What’s the better hustle: flipping houses or making media about flipping houses? The dozens of house flipping TV shows suggest it could be the latter, as does House Flipper the game, which released on Steam in 2018 and has over 68,000 user reviews on the platform, largely positive. The sim sensation clearly isn’t out of juice yet, either, because its upcoming sequel had the most-played demo in the recent Steam Next Fest.
To take first place in the Next Fest most-played demos list, the House Flipper 2 demo beat the demo for Lies of P, a more-wishlisted action RPG that more or less puts Pinocchio in Bloodborne, trippy puzzle game Viewfinder, and hundreds of others.
House Flipper 2’s demo is no longer available to play, and neither is the Viewfinder demo, but the Lies of P demo can still be downloaded on Steam. The same goes for a few other popular Next Fest demos, including those for cat adventure Little Kitty, Big City, turn-based RPG Sea of Stars, co-op action RPG Hammerwatch 2, and sci-fi adventure The Invincible.
The original House Flipper simulates the whole process of starting a flipping business, where dated or run-down homes are purchased, cleaned up and renovated, and then resold at a profit. Like Sims 4 players, people take their House Flipper architecture seriously, and the game is pretty flexible—someone made a whole police station with holding cells. I’m not sure how much active police stations with prisoners in them go for on the housing market these days, but you’ll probably get a buyer if it’s in California.
House Flipper 2 will introduce new systems and graphics, but the biggest deal is that it’ll let players not only flip houses but build them from scratch—the devs show off that sandbox mode in this archived stream.
House Flipper 2 is scheduled to release sometime this year, but there’s no specific date set yet. Meanwhile, developer Frozen District says it’s “still going to develop and support House Flipper 1,” which has so far received seven DLC packs, adding animals, new houses, and new design options, including a free cyberpunk-themed add-on.
