House Flipper is a 2018 game developed by Polish studio Empyrean and co-published by Frozen District and Playway S.A. which takes players into the world of buying, fixing, and reselling real estate, also known as house flipping. As a flipper, you'll take on properties that have suffered damage, been trashed by previous tenants or are otherwise unwanted. Armed with your trusty tools, it's your job to put in the hard work and investment of fixing these properties up, then reselling them at a profit. Along the way, you'll also take on lesser jobs as a handyman, find hidden secrets, and with enough hard work maybe even become a millionaire!
It currently has five purchasable Downloadable Content packs.
- Garden Flipper, which adds landscaping and the ability to modify the yard outside of the houses, along with special houses with larger yards to work on.
- HGTV House Flipper, a collaboration with Discovery HGTV which includes new challenges and a choice system where you can choose whether to follow the advice of HGTV hosts Greta or Oliver.
- Luxury Flipper, which is the size of the main game and has the player fixing up large and expensive mansions in glitzy Moonrise Bay.
- House Flipper Pets, which adds the ability to care for various pet animals along with new jobs and houses in the foothill town of Cozy Village.
- Farm Flipper, which adds several new mechanics (such as repairing and changing roofs) and improvements over existing ones, in addition to a new campaign and houses in rustic Maplebloom Village.
And two free update packs.
- Apocalypse Flipper, which adds new houses with fallout shelters, "doomsday preppers" themed items, and three new buyers who specialize in buying homes with shelters.
- Cyberpunk Flipper, which adds a large number of science fiction-themed items and a new house, the Hacker Loft. Later updates contain an additional two properties with the same theme.
A Sequel, House Flipper 2, was released on December 14, 2023. It contains reworked gameplay, more detailed customization and a Sandbox Mode where you can build a house from scratch.
House Flipper and its sequel contain examples of the following Tropes:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
- None of the pet creatures from the Pets DLC can die of old age, a conscious choice from the developers as they considered such an occurrence to be at sharp odds with the general comfy tone of the game.
- In the sequel there are several homes that have flooding damage. This means lots of peeling wallpaper and loads of mud, but nothing a good rub down and scrubbing can't fix, nothing more than superficial damage is shown. Even more egregious since the first game at least required you to fix the plaster before painting over damaged walls.
- Adjustable Censorship: The game has the option to censor the cockroaches which are present in some of the houses. Setting this option to "on" changes the graphics of the cockroaches to shards of broken glass, and removes the skittering noises that they make. There's also an option to censor the moles in Garden Flipper.
- The Alleged House: A number of the houses you can buy and remodel are in pretty bad shape. They might be filthy and full of garbage, have faulty electrical outlets, have bad fire or water damage, have walls that need re-plastering, and/or be infested with cockroaches.
- Ambiguously Gay: Gorgio Shanua, one of the potential buyers. He's Camp as all get out, obsessed with clothes and hair, works as a stylist, and according to the achievement for selling to him, he's a Belieber. The game never explicitly says what orientation he is, though.
- Artistic License – Gun Safety: The Apocalypse Flipper DLC added placeable guns as a decorative item. The model shows them as being stored with a magazine in the well, and there are no lockboxes, cases, or gun safes either. For bonus points, there's also a placeable hunting knife, which doesn't come with a sheathe.
- Asian and Nerdy: Chang Choi. He's a college student who only thinks about his studies. He prefers having a desk near his bed, having many shelves for his books, and the color green because it helps him study. Truth in Television because green is a color that's commonly associated with concentration in color psychology.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The House on the Moon was built by a millionaire but he never moved in because commuting anywhere would literally have been impossible!
- Bait-and-Switch: Many of the descriptions for houses and jobs conveniently fail to mention major problems, or downplay the amount of work that will actually need to be done. Of course, anyone who's worked in construction or real estate, or who has bought a house before, will tell you that this is depressingly true to life. A few specific examples:
- Family House, which neglects to mention that the house was the site of a bloody murder, the aftermath of which still needs to be cleaned up.
- Variable Woman's House, which makes a big deal out of how fickle the previous owner was, to buy a house and then immediately change her mind and resell it. It doesn't mention that she actually changed her mind because the house is absolutely infested with cockroaches, with multiple nests in every single room (or there's piles of broken glass everywhere).
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: The House on the Moon is literally on the moon, and is seemingly unprotected from the vacuum of space. There is no need for airlocks or spacesuits, though, as it is mechanically the same as any other house in the game.
- Bland-Name Product:
- All of the buyers use email addresses from "Gmai" instead of "Gmail".
- You can buy IKEA-style furniture with names such as "Mal" (Malm) and "Hermes" (Hemmes)
- The Casanova: Jimmy Traitor and Raphael Erko. Jimmy's bio lists his likes as "parties, alcohol, girls" and both of them want a double bed so they can share it with a female companion. Jimmy also mentions wanting a sauna in his house so he has an excuse to ask his female friends to walk around in a towel.
- Child Hater: Jimmy Traitor and Veronica Liptson both dislike kids and won't want to buy a house if there are kids' objects or toys. Jimmy outright says he doesn't like kids, and Veronica calls them "little snots." Raphael Erko also doesn't want stuff for kids, though in his case it's because they "offend the honor of his masculinity" rather than because he hates kids.
- Cool, but Inefficient: The flamethrower tool, added by the Cyberpunk Flipper DLC instantly destroys garbage in a wide area and can be useful for clearing large quantities of trash quickly. It also needs to be refueled regularly, destroys furniture items as well, and will also obliterate your lawn if used outside.
- Crazy Survivalist: Lonewolf37. While the other two potential buyers from the Apocalypse Flipper DLC are fairly normal as preppers go, this guy is an absolute nutjob. For one thing, he obscures his face with a gas mask for all of his communication with you and refuses to go by anything other than his screen name. He also gets mad if you put any furniture in his bunker, saying it "won't help [him] survive", and that includes giving him a toilet. All he wants is lots of water jugs, lots of canned food (because he refuses to cook for himself), and guns, guns, guns, guns, GUNS!
- Creator Provincialism: The game is set in different countries based on the user's selected language, according to the addresses listed for the potential buyers. However, there are certain bits of the game that suggest a European viewpoint. The default unit of money in the game is euro (though it can be set to any of a couple dozen different units, including US dollars, through the options menu) and all measurements are listed in metric rather than imperial units. Towel rack radiators, which are common in Europe but less so in the States, are all over the place here. There are also quite a few options for building saunas and even 2 of the buyers will demand having one in their home; home saunas are also quite common in Europe but exceedingly rare elsewhere .
- Averted by the sequel which is set more decidedly in the American East Coast, featuring three separate neighborhoods set respectively in the forest, the suburbs of a small town and along the coast.
- Cue the Sun: After finally lifting the curse on Samarta Myers' House, the sun finally rises over the house changing it to day.
- Cyberpunk: The focus of the Cyberpunk Flipper DLC, naturally. It gives a new tool for cleaning trash, the flamethrower, and comes with a cyberpunk-inspired home to buy, the Hacker's Loft. Certainly not a coincidence that it came out shortly before the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In the original game (assuming PC controller controls) X was used to jump, Y turned on the flashlight and B let you crouch. In the sequel, X is now used to crouch, Y to jump, and B...only lets you cancel choices.
- Didn't Think This Through: The description for the House on the Moon states the house was built by an Eccentric Millionaire who thought it would be cool before he realized that his commute to work would be literally impossible.
- Doesn't Like Guns: Maria Kolkowsky, one of the three new potential buyers from Apocalypse Flipper refuses to buy a house if the shelter has guns in it, saying that she fears her kids hurting themselves and she doesn't know how to fire a gun anyway. This is in contrast to her fellow preppers Ted Arrown and Lonewolf37, who are both Gun Nuts.
- Education Mama: The Smoths are implied to be like this to their future children. They want bookshelves to store educational books for their children, so they can grow up to be smart."We want our children to grow up smart, so we need a place to put all the books!"
- An Entrepreneur Is You: The primary focus of the game is on buying properties, fixing them up, and reselling them on auction for a profit. You can also haggle for a better price.
- The Faceless: Lonewolf37, one of the buyers from the Apocalypse Flipper DLC, is a mysterious doomsday prepper known only by his online screen name, and who wears a face-covering gas mask in his portrait.
- Gratuitous English: The "Hacker Loft" from the Cyberpunk Flipper is stated to be in "Neo-Tokyo", but all of the neon signs that can be seen in the loft and in the cityscape outside the window are in English, which is notably not only not the right language for what is presumably a Japanese city, but is also not the native language of the developers.
- Guide Dang It!: Selling to each buyer for the first time will net you achievements. Some of these can be quite hard to get, due to other buyers having many of the same likes, with the ones you want to sell to having very few unique things that they specifically want. Some buyers have guides dedicated specifically to selling to them, with such finicky requirements as building a kitchen without a sink, and no bathroom. It was actually believed for some time that selling to Jack Tarinton was literally impossible, due to so many of the things he's looking for being shared by the Jantart family.
- Gun Nut: Ted Arrown and Lonewolf37, two of the new potential buyers from Apocalypse Flipper both want to have guns around their shelter. This is especially the case for Lonewolf37; Ted wants a gun or two around for protection, but Lonewolf wants as many as possible, the more the better. This is in contrast to their fellow prepper Maria Kolkowsky who Doesn't Like Guns.
- Haunted House: Samarta Myers' House from the Halloween update is definitely haunted. It exists in perpetual night, is stalked by Michael Myers, and even has a few Jump Scares in it. The curse can be lifted by burying the coffin in the backyard which brings out the sun and removes the flickering lights and supernatural phenomena, but keeps the spooky music.
- Home and Garden: The entire game is all about flipping houses (and gardens with the Garden Flipper DLC) but especially the HGTV House Flipper DLC adds new missions that take the feel of this type of show, complete with the dramatic reveal at the end.
- A Homeowner Is You: In addition to fixing and selling houses, you can also select one of them to be your home office, where you live and operate your business.
- Informed Attribute: Much ado is made over Chang Choi preferring the color green, supposedly due to it helping him concentrate. However, this has no actual effect as there is no code in the game for looking at color when deciding who will buy your house.
- Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Invoked with Chang Choi. He has a Chinese first name, a Korean last name, and mentions that his country's people prefer hot springs over saunasnote .
- An Interior Designer Is You: The entire point of the game, really. You design a house to your own likes and then sell it or use it yourself.
- Mundane Utility: The flamethrower, a new tool added by the Cyberpunk Flipper DLC. It's a flamethrower, used for cleaning trash.
- New Work, Recycled Graphics: When the game was first released it used mostly stock Unity assets, with many textures and items that are commonly seen in other games that use the engine too. As the game has continued to grow and develop, Empyrean has introduced a number of their own designs as well.
- The Night That Never Ends: Samarta Myers' House exists in perpetual darkness, made even worse by flickering lights. Cue the Sun when the player breaks the curse on the house by burying the coffin in the backyard.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Lonewolf37 who goes not only by just their nickname but they also wear a face covering that hides most of their face.
- Playing with Fire: The flamethrower is an easy way to clean up trash by burning it, but if not careful it can set anything on fire!
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: There are options in the menu to play as either a male or a female, but since the only thing you ever see of your character is their arms, that mostly just controls whether said arms are hairy or not. There are also options to play as Santa, a zombie, or two different variations of cyborg.
- The sequel again let's you select a male or female presenting avatar, but it has no bearing in the story and it just changes which body you'll see when looking down or the hands you'll see when grabbing things.
- Rags to Riches: The player starts out with barely any money, and living in a tiny shack. Through hard work, however, you'll end up flipping houses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and being worth millions yourself.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: The mole that can sometimes infest your yard in Garden Flipper is easily the size of a small dog and leave enormous molehills reminiscent of African termite mounds.
- Scenery Porn: Empyrean put a lot of work into detailing the streets outside the houses, especially considering the player is incapable of leaving their own yard. The cyberpunk skyline outside the Hacker Loft is especially cool, and of course there's the moonscape from the House on the Moon.
- Shout-Out: Has its own page.
- Somewhere, an Entomologist Is Crying: How do you take care of a cockroach infestation? By sucking them up into a vacuum cleaner, of course! Don't worry about all the roaches that are surely still in the walls or the many hundreds of eggs they can lay. Most likely this was done to facilitate the Adjustable Censorship for katsaridaphobes, which changes the roaches into shards of broken glass instead. If you had to choose one action for both things, vacuuming roaches is at least slightly more plausible than spraying poison on glass shards.
- Trash of the Titans: Many of the houses start this way, with mountains of garbage, bottles, pizza boxes, old tires, cockroaches (or broken glass if you have the katsaridaphobe safe mode on), and more nastiness that needs to be cleaned up. A lot of the early handyman jobs the player can take also involve cleaning trashed-up houses. With the Garden Flipper DLC the yards can get in on the "fun" too with piles of pallets and boards, concrete bags, gravel debris, and molehills.
- Trumplica: Dolan Trusk, though his name implies he's meant to be a Composite Character of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. He's a corporate executive with wavy blonde hair. He prefers cheap furniture in order to save money but wants an extravagant facade and entryway so he can show off, and a nice office for himself. The Steam achievement for selling to him is "Worth Every Penny", which has the description "Mind over matter. Money over all."
- You Have Researched Breathing: You can learn perks through performing actions repeatedly which allow you to improve your skills. Some of these should be quite self-explanatory without needing to be upgraded, such as the ability to paint directly on the wall without having to block off a specific area first; or the ability to spray cleaning solution more than once at a time. Not to mention the ability to use bigger trash bags (or at least bags that fit more trash somehow).
