Help me, I’m addicted to House Flipper and I don’t know why

A few weeks ago, fellow App Trigger contributor Joe O’Rick suggested to me a game called House Flipper. At the time I was deep in Pokemon Legends Arceus, which, as you can see, I covered a bit extensively. Because of this, I didn’t really want to try anything new.

After finally capturing Arceus and deciding to take a bit of a Pokebreak, I saw the game show up in the Nintendo eShop and got it. Now, days later, I can’t stop playing it and I don’t know why.

If you don’t know, House Flipper is a game designed by Frozen District. As the name implies, you go to houses and you flip them. And by that I mean you clean them up, repair plumbing and wiring, paint walls, clean windows and make the house into something someone might want to live in.

The issue, and the reason I’m confused, is that this game is ugly. It looks and plays like a PC FPS from the time before CD-Roms. Textures are about as vivid as the walls in the Windows 95 maze screen saver. The character models for people look like someone just hit random on a 3D rendering software. When you’re working on installation it looks like you’re just rotating an unfinished 3D shape.

It’s also glitchy. I was designing a new office and when placing my laptop (the item needed to play the game) I accidentally put it in the wall where it then vanished forever. I had to start the game fresh.

After that I encountered something weird where I would plaster damaged walls and the game would tell me I completed it but visually it wouldn’t change. This glitch was only fixed by completely uninstalling the game and reinstalling it.

Now, this is the Switch version. From what I’ve seen, the PC version is far superior. It’s got way better textures and even DLC, including an official cross-over with HGTV.  The Switch version is insanely barebones but this is the one I can play in bed so this is the one I want.

So what happened here? Why am I addicted to it?

I know that when Animal Crossing: New Horizons dropped their Happy Home Paradise DLC I was trapped. I love designing things in games and this gave me a lot of freedom. I wanted to do nothing else but endlessly design homes. So this is probably tying back into that.

It’s also got weird secrets which I am a huge sucker for. I bought a new house to turn into my home office and while in the basement I saw that there was a room on the floor plan that wasn’t available to access so I took out a sledgehammer. Smashy smashed the wall. And found a room with three pieces of furniture including a painting that could be sold for over $50,000. I am HERE for that.

I love secrets.

Now considering the house was being sold as “House that is hiding something,” that should have given it away. But I figured it just meant that there was a roach nest that I had to get rid of. There was also an electrical issue where some of the lights didn’t work until I found the basement breaker box and replaced a fuse.

Nope, this was a full-on hidden treasure room. There’s also weird stuff like finding out the house you’re looking at is the house from Breaking Bad. The biggest house you can buy is called the Alone Home which…is literally just the mansion from Home Alone decorated as such in its red and green nightmarish glory.

This game is simple, hideous (especially the Switch version), and broken to high holy hell. I mean, heck, sometimes the descriptions for the items glitch out and just get replaced with the URL for a company from which Frozen District jocked the majority of their furniture ideas from.

And yet, I love this game. Broken or not, I’ve literally and figuratively made myself a home in this blocky hellscape and I fear I may end up “Cask of the Amontillado” myself in the cellar. Please send help.