House Flipper, The Game That Keeps Forcing Me To Compromise My Morals

House Flipper, The Game That Keeps Forcing Me To Compromise My Morals
Contributor: Renee O’Flynn

House Flipper is a home renovation simulator that has built and maintained a dedicated community and home improvement fanatics. The premise is simple: Buy a house, do it up, and sell it for a small profit. It makes bothersome chores entertaining; the slow transformation from rundown ramshackle ruin to something stylish is immensely satisfying.

You must flip it

Players start with no money in the bank. This presents a problem: before you can flip a house, you must be able to purchase one with cold hard cash. So, players must pick up odd jobs to earn a crust. Jobs come in via emails on your personal computer. At first, these jobs are fairly innocuous. Clean up my garage. Pick up my garbage. Things of this sort. Most of the time, these emails are quite direct, with little more than a paragraph on the work to be completed. They’re mostly fluff because the game presents the player with a list of tasks, and the percentage completed, once they are on-site. Because of this, most players end up skimming the emails or not reading them at all. This is a shame. While most of them are fairly normal, some of these emails are heart-wrenching, and several more are downright awful.

The first email is from a woman whose ex-boyfriend sold her radiator and trashed the house. She’d like you to clean the place up and replace the radiator.

If I were her, I would be moving rather than bothering to fix it.

Another potential lead explains that they rented their house to a group of college students. Unfortunately, the students stopped paying rent. When the owner entered the property, they found the place was filthy. They also found the tenants lying on the kitchen floor in a drunken stupor.

I found myself feeling quite sorry for this poor person who just wanted to make a little extra money in retirement and got screwed over by rowdy uni bros. Considering the number of wine bottles, they probably could have afforded rent and then some. This level also serves as the game’s introduction to cockroaches, so take that on advisement if bugs freak you out (you can switch them off in the options menu if they do).

Another sad job came from a man whose wife had died. He wrote in his email that he couldn’t stand to be in a house full of memories, so he’s purchased a new one. He requests that both his girls rooms are painted their favourite colours and for the job to be completed quickly, as living in his current home pains him.

And then there are the monsters. A man offers a job, wanting to get his house painted while his cousin is at an art show. Well, plot twist, it’s not his house. The home belongs to the absent cousin who has no idea their place is about to change colour. Taking this job gave me pause. I could see the AITA Reddit post already: “I painted my cousin’s house while she was at an art show, AITA?” The thread would be filled to bursting with YTA (You’re The Arsehole) verdicts.

I knew that, morally, this was a job I shouldn’t take. If the man making the request hated the place so much that he was willing to pay me to repaint multiple rooms of a house he did not own, why not move out and find his own place? The dilemma the job presented made me agonise over it for a full ten minutes before finally deciding to do it. I am just here to do a job, I rationalised. The fallout is not mine to deal with. It’s not my problem.

The colours he wanted were awful, by the way. A shithead and he has terrible taste.

The emails returned to relative normality after that. A lot of clean this, repair that, and paint that wall over there. That was until I reached the Apocalypse Flipper quests. Apocalypse Flipper is a paid DLC that was bundled with my version of the game.

This job asked me to create a living quarters for a man’s mother in law. He requested simple furnishings, a basic sink, a bed and a bathroom. He then added, ominously, that he didn’t think his mother-in-law would be around for long. And hey, since you’re coming by, why not throw some survival stuff in there as well.  

I arrive at the property to find a ladder leading down to where I need to work. The guy wants his mother in law to live in an underground bunker. I mean, look, I’ll still do it because I need the money for house flipping, but I kept thinking the worst. Is this man planning to kill his mother in law? I can’t help but notice there’s a gun on the wall, and that he’s technically asked for more of them. The most innocent read of this scenario is that this man hopes to cause his mother-in-law such affront that she nopes out of the place, clearing the way to the man-cave of his dreams. The worst-case scenario is that he is planning to lock his mother-in-law in an underground bunker and murder her.

See you at the trial, I guess? That email is proof of premeditation. He could argue she slipped on the ladder, I suppose, but still.

I was deeply sus the whole time I worked on this job.

Yes, I did still take the job.

After that, House Flipper life returned to mundanity once more. I ended up buying the Garden Flipper DLC as I felt I couldn’t properly flip a house without doing the garden as well. This added gardening jobs and along with it the ability to unlock the garden tools. It was relaxing, taking care of the yard and the house’s exterior. A nice change of page from cleaning and painting indoors.

And then we got another dire email.

This time, the job asked me to rip up a clutch of flowers that the writer’s mother was very proud of before she returned home. He asked that I keep the front ones intact so she doesn’t realise the rest have been removed.

What an awful son. It doesn’t say where his mother is, but I immediately imagine it’s the hospital. She’ll come home looking forward to seeing her garden, only to find two-thirds of it are gone. In its place will be some grapevines and fruit trees. I hate this man. What is it with people in the House Flipper world messing with homes that don’t belong to them?

Here I finally took a kind of moral stand. In an act of defiance, I moved the flowers to another garden bed and planted the requested trees in their spot. He never said I had to throw the flowers out. Compromise, terrible fictional son who I hate! 

After dealing with all these horrible people, I had finally earned enough capital to start flipping houses instead of cleaning other people’s places up.

Flip it. Flip it good.

The way House Flipper works is once you purchase a property and arrive on-site, a list of potential buyers will be displayed in the screen’s upper left. The person at the top is the one willing to pony up the most cash for the property. They also run a live commentary about what happens to the house, allowing you to manipulate the sale amount in your favour.

This is getting a little close to the actual Australian real estate market for comfort.

The properties are usually in rotten condition when you move in. I like to sell everything in the house right away because it’s all usually half-broken or just plain ugly. This leads to potential buyers howling things like “What?! No bathroom?!” and “I only need one bedroom and one bathroom, got it?!” Two potential buyers constantly complain about a lack of TVs. A friend suggested I create a wall of TVs just for them. I planned to put one in every room but why not save time and create a feature wall? In another eerie parallel to the actual Australian housing market, a lot of these buyers come off as entitled and rude. If they irritate me (and most of them do), I will purposefully avoid the things they like.

I’ve finally cracked. I can’t be made to compromise on my morals any longer. The game has now become less about the money and more about teaching these fictional people a lesson.

To give the player further leads, loading screens feature comments from potential buyers. You’ll see these long before you’ve even bought your first house. Two of the names that pop up, possibly the TV fanatics, are adamant about having a sauna in their house. One woman wants plants, pictures and nothing for “little snots”. Why on earth am I making nice houses for these awful people? Guess I’ll just keep selling to grandma and grandpa over and over. They will have a mighty portfolio by the time I’m done.

Sick of the demands, I ended up grabbing the HGTV Flipper expansion. The expansion broke the now-understood game loop because players are working for a company rather than as a sole trader. It changes the previous loop by giving players a board of advisors and letting players choose a course of action from their suggestions. Keep the old furniture or replace it with something more modern? Knock down the wall to open up the room or keep it contained? My only issue here is that Oliver and Greta, the advisors, are not the nicest looking models. They have odd scowls and slight smiles. I just get a bad vibe from both of them.

Luxury Flipper turns the loop on its head yet again, and in an alarming way. Players return to dealing with homeowners, but now each property has an introduction, complete with voice acting and 2D avatars. Rather than email you, customers will now engage you face-to-face, telling you what they want right there on the property. It’s an alarming escalation.

Most of these people are fickle and do not know exactly what they want. Some residents provide a simple mood board and leave the important decisions up to the player. We love those people, but there are more interesting characters to come across. Most of them are the good kind of interesting, though a kid that messed up his daddy’s yacht had me badly wanting to dob him in. The “Christopher Gray” job, an obvious reference to 50 Shades of Gray, was certainly an experience. Barney Stinson, the Neil Patrick Harris character from How I Met Your Mother also appeared to show up at one point. I made a kids’ bedroom as well as a bar.

Another client made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. It was right next to the water and everything.

Despite its many strange, occasionally familiar characters, and its willingness to back me into profound, repeated moral quandaries, House Flipper is a great casual game. I’ve really enjoyed playing it. It’s available on Steam and currently has five expansion packs. A sixth expansion, House Flipper Pets, is slated for release in May, and a seventh, Farm Flipper, was recently announced. 


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