The House Flipper Remastered Collection's Toolbox is Absolutely Full to Bursting

In some ways, the idea of being a handyman is actually the pinnacle of what work looks like. I know, that sounds weird. But think about it for a minute. The work you do directly has a positive impact on the person in front of you. You are making your own decisions about what work to pursue. Best of all, you are genuinely competent in a wide array of skills that are beneficial for living in today’s society. Spreadsheets and powerpoints, who needs em?!

Of course it isn't all rainbows and sparkling clean drain pipes in reality. Luckily, House Flipper isn't reality. Like all good games, it's enough of a facsimile of the idea of the thing, taking all the good parts while ignoring the (sometimes literal) shitty parts. Who needs to find the right screwdriver in your toolbox to screw in a bracket when holding down the left mouse button and watching it screw in itself will do?

The Remastered Collection of the hit sensation has recently dropped, and it's honestly a pretty good package. I tinkered a bit with the base game yonks back, but there has been a frankly ludicrous amount of extra content come out for this thing, with a ton new of missions, new tools, new items, new houses, new everything. Wrapping it up in a neat little package and giving it a nice visual sprucing is like putting together all layers of that seven tier cake and indulging to your heart's content.

Thankfully (through the story mode path anyway) it doles out areas, missions and importantly tools at a thoughtful pace so as not to overwhelm you with everything you can possibly do in this game. You can follow the path from rags (well, $50k of rags as a start, which, damn I wish I had that) to riches and learn all the systems that way. If you’re coming to the game with experience and just want to dive in, you also can do that from the jump.

I spent quite a bit of time across both the PC and PS5 versions of the game, and while I will always pick laying back on the couch with a controller over adding extra hours to my desk chair's butt-mould any day, I do have to admit the controls are still a bit finicky on the sticks sometimes. Not enough to be a problem, but enough to find it a bit difficult to try and line up the window washing tool into neat straight lines, for example. All it means is a bit extra time waving that thing back and forth until you hit those missed spots, so it's not the end of the world.

A frankly excellent little thing you might not see in many reviews is that there are quite a lot of cool game specific settings outside the typical graphical options - even on PS5 - available to tweak. Things like changing cockroaches to broken glass, choosing what your hands look like, even just the option to disable sound altogether. The creators of House Flipper know what they have made here; there's a sizeable chunk of the audience that loves to sit back with a podcast and just relax while tearing down and rebuilding walls, yours truly included.

And that's the thing with House Flipper really. It's of a piece with a genre of games that are less about overcoming challenge, but more about deriving satisfaction from simply the act of accomplishing tasks as a form of relaxation. Which, while now that I type that out, actually feels kind of disturbing to admit - that an entire generation of people need to feel like they are still working in order to feel relaxed - but that's a topic for another essay.

In this, House Flipper always succeeded in accomplishing, and now does so to it's fullest with a sharper paint job amid a bundle of every little piece of DLC you may have missed along the way being right there at your fingertips. It's an impressive package, and without a doubt one of the top contenders for those that fit it's particular brand of de-cluttering, rebuilding, fixing and so, so much more.

Code was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this piece.