I get the trend of “flipper” games. There’s a catharsis to them, and a freedom that reality does not have. As a millennial, I think these games also tap into a vein of domestic powerlessness that runs deep in my generation, providing an outlet and a way for us to play house in a world that has taken that ability away from us. Much as there’s a reclamation of witches, there’s a reclamation of domesticity and the satisfaction of taking something that had been grimy and grungy, and making it pristine.

Except for me, of course. I, as a chaos demon, just want to make messes, not clean them up. I am not the target audience at all, but yet, here I am, pretending to be a peasant interested in good hygiene.

i just want to fire the trebuchet

I understand Castle Flipper, and on paper, it should work. It, like the many, many other games in its genre, is a cleaning, building, and repairing simulator. You play as a peasant - or lord? the titles here don’t make much sense - who is good at renovating and building. You’re hired to renovate and build a variety of buildings, moving into more and more complex buildings until you are ultimately building castles for yourself and your serfs tenants. On paper, this formula is great. People love flipping games. People love medieval games. Why not combine the two?

The first element that breaks down, though, is the mechanics themselves. I’m playing on touchpad and fully acknowledge that some of the difficulty I had with the controls is likely due to the fact that absolutely no one expects someone to play a game like this on touchpad. What can I say - I am the Walmart laptop in the corner that you’re supposed to optimise for, but never do because you assume no one would ever be foolish enough to try to function like this. However, it doesn’t change the fact that this game has absolutely miserable controls. Every action requires equipping a new tool or putting away an existing tool, each requiring navigating into a submenu and clicking on the correct tool for the job. This shouldn’t be an issue, and yet, it very much was one. Trying to click on the tool to use it was an exercise in frustration. Coupled with needing to make frequent runs back to a wagon to drop off my loot, I ended up spending almost as much time navigating tool menus as I did actually using any of the tools I struggled to equip in the first place.

i don’t need further disincentives to clean

I’m willing to chalk the difficulty with the controls up to me being the edge case no one wants to think about, but it doesn’t excuse the overall feel of playing the game. The idea of Castle Flipper is to build lovely medieval villages and castles, yet the tools to build are themselves tedious and headaches to use. The actual process of building, again, requires going into submenu after submenu, selecting walls and foundations and doors without any real ease of use. Walls and roofs snap to the wrong places and in the wrong direction, and furniture seems to follow no real logic in whether it’s going to obey the laws of physics that day.

This is also setting aside the unintentional difficulty of play itself. What is smashable and what is not seems almost arbitrary. What qualifies as a stain needing to be cleaned and what does not seems arbitrary. There isn’t so much a space to trust my eyes to spot a mess as there is a constant reliance on the mechanic the game provides to highlight what I need to do next. This becomes especially necessary as the game cycles through day and night. The game is not particularly bright as is, with a dim torch providing the only light in the gloomy crevices of these abandoned homes. When night strikes, it becomes nearly unplayable, with the glow of my psychic mess-finding providing the only hint of where it is I need to go next.

Engine issues aside, even the logic of the game is questionable. While I don’t expect a historically accurate rendition of life as a medieval noble, the process of needing to build suitable houses for tenants to rent felt distastefully like a mechanic lifted from other, better games without consideration for the game it was being placed into. The idea of “tenants” was an odd one, as was the idea that I would need to cater to their every whim. If I’m a medieval lord, they’re my subjects, not vice versa. Even the idea that building and designing inevitably turns into a system of landlording and leeching is a depressing one. If I want to build, shouldn’t I be able to without worrying about whether what I build appeals to anyone standards but my own?

I came so close to saying “landlords are leeches,” and then……oh wait…i’m not sorry

These types of job simulator games work because of the catharsis and escapism they provide. Loading one up welcomes the player to a world they otherwise don’t get to experience, and into the quiet and comforting repetition of a task that can be done at their own pace and in their own way. For flipper games, especially, there is an opportunity for creativity, and for the patience of building something wholly one’s own, with the knowledge and safety of a virtual world.

That catharsis is exceedingly difficult to achieve when the player is having to fight against the game to get there. I played this game for as long as I could before giving up on the abysmal controls. What it was offering was nowhere near enough to justify the headache it was giving me.

Developer: Pyramid Games

Genre: Job Simulator

Year: 2021

Country: Poland

Language: English

Play Time: 4-6 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/a5Iz519UNQU