House Builder is fascinating in theory, but less fun in practice

★★★ | Life as a house

Reviewed on: PC (Steam)
Distributor provided a review copy.

I’ve helped my dad with two house building projects. Neither of which were fun, but they were necessary to understand just how tedious that experience can be. It gave me a perspective of what goes into crafting a solid, livable place, that isn’t just four walls and a roof.

So when I read the concept for House Builder, out now from developer FreeMind S.A., I jumped at the chance to give it a go. It’s a simple, but effective one. You’re a one-man construction crew, and you travel around the world to build dwellings throughout the ages. Starting from mud huts to igloos and beyond.

Each mission begins the same way. You’re stranded somewhere with nothing but the barest building blocks of a house. From there, you gather materials, mix the ingredients that are necessary, and place everything where it’s supposed to go. Over, and over, and over again.

Right away, the game hits that elusive barrier between fun and tedious. In theory, it’s exciting to see what goes into everything that we take for granted in a house. In practice, actually picking up the mud, gravel, and water, and then mixing them together, is tedious busywork.

Sure, the game offers a plethora of skills and level ups that speed the process along, but all that makes me question the necessity for the parts that aren’t fun in the beginning. If the gameplay loop is built on rewarding those who can grind out the frustration, it’s not a very fun one.

Similarly, the actual building process isn’t particularly exciting. In the story mode, you’re locked into placing pieces in highlighted areas, and nowhere else. Everything you build looks the same eventually. There’s no creativity involved in the mechanical process.

In a way, that’s fine, since the actual process becomes a relaxing, almost zen-like chore. You can listen to a podcast in the background and just zone out while building. But I can’t help but feel like that’s not particularly healthy or fun. After all, there are countless other games that allow you the same zoning out while still giving the freedom to do what you want.

There is a creative mode, too, but that swings the balance too far in the other direction. Here, you’re given no indication on what to do next, and the lackluster UI and extremely limited map space are of no help. I spent a few hours fiddling with the finicky controls, and while I did have more freedom to build as I saw fit, it never felt rewarding.

That’s the problem with any simulator. You have to balance the realism with the immediate rewards that gaming requires. No game is realistic by definition, so making things tedious because that’s how it is in life is pointless.

I admire that House Builder tries something different, and I think it has a foundation for a really fun simulation experience. There’s a VR mode available on the PC, that I didn’t get to try out, that could be a lot of fun for would be architects.

But to get there, House Builder needs to figure out what it wants to emphasize. Right now, it’s all over the place, and the tedium overpowers the wonder. I found the history of houses fascinating, but I can’t say that I came away with any new knowledge about how any of them worked.

All I found out was something that I already knew. Building houses is hard work, and that’s something I don’t want to experience when I’m gaming.