House Painting – Simulator

Genre: First-Person Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

House Painting – Simulator, released on Nintendo Switch in 2024, is, as the name indicates, a First-Person Simulation-style game built on core gameplay that has you cleaning and painting houses, with gameplay that’s vaguely similar to PowerWash Simulator.

The presentation here is not very impressive. These 3D visuals are simple with unimpressive textures that look like something you could have seen in a game 20 years ago. And strangely, textures load into the game in squares as you see them, which means that when you round a corner you briefly see a rough zigzag of empty polygons while it takes a moment to load the textures in. In one room, the lighting always looks this way for some reason. It’s really rough and ugly, and looks unfinished.

The sound is pretty unimpressive too. There’s a low, soothing melody playing in the background with some environmental noises, but there’s nothing resembling the sounds of a paintbrush on a wall when you’re painting, nor do any of the other actions here sound like they should. Filling a tray with paint to use sounds like moving furniture for some reason. It’s like the people responsible for making this game have no idea what it actually sounds like to do any of this stuff, and just used random stock sound effects.

As for the gameplay, those hoping for a relaxing exercise of gradually getting a room to look how you want it will find this game kills that satisfaction in numerous ways. Firstly, it bogs players down with the nitpicky details of doing this – you can’t just get started, you need to go into your menus and buy equipment, and things like paint run out (and quickly!) so you’ll be doing that repeatedly. When you do have everything, you can’t get started then either, you have to duck down, place the paint bucket, place the tray, pick up the bucket again, fill the tray with the bucket (which takes multiple button presses), then set the bucket down again, then select your paint brush, then apply the paint using the tray. In my life I have painted multiple rooms, and unless I was using a paint roller I never felt the need to use a paint tray the way this game forces players to.

Oh, that’s another thing – this game locks players’ tools behind progress, and things like paint rollers are unavailable at the start. What’s more, while there’s an equipment wheel that lets you select among the various tools you can use, it doesn’t indicate how to select which one of a particular type of item, meaning that when I was selecting brushes, it just randomly assigned me a brush to use rather than letting me pick. Bizarre.

Overall, the controls in this game are poor and not at all intuitive. and players will often be struggling to figure out not only what they need to do, but how to do it. There is no tutorial here, only a text-based guide, and it is only accessible from the main menu, not during gameplay.

However, despite all of these problems, possibly the worst part of House Painting – Simulator is how it fails to capture the tactile sense of actually painting a house. The interface for painting is basically point-and-click, and when you click on a section of wall to be painted, it paints an entire strip automatically. There’s no going over the wall and getting spots you missed, the game doesn’t attempt to capture the way it feels to apply paint to a wall, nothing like that.

In short, if you were hoping that House Painting – Simulator would be a painting equivalent to PowerWash Simulator, you will be woefully disappointed. This game’s graphics are terrible, its sound design is atrocious in ways that are nonsensical, its game design is unnecessarily tedious, its controls are horrible, and it can’t even manage to capture the simple joy of applying paint to a wall. I simply cannot imagine why anyone would want to play this game.

tl;dr – House Painting – Simulator is a First-Person Simulation-style game where players must clean and paint a house. While there is potential in the idea, this game is ruined in every possible way: ugly graphics, nonsensical sound, terrible game design, horrible confusing controls, and this game can’t even manage to get right the joy of applying paint to a surface. I can’t see any reason to waste your time and money on this game.

Grade: F

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