I first wrote about House Flipper back in 2020 as a game I really enjoyed. It’s one that I’ve followed over the years, picking up the DLC as it’s come out, and I’m very much looking forward to the future Pets and Farming DLC. Not to mention, it’s been confirmed that House Flipper 2 is in the works!

Pets will be releasing in May, so I decided I wanted to put some time into the content I already have – namely finishing up the main jobs for the HGTV and Luxury DLC. I also have a goal of making 100% on all jobs I do… and I’ve done well at this.

I had to reinstall House Flipper last month, and when I did, there was a Steam cloud syncing issue that set me back a good number of jobs and a few houses in HGTV. I’d completed all of the mail jobs last year, but for some reason, Steam couldn’t find those and I didn’t have the original save files. So I had no choice but to redo those.

Since I’d already done them once, it wasn’t too difficult to knock them out in a couple of play sessions, then I was on to new stuff. For the most part, I like to focus on the jobs where you have some guidance on what your clients want you to do with the place.

Once you’ve completed that to their liking, you can then re-purchase the house, do it up to your personal pleasure, and then flip it again. This seems to take a lot longer, so while I’ve done some house flipping, most of my focus has been on getting through the job content first.

When I got to the Luxury DLC, which is the newest content, I was pleasantly surprised at the changes to series. Not only did the game offer bigger houses, more variety in layout, and much more content to decorate with, but it had some quality of life that I gave it some polish.

For one, your clients are now represented by lovely stylistic artwork and they are fully voice acted! I appreciated this so much as it helped to bring them to life and make their situation more realistic.

We’d always gotten the backstory on each client – either through the mail or otherwise. So there was always a reason we were called to fix and renovate for the client. But I found myself a lot more motivated with this style of introduction for each job I needed to do.

I also love the idea of the character artwork – it’s so, so much better than the serviceable but bland 3D rendered clients we’ve had up until this DLC. You can tell that they also went out of their way to be inclusive about various ethnicity, which is nice.

Of course, since this is the luxury DLC, everything here is pretty upscale and the folks who are moving into Moonrise Bay have enough cash to make jobs feel very flexible. I’ve never run across a situation where I didn’t have the budget to finish a job 100%, but some of the requests here feel frivolous, which is fun!

I also like the choice system in this DLC. The previous DLC introduced a choice system where you decided the theme of an entire room between two options. This was fun, but it also made me wonder about the choice I was not making.

The new choice system in Luxury just feels better. The client has been inspired by an aesthetic and has an idea of how they want the room decorated in a roundabout theme. They present the theme to you, which offers several different design choices to select from.

For example, they may not know exactly what couch they want, but they have a theme in mind. You are given the choice from several couches that fit that theme, and of course the design options that the item presents. I find this fun and freeing without the overwhelming feeling of having to sort through ALL of the content hoping to match the client’s need.

There’s also a new renovating feature for furniture. You can take an old piece that needs some love back to your workshop and make it shine again. Sadly, this isn’t used as much as I’d like it to be – but I suppose if every house had furniture renovation, it would get to be a bit redundant. I haven’t finished all the jobs in the neighborhood yet, so there might be enough of this to come.

Overall, I think the direction House Flipper is going is exciting, especially with things like pets and farms coming. It’s slipped into the top 6 of my most-played Steam games this year, and I can see myself continuing to put time into it in the future. I have more luxury jobs to complete, after all!

Have you ever tried House Flipper or a game similar to it? Is this kind of concept fun to you?