Have you ever wanted to play one of those House Flipper titles in a haunted mansion? If so, then Haunted House Renovator is the game for you. Haunted House Renovator allows you to clean up and decorate the interiors of apartments and houses to your specifications while also capturing or banishing ghosts. Unfortunately, players don’t seem to be able to use a vacuum cleaner to suck up the ghost who keeps turning the lights off, but a game can’t have everything.
Plot Ahoy!
There isn’t a whole lot to the plot of Haunted House Renovator, though players are treated to a fun cutscene with drawn artwork that includes a fun homage to Phoenix Feyworth, Ace Attorney. This is clearly a title that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you’ll gain an understanding of this right off the bat. That’s because when one of your dead ancestors calls you in to renovate some haunted houses in Haunted House Renovator, you say yes sir in whatever eldritch language the dead understand.
Players can get their haunting renovations started over on the Steam platform where Haunted House Renovator is available for under $20. And based on its popularity there, those apparitions recently took up residence on the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 consoles as well.
Review Notes
Haunted House Renovator is basically House Flipper with a spooky aesthetic. When you start to renovate a house, you’ll have a list of tasks you’ll need to fulfill before you can complete that job. Many of your tasks are simple, specific things like removing stains, while some are more nebulous like awakening spirits. You have a variety of tools at your disposal to do all that like a repair kit, scrubber, brush, telekinesis, and more. In a fun twist, you move around in first person while navigating by flashlight until you can turn the power on in whatever apartment or home you’re renovating. Then you can equip your other tools to pick up garbage, fix furniture, or breakup trashed items throughout the area.
Some tools will work on their own, like you can select an entire wall and have one of your tools change all the wallpaper in a room pretty effortlessly, which is kind of nice. You’ll see your haunted tool float and replace things for you as if it were Hogwarts, plus it has the side benefit of cutting down on some of the repetition normally found in these kinds of titles. You will also encounter puzzles while renovating these houses, and new spirits may become active while you do things as well. If that happens, you’ll have to deal with them too.
Pretty much any time you’re at a loss for what to do, you can take out your handy camera and get some information on what might be required to solve a puzzle or fix a problem. Using the camera on different objects will oftentimes bring up codex pages, which will either give hints for how to progress or will outright tell you what to do. It’s quite handy, so I made use of the camera very regularly while trying to figure out what Haunted House Renovator was requiring of me during some of the vague tasks. Each place you renovate will also have at least one primary specter that will require that you collect information to perform a banishment ritual, which is definitely fun the first couple times.
Visually, Haunted House Renovator gets the job done without any issues and is likely playable on weaker PCs without any issues. As far as music goes, there’s a pretty grating haunted house carnival track playing in the background throughout the entire first mission which can drive players absolutely batty.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are some pretty rampant bugs that may pop up during Haunted House Renovator’s gameplay. When dealing with specific tasks like banishing a gremlin, for example, you will be presented with two options, but one of them may just fundamentally not work. Sometimes fixing the fuse box may not work either, but closing and relaunching Haunted House Renovator in that case fixed the issue and allowed further progress. I also had tasks break so they couldn’t be fully completed, such as having to buy or fix missing items, which would lead to an incomplete to-do list menu.
TLDR
Haunted House Renovator is an interesting combination of straight up House Flipper gameplay with ghost themes and puzzles. This title could definitely use more polishing because there were a number of bugs encountered even in a short playthrough, but with a bit more polish there could be something fun here. The idea of mixing House Flipper with banishing ghosts is a fun idea that deserves a little more time in the oven.
Developers: Image Power S.A.
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X