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0 I enjoy when a sim takes a nice premise like cleaning/cooking and adds a nice difference. Which is where the Haunted House Renovator by Image Power S.A. comes in! A simulation game all about cleaning old abandoned homes while encountering and dealing with ghosts. If that’s caught your eye, then it’s out now on Steam for £16.75.
“This house… is clean.” — Seth Grahame-Smith: Poltergeist [1982]
Gameplay
The game starts you off in your inherited apartment, which serves as a tutorial and a hub, with the elevator allowing you to start the next mission at any time. Here you learn the basics of banishing various spirits and renovating the rooms themselves. Renovating is the simpler part; using a variety of haunted tools, repair damaged or broken floors and furniture, or entirely replace them all together.
One nifty perk of having haunted tools is multi-selection, allowing a whimsical, musical-like flurry of sentient tools to perform multiple tasks at once, such as wallpapering multiple walls or redoing entire floors. Each room has quotas to fill, for example, repairing a certain amount of furniture, buying required items from the catalogue, or cleaning a certain amount. As you progress through the levels, they become larger and more challenging to renovate.
Spirits & Banishing
It wouldn’t be Haunted House Renovator without the titular haunting. There are a variety of spirits which you can banish in two ways; kindly or in a ‘mean’ way. For example, a ghost that inhabits a book will dispel by taking it back to a bookend, or simply get it over with by catching it in a trap. It’s wise to deal with spirits, as they have no qualms about messing up all of your hard work in one felled swoop (or splash with the staining ghosts).
While the spirits vary in difficulty (and annoyance) in how they’re dealt with, the most complex spirit to banish is a wraith. A wraith will have you taking pictures of various objects before requiring you to place a ritual circle in a specific room, then purchase specific items to banish the wraith. They won’t make it easy on you either, as they’ll patrol the area and if you’re caught by them, they’ll possess you. While possessed, you lose control, and they take a joyride in your body until you successfully complete the mini-game. This has you cutting puppet strings to free yourself from the wraith’s grasp. However, there are skills that can help make things easier.
Skill Tree & Ectoplasm
You earn money and ectoplasm as you renovate; money comes from renovating, and ectoplasm comes from spirit related tasks. Ectoplasm is the currency for purchasing upgrades in the skill tree. There’s a vast amount of skills that can help make banishing and renovating easier, such as the ability to buy ritual candles in place of any summoning circle object, or a scanner to help you find stains within the room.
Graphics & Audio
Haunted House Renovator suffers from the same graphical fate of most simulators. The textures are a little dated and low quality, and there are many texture issues, especially with paintings and mirrors. The text on the UI also looks pretty tiny to me, and I feel like it would benefit from a larger font size, and possibly thicker characters. And although there is a purple swirl floating around the general area of the haunted object that needs destroying, it’s awfully vague. Particularly if there are multiple items stacked on a table, for example, you’ll spend too much time moving every individual fiddly item to locate the correct one. I wish it was a bit more distinct, such as a pulsing purple aura on the item itself, rather than a swirl around the general area.
Listening to the same track on repeat gets a little dull too, and I end up listening to my music instead, or simply turning the music off. I like the spooky vibes of the music, but maybe a variety of more tracks in that theme would be better. On the upside, I like the different ghost types, and I love the bestiary (being a fan of creatures and monsters, it’s something I have a personal weakness for in games). I also enjoy the cosmic theme of the UI background, the design of the skill tree.
Longevity
There are six levels in the Haunted House Renovator, but how long each one takes is down to you. Usually I try to make each map as clean as possible, and with each task ticked at 100%. But unfortunately I couldn’t do this due to various issues the game had. Such as hidden stains or ghosts items not appearing, etc.
Final Thoughts
I thought I’d leave playing Haunted House Renovator for a bit because I suffered a lot of issues. Mainly texture/gameplay problems, such as items clipping through walls and floors. Now that the game has released, a fair amount of my issues were fixed, but sadly some new ones have also turned up. For example, key items for spirits not appearing or new flooring becoming a solid white colour.
The ghost busting part of the game also feels a little underwhelming as well, mainly because of Haunted House Renovator’s instructions not being clear. Take the gremlin (where you’ll find most of the issues), in the bestiary it explains on how to deal with it, either nasty or nice. Personally, I prefer to handle things nicely. Now, with the gremlin, it says place more expensive items nearby and bam, you got it. This isn’t the case at all. What you actually have to do is buy the Gremlin Clock and place it instead.
The renovating side is okay but becomes tedious with all the bugged up menus and visual problems. Hopefully, with enough fixes and updates, Haunted House Renovator will be a worthwhile purchase. But as of right now, I’d suggest holding off.
Sadly, Haunted House Renovator gets the Thumb Culture Silver Award from me.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
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