to speed up and perform tasks quicker is a big help, and makes you feekl that you’re getting better, when really you just have more tools at your disposal.

House Flipper 2 is constantly rewarding your efforts, even opening up courses later on where you can learn to assemble parts. Once you’ve learned how to build, say, a photo frame, any photo frame going forward is cheaper to purchase and install. It’s an extra-curricular activity that benefits you throughout the experience. Even if you do manage to somehow get a little bored of following rules, there’s a sandbox mode where you can just go nuts, building your own dream home for the fun of it.

This is one of those games where you can put some music or a podcast on and lose hours. The only thing I’d add is either a time lapse of your improvements to a house, or a before and after gallery, because the simple act of improving these homes and businesses is so smooth you don’t realise how much you’ve done until you take a step back at the end. You don’t have to fully finish the jobs either, as it’s based on a three-star system and you’ll only need one to progress, but I routinely found myself finishing every job to three stars for the extra money and the sheer cathartic joy of making something rough-hewn and scrappy look very pretty instead. In a year dominated by MetroidVanias, huge open worlds, and big budget action, House Flipper 2 is a refreshingly joyous experience.