Zen and the Art of Literally Just Taking Out the Trash - House Flipper: Home Design Review

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Last year, at the ripe old age of thirty-six, I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or ADHD, as it’s more commonly referred to). This neurological condition is normally identified during childhood, so adult diagnoses have been relatively rare—though they’re getting more common. While I wish I could have figured it out sooner, I also found a great sense of relief in this diagnosis. ADHD was not an excuse for my many shortcomings, but it at least provided an explanation (and some options for improvement) in regard to why I had so much trouble following through on some of the most basic parts of life, responsibilities and chores that friends, family, and partners had no problems with.

Take, for example, cleaning. I’ve always been disorganized. I’ll spare you a picture of my desk, but needless to say it’s littered with old mail, receipts, coins, controllers, and (amusingly enough) the bottle of pills that I take to help fight the ADHD. When the mess is contained to my little working space, it’s not such a big deal. But when I started living with other people, and when that clutter spread around the whole apartment, or later the whole house, it became a serious issue. But even when I knew it bothered the people I lived with, even when it annoyed me, I just couldn’t get my brain to conceive of cleaning as a vital task worthy of attention and sweet, sweet dopamine.

While I’m marginally better at cleaning these days—current state of my desk aside—I can only imagine how furious some of my old roommates would be at discovering that I just spent my last week mopping, vacuuming, scrubbing, and generally polishing every inch of every surface in front of me to a spotless sheen. Just, uh...not in real life. No, this week all those good habits were targeted at the virtual spaces in House Flipper: Home Design.

Originally a surprise cult hit on Steam back in 2018, where it sold over two million copies, Home Design very slightly tweaks the core House Flipper formula for mobile devices. That formula, in case you’re wondering, is a light management sim in which you accept jobs to clean houses (in some cases so they can be flipped, in others just to help the current tenants). Once you’ve accepted a job, you load into the home in question and begin the arduous task of getting everything in order.

And what does getting everything in order mean? Well, basically you’re just doing chores. You’ve got to take the trash out. You’ve got to pick up chairs or lamps or other items that have tipped over or been tossed haphazardly onto the floor. In some cases you’ll be asked to plaster over wall damage or repaint walls to make rooms feel more alive. And sometimes you’ll have to sell old furniture and replace it with nice, new items that will serve to make the house all the more attractive to potential buyers.

But I cannot stress enough that even the more involved of those tasks essentially boils down to checking items off a “to-do” list. House Flipper’s mechanics match the simplicity of its structure. For example, to throw out garbage, all you need to do is aim your first-person camera at a filled garbage bag or a pile of empty pizza boxes and tap. A small circle will fill up, and then your character will suck up the garbage, as though they’re some sort of vacuum-cleaner-meets-black-hole. Don’t worry about carrying the garbage out to a trash can; once your character consumes it, it’s gone forever.

Other tasks are similarly simple. Moving furniture around is as simple as tapping once, then dragging the item where you want to place it, then tapping again. Sometimes the game misinterpreted me lifting my thumb off the screen to readjust or stop dragging as a second tap, which led to some minor annoyances. But it’s not like House Flipper ever placed me into a tight race against the clock to get things done. This experience is as tranquil as it comes, so I didn’t get too frustrated even when the controls were a little touchy.

The most House Flipper ever demanded of me was picking the correct items when purchasing new furniture or the perfect color for painting walls. During one job, I accidentally grabbed the wrong shade of orange for the walls I was painting—an error that was one hundred percent my fault, as the game’s user interface is exceedingly clear about what to purchase—and ended up painting the whole room before I realized my mistake. But again, it’s not like I faced some massive punishment for this screw-up. I wasn’t even fired from the job! I was out the cost of the extra bucket of paint and the time spent repainting with the correct color, but otherwise it was fine.

That relaxed approach carries over to House Flipper: Home Design’s monetization as well. The game functions perfectly fine as a fully free-to-play title, with the only caveat being that you’ll be forced to wait a set amount of real-world time before you accept the pay for each job you complete. That timer can be annoying at first, but before long you’ll have built up enough money to keep accepting jobs without worrying too much. If you don’t want to deal with the wait at all, though (and if you want to support the developers), you can drop $4.99 for the Starter Pack, which permanently removes the timer from accepting your payments, alongside a few other small bonuses. Some other microtransactions are offered, but honestly, once I had picked up the Starter Pack I was fully set and never thought twice about grabbing anything else.

I feel confident in recommending House Flipper: Home Design if you’re looking for a chill way to blow off some steam between more intense gaming experiences, or if you just love interior decorating and cleaning. I’ll give one warning, however: Not unlike real-life chores, House Flipper doesn’t offer a lot of variety.

You’ll be doing the same trash-grabbing, wall-painting, and picture-straightening from your very first job to your last. Every once in a while the game throws a surprise at you, either via the look, layout, and theme of a location, or through new and upgraded mechanics, such as one job where I had to vacuum up a kitchen that was absolutely crawling with roaches. (Sidenote: I don’t think taking a vacuum cleaner to a pile of bugs is a reliable way to get rid of them long-term.) These shake-ups are few and far between, though. If the soothing repetition of washing windows and slinging plaster doesn’t appeal to you from the start, don’t expect to find much worth sticking around for.

For my part, I was surprised just how much House Flipper’s gamified approach to cleaning clicked for me. Was this what I’ve always been missing? If real-life cleaning came with an experience bar and the option to purchase upgrades that improved my speed, would it have been easier for me all these years? Well, my doctor and my exes all say probably not. Oh well. At least I can be a master of finishing all my chores on time somewhere.

SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Zoning out. House Flippers: Home Design is the ideal game to relax with while listening to a podcast or music, or perhaps with a movie on in the background. It’s extremely chill and doesn’t require your full attention.

• Spending a few brief moments feeling like you’re not absolutely worthless, like, are you serious, all I asked was for you to take out the garbage, are you kidding me right now, you have no trouble cleaning up trash on your little game but you can’t get off your ass and actually take the garbage out from our real-life kitchen where it real-life stinks, why are you LIKE this I cannot depend on you for anything no, no, it’s fine, don’t worry about it, I’ve got it just go back to your games. For real, though, shout out to anyone I’ve lived with over the past twenty years or so. I’m sorry for being so messy and not figuring out my brain sooner!

• Watching anything on HGTV. Real House Hunters heads know what I’m talking about.

💬 Have you played House Flipper: Home Design or the earlier PC/console version of House Flipper? If so, let me know how you liked them. And if not, what’s one surefire trick you use to help you get through cleaning? Please give me some advice, I need it!

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