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Castle Renovator, also known as Castle Flipper on the Steam platform, is a castle simulator of sorts made by the indie company Pyramid Games. Unlike many of these building or management games, it doesn’t take place from a bird’s-eye view. Instead, it takes place from a first-person perspective. You come across your plot of land, and the overarching goal of Castle Renovator is to build your castle and become king.

Despite the name, you won’t be doing a lot of castle renovating or flipping. Most of that is pushed back toward the end of the game. In most cases, you’ll be visiting smaller areas as jobs to clean up or fix for profit. The whole thing feels similar to something like Viscera Cleanup Detail, but a lot less gore-y and a bit more chore-y. While the former has a more non-linear set of objectives, Castle Renovator is much more concrete in its rulings. There are specific objectives in each area that must be completed for the job to be considered a success, and if you do all of them, you’ll get a bonus to your pay. The process is also much more simpler with many context-sensitive tasks. You can chop down dead trees, clean up stains on the ground and walls, and destroy or repair broken furniture. While simple mechanically, I found the cleaning aspects to be pretty enjoyable during a time when I didn’t want to think hard.

When playing on the consoles, I could tell that the experience was meant for the PC in mind, due to the hotkeys not being adjusted for consoles. They work around this by using the DualShock pad as a navigation tool, but sometimes I found it to be inaccurate and it would either not register the command or go right when I wanted it to go left. Aiming with the right stick can also feel stiff, even when you crank the sensitivity to the max, so you’ll end up overshooting or undershooting during most tasks. Menu navigation is also cumbersome with the controller as highlighting options isn’t also noticeable and there are many menus to go through. It’ll take some time to get used to.

After a while, you’ll gain the ability to build houses and castles. The pieces are pretty varied and you have plenty of material and textures to use depending on how much wood and stone you have in your inventory. Fortunately, you’ll be gaining a lot of those materials when cleaning other people’s properties. Combined with the controls, building castles and houses can feel clunky. I would have preferred an optional bird’s-eye view for building because it’s not like you’ll be doing both cleaning and building, and it would help significantly when you have to build additional floors for them. Some annoying minor glitches happen with the tasks for house jobs. Sometimes, if you build the foundation, and destroy it, the foundation requirement will keep increasing, making the mission unwinnable. It’s only a minor setback as you can exit these jobs at any point, and most of them take no longer than 10 minutes—but it’s still annoying.

Sometimes when houses are made, you can rent them out to NPCs that will increase your profits but will also turn you into a glorified maid as they don’t clean up after themselves, and they’ll eventually stop paying if the place they’re renting out is not cleaned. That’s pretty messed up when you think hard about it. Aren’t I supposed to be an eventual king? They should be cleaning after me!

Music is pretty standard. A lot of it is free use, but what is used is appropriate for the setting. There are a few tracks and sound effects that I've heard within that I've also heard in other indie games that I reviewed.

On the PC platform, Castle Flipper looks pretty good. Not amazing, but solid. There’s a rustic, ancient look to the medieval setting that matches the aesthetic. On consoles (at least on PS4) this game looks ugly. And this was with me running it on my PS5. For some unknown reason, all forms of lighting, shading, and many textures are just outright missing. Because of this, it is borderline unplayable at night, so make sure you toggle day/night cycle off. This also comes with the unintended side effect of making some lettering hard to see. It reminds me of trying to use an Xbox 360 on a CRT TV. It doesn’t even come at the cost of a smooth 60FPS. The game runs at 30FPS, but at least it’s a stable 30. Many modern games can’t even manage that.

The number of morals are very few. Within the game, you can come across notes during jobs that have a fairly lighthearted comedic tone with the people usually complaining about their mundane life. One note has a wizard complaining about how no one takes his magic seriously. A few notes contain some mild language such as “b*st*rd”. There is a job later in the game that have you hired by a lord to vandalize his rival’s home. Eventually, you’ll get hired by that same rival who is distraught over his home being ransacked and hires you to fix it up. Yes, you have just committed fraud since the rival lord doesn't know that you were the one who did it.

Most of the jobs in Castle Renovator act as a tutorial for the final tasks of becoming king. Overall, it should take less than 10 hours to become king, and after that, you can freely clean areas via the world map to further expand your castle and land. The experience has its issues, especially on consoles, but it was a decent laid back casual experience. Morally, there are only a couple of issues at hand so it should be safe for most people to play. If you were to buy Castle Renovator, I’d highly recommend getting it on Steam over the consoles. Keep in mind that it is called Castle Flipper when searching through Steam. It looks much better and doesn’t require powerhouse specs either, and I've seen it go as low as 90% off.