[Review] Furnish Master

Whilst House Flipper was more akin to a simulation of a house renovation, and The Sims offered the ability to build a home from scratch, Furnish Master focuses primarily on decorating one small space in great detail. If the game stuck to what it was best at, then it’d be a worthy addition to the genre, but with its unnecessary diversions and lacklustre decorations, I doubt you’d play long enough to master the art of furnishing.

Should you give the game a go, then two modes are available: Sandbox and Story. Sandbox grants players complete freedom to decorate an empty room to their heart’s content, whilst Story has you progress through a variety of missions to earn money and buy properties. I started with Story mode, as I thought that would be the best place to familiarise myself with the mechanics of the game.

The tutorial for the game is intuitive enough, as it teaches you the basics of gameplay, such as camera controls, painting, and item interactions. It’s all contextualised within the framework of the narrative (as simple as it may be) as you clean up and paint your first rooms. Your character is portrayed as a handyman of sorts, and throughout the campaign, you’ll complete a variety of objectives to earn money. Before the start of each mission, you’ll see a string of text conversations between you and the people you’ll be working for. Though the dialogue is occasionally stilted, it’s still serviceable at providing the player with a basic narrative.

What isn’t though is the number of grammatical errors found in these texts. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a conversation (whether it’s before or after a mission) that doesn’t have a misspelt word or isn’t missing appropriate punctuation. As such, it presents the narrative as an afterthought – I’d even go as far as to say that it just feels downright lazy.

Once you’ve completed the first tutorial missions, you’ll be given access to your first-owned property to decorate as you wish. From here on out, the world – or at least your small room – is your oyster. New furnishings, however, cost money, so if you want to get decorating you’ll need to continue to complete missions to accrue the necessary cash.

Starting on the World Map, you select your missions, with these showing up two at a time. Conceptually speaking, I really like the inclusion of this map, as it provides players with a nice preview of what locations you could find yourself working in; from suburban houses to places of worship, farmyards to factories, it seems like there’ll be a great variety. Disappointingly though, this isn’t the case right now, with most missions taking place in apartment complexes. Admittedly, the game remains in early access, and if those locations are ever expanded upon it’ll make a drastic impact on the setting variation, but until then it tends to get repetitive.

You wouldn’t be amiss to assume that a game titled Furnish Master would have little to no gameplay variety – surely your time is spent just furnishing various locations? Perhaps surprisingly, the game manages to slip in a fair amount of different objectives, but sadly these alternative mission types do not manage to be the compliment you might think they are.

Missions themselves can be loosely grouped into what I’d say are three different types: Cleaning, Searching, and Furnishing. By far the most entertaining of the three are the furnishing missions. In these, you’ll be given a list of items that you need to lay out in a few different places. As opposed to if you were freely decorating yourself, being constrained to the pre-chosen group of items proves to be an entertaining puzzle. Technically, since these missions’ success state is tied to simply placing the items into the world, you can get away with haphazardly strewing the items anywhere.

These missions wouldn’t feel so good if it weren’t for how the moment-to-moment gameplay feels. Choosing items from the catalogue is intuitive, and placing them into the world is even smoother. Plentiful customisation options encourage player freedom, and once I had realised I could turn the option for item snapping off, my enjoyment went up tenfold. The freedom of finding the perfect alignment and placement of objects to design a perfect interior scratched a feng shui itch I never knew I had. Whilst there are still some improvements to be made (such as allowing you to zoom whilst holding an item), the game handles more than well enough to provide a smooth and enjoyable experience.

Perhaps my favourite mission was the final furnishing one. You’re tasked with placing over 250 items in a fairly small room to form a functioning office. Not only does the vast amount of items provide a puzzling challenge, but it also grants a nice change of scenery. If anything, it made me realise just how little time the game spends in these situations, and it’s a huge shame as there could be plenty of ways to build on this. This could be as simple as adding more location and furniture variety, or perhaps even specialised requirements like restrictive budgets to adhere to or having to maintain a certain style of decor. Adding little elements like these would add real value to the gameplay without losing any of what makes this such a unique experience.

Cleaning missions are the worst offenders when it comes to gameplay banality. In these locations, you’re given a simple task – tidying up. It consists of picking up individual items, one by one, and then manually deleting them. It served as a great tutorial concept, but for there to be a mission to tidy up over forty individual objects? At that point, it just felt like a chore, and while some may enjoy the monotony, I still felt it was incredibly out of place.

Speaking of being out of place, there’s nothing more so than the curious addition of the driving mini-games. Once you’ve cleaned a racetrack, you’re then challenged to beat a timed lap of the course with an RC car. To control the car, you have to select it and then move the mouse in the direction you want to go in relation to the car itself. This sounds simple enough, but when combined with the awful turning speed of the vehicle and the ability to fully collide with (and get stuck on!) the edges of the track, what could have been a fun gimmick instead turned into a frustrating few minutes as I tried to beat the timer to progress past this irritating objective.

Surprisingly, this isn’t even the worst of the driving mechanics. In another mission shortly afterwards, you’re tasked with guiding a hand trolley through a tightly packed store without bumping into any of the stock. Again, this sounds like a fun objective, but does it have a place here? Due to the truly awful controls and the fact that if one stack of anything fell over, I found myself being reset to the beginning repeatedly, no matter how careful I tried to be. Thankfully, you’re free to skip missions, so your progress is never gated (though you obviously don’t reap any of its rewards). After fifteen minutes of crashing into shelves and stacks of boxes, I promptly made good use of the skip option and never looked back.

Nothing exemplifies the game’s inconsistency better than the Search missions. The first Search mission serves a great purpose in putting the player’s control of the camera and object interactions to the test. You’re assigned with searching an apartment for pieces of a puzzle, and they’re scattered throughout the place in a variety of hiding spots, such as behind ornaments on shelves or even inside boxes only visible from above. These encourage the player to use the camera at different angles and heights to thoroughly explore the confined space in a fun and engaging manner. Before you know it, the mission will be complete, and you’ll be moving on to the next…

Only to find that more and more missions largely revolve around the same concept. Sure, they’re in different locations, but conceptually you’re always just searching for items to put in the right space. Arguably the biggest culprit of this was the ‘model train’ mission, where you’re tasked with rebuilding its broken track. One of the pieces was hidden under a table so dark I genuinely couldn’t find it. Eventually, I had to rely on the collision of another object I was already dragging around in the shadows to find it!

Both the Cleaning and Searching missions combined beg the question of why they were included in the first place, especially when the core gameplay loop of actually furnishing properties is easily the game’s biggest strength. If I were to guess, they’re included to showcase the furnishing system’s potential, and to the developer’s credit they all look fantastic.

It’s certainly a testament to the art style, which helps blend a sense of familiar realism with a mildly cartoonish approach that creates an aesthetic that’s effectively a game seller in itself. Even on the lower graphical settings, it manages to successfully maintain the same style, helping it to stand out amidst a sea of similar games. I also found myself truly impressed with the lighting on display; at higher graphical settings this can add a whole new layer to the game’s cosy aesthetic. Whether it’s natural sunshine pouring through windows or the hewed light gleaming from a nearby lamp, shadows cast by these light sources help add a sense of palpability to the rooms you create, adding a wonderful element of life to an otherwise motionless space.

It’s a shame then that the soundtrack doesn’t quite lend itself to the comforting tone the game’s vying for. Throughout my roughly ten hours of playtime, the same dulcet tune plays on a loop. Perhaps it will be ideal to some, as it’s akin to lift music, and it’s easy to tune out, but I found myself preferring to mute the audio in its entirety as I listened to a podcast while I got to decorating.

With every mission you complete, you earn cash. With this and the required star level, (a currency earned alongside the money that’s entirely superfluous) you can choose to purchase your own properties. Once I’d completed all the missions, I found that I’d gathered more than enough combined currency to buy them all at once. Some places, like shops, even offer you a steady stream of income, making the game’s financial mechanics trivial at best. In fact, by the time you can purchase all the properties, you’ll be able to afford any furniture, practically rendering Sandbox obsolete.

As for the Sandbox mode, you only have access to a single room, and it’s impossible to create floor plans for a whole house or apartment. You can edit the size of the room, but that’s as far as it goes, and I found that quite disappointing. When you contrast this against the properties you can buy in Story mode, it just doesn’t compare – why play Sandbox, when you can do it all in Story? Once more properties are added, then I think the Story will without a doubt be the better of the two modes.

Regardless of what mode you wind up playing in though, you’ll soon come to realise that the game is in dire need of more furnishings. Some types of furniture have plenty of options, but others find themselves with shocking imitations. Considering the core of the game revolves around decorating, there needs to be as many choices as possible, but after ten hours I felt like I’d either seen or used almost everything. I hope that in time Furnish Master continues to be updated with more furniture, as in its current state I think the novelty of decorating with the current selection won’t reach the standards other similar titles have set.

At its core, Furnish Master is a valuable addition to an oversaturated genre, but there’s still plenty of work to be done for it to stand as tall as its competitors. The Story mode is great in concept, but it needs to be refocused on what makes the game so fun to begin with – the furnishing. Assuming more variety will be added to both the range of missions and the selection of available furniture, there’d be little else to change, especially when what truly sells the game is its gorgeous visual art style and precise (albeit sometimes finicky) controls. If you’re looking for a cosy, aesthetically pleasing decorating sim, then this will give you a taste of what you’re after – just don’t expect to want to stick around for too long.