Haunted House Renovator is set to release on April 30th which has you going around fixing up and banishing ghosts that are terrorizing a local town. Not everything is as it seems as you slowly learn the terrible truth of your family. Banish ghosts, bash toilets, and put up new wallpaper. It's time to dive into the world of renovating haunted houses.

When it comes to these kinds of simulation games where you are mostly going around cleaning up a mess that was created by some kind of creature. In this case, those creatures are ghosts. You don’t expect a massive underlying story that is waved throughout it giving all your cleaning jobs a purpose.

That is exactly however what this game delivers. There are also some spicy things going on in your family tree as you find out you have been down on your luck your entire life for a reason.

When it comes to games that tie in a tutorial quite well into being part of the actual game. When it’s not feeling like a tutorial but an interesting prolog to the game. I like to call games out that do that well.

It was refreshing to see how Haunted House Renovator tied in your first location as a tutorial in a way that did not feel like you were just wasting your time hoping to get into the actual game.

That location ends up being an apartment that you inherited. From it being trashed along with being haunted. You have some work cut out for you as the game slowly shows you the ropes of clearing, repairing, and yes even attempting to banish a family member that has taken over one of the rooms in the apartment.

The best part was this first location then is used as a return point after each house-clearing renovation job. It was nice I did not need to fully restore it either before being allowed to go further into the game.

I could return after doing some other missions and decided to further fix the place up. You could even make some changes to it as well. You could add in further furniture, different wallpaper, and maybe even deal with any ghosts you have been ignoring up to this point.

At the start of every mission, you discover that the location was chosen for a reason. These were not just some random haunted homes looking to get renovated after all. The main storyline slowly reveals itself in a cutscene leading up to your next job. Here you were just hoping to make a little extra cash, and you find out things are a bit more complete than that.

There was also enough of a backstory that it kept me around not wanting to skip over the details being dropped. Almost as if I missed out on something it would come to haunt me later. Thankfully like a lot of things in this game if you skip over something it’s not going to be the end of the world.

The game has a couple of different locations ranging from easy and small to highly rewarding and a bit more complicated. A couple of them are unlocked early on and others you find out through the storyline that you just are not quite ready to take them on just yet.

In each area of a house, apartment, or other location. The game displays that room's overall goals. You can also find things like furniture that was decided for that location in the shop menu. Great for replacing any busted-up chairs, tables, and lighting that you demolished to get out of the way.

For a large part of the work you are doing is simply clearing. You are removing garbage off things, clearing the floor and even walls. I don’t know how many times I'd get a room looking great just for some ghost I had yet to capture popping in and leaving a trail of ooze that I now had to deal with.

You can bet I chased after any ooze-making factory and banished it out of this world. Look at all the extra clearing I must do now! I’d bring it back to our world and banish it again for the anguish it caused me if I could.

Anytime I would encounter a new ghost I'd take a photo of it. Then a helpful window would pop up giving me some further details about what I had just encountered. There are usually two ways of dealing with a ghost a friendly and not-so-friendly way.

There were even a couple of instances where if I wanted to go the long way of being kind to the ghost I had a chance for it becoming a pet. More time than not I went with shooting a web or capture device at the ghost. I just wanted to get back to bashing things with a hammer and mopping the floors.

Not all the ghosts you encounter are so easy to deal with either. In each level is a wraith that you need to perform a ritual to remove. This requires placing down a magic circle with the correct options in a certain room in the house.

These things can be quite nasty to encounter as well. They tend to hold up in one of the rooms in the house. Making it impossible to get any work done in that room till you have dealt with them.

I have no idea what it is about toilets in this game. The number of magic circles that required having a toilet in one of the locations on the pentagram was a little strange.

This game also has a couple of different puzzles. From memory matching item tests to solving what belongs were. While none of them were hard some did take a couple of attempts or a little more thinking than the rest.

Of the many puzzles. I found the one above to be quite funny. Everyone is in the wrong location in the painting, and you must switch them around. They also all don’t go where you think they would either. There is some strange stuff going on in this one.

Along the way of earning cash, you also get skill points. These can be invested into things to make life a little easier. Such as the ability to sense broken items, trash, dirt on the floor, and so on.

While other upgrades you could flat out just purchase with cash. After renovating two locations I found myself loaded and went on a bit of a spending spree. Making the next job just a little easier to carry out.

Final Thought

Overall, for quite a dark-themed game I found it a bit lighthearted. How can you not when you are fixing places up and getting to choose the wallpaper and even some of the future to go in them? For the most part, it was rather relaxing.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Haunted House Renovator.

Disclosure. This review was written before the release of the game.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.