Furnish Master is a game all about cleaning up. More specifically, it’s a decoration sim not unlike House Flipper 2, which I reviewed a few months ago. Where that title focussed more on renovating an entire building, Furnish Master focuses on a smaller scale, allowing you to decorate individual rooms to your heart’s content. While the game certainly succeeds in being a relaxing simulation game, there are some areas I’d like to see it improve and some questionable choices by the developers that held my enjoyment back.
The main allure to Furnish Master will probably be the game’s story mode, which allows you to live out the questionably realistic fantasy of being paid to redecorate homes, offices, and other highly trafficked areas. Look, I don’t know how realistic this job is, but it must be a pretty sought-after fantasy with so many titles emulating the idea.
If story mode isn’t your thing, you can go into the game’s sandbox mode, which allows you to freely decorate a room of your design using all of the available furniture assets in the game.
In story mode, you’ll go from place to place, filling out the questionable requests of paying customers as you earn a bit of dough on your own. This feels like an odd complaint, but could these jobs have been a bit more realistic (for lack of a better word). Refurnishing a wrecked store makes sense to me, but being paid to finish a puzzle or line up dominos for someone who presumably would never see them fall is not. These jobs are clearly designed to be a fun (debatably so, at least) thing for players to do, but they sort of break the fantasy the game is trying to go for with its “paid furniture” storyline.
Once you get into the actual furnishing aspect of things, it’s certainly enjoyable, and I can see how relaxing the game could be after a hard or tedious day. You can place objects freely and even color them as you see fit, with a huge palette of colors to choose from. Though jobs will have you furnishing buildings as the customer sees fit, once you purchase a property, you can customize it to your heart’s desire.
That being said, the game does focus hard on the furniture part of the furnishing. While you can paint walls, you’ll more or less be just putting furniture down and changing the coloring. You won’t be tearing walls down or building structures like in other similar games.
A couple of quality-of-life fixes Furnish Master could really use lay within its core-grabbing mechanic and its trash pickup. When grabbing an object in Furnish Master, you must click and hold the mouse button for a second before you’re allowed to move it. On paper, this surely doesn’t sound like much to complain about, but those precious seconds tend to add up when you’re in a room that requires a lot of renovation.
This goes so far that I felt like the mechanic was kind of tedious as early as my third or fourth job in the game’s story mode. Pair this with the trash pickup feature, which requires you to interact with each individual piece of garbage and then hold R or drag it to the trash can. A quick click should allow you to select and move anything in the room, and there should be a garbage tool that allows you to automatically throw out anything with a single click of the mouse, rather than taking the time to interact with each piece individually.
While this may not be present in the game’s launch version, the Early Access build of Furnish Master has one incredibly jarring feature, or perhaps an oversight from the devs: Objects can very blatantly clip through walls and other objects. You can put objects halfway through a wall or watch as the jars on milk bottles clip through the shelves in fridges. This sort of makes your furnishing options unlimited—but not really in a good way. The laws of physics should be a good boundary for what you can place and where.
A huge issue the game struggled with when I played, as well as a lack of save states during an actual job. Put yourself in my shoes for a second. You just got hired to finish a puzzle. The owner has hidden the last 19 pieces of the puzzle around her apartment’s living room, and you’re having trouble finding the VERY LAST piece. Unable to find it, you decide to leave and return after finishing another job, only to find that the puzzle has totally reset.
If this were real life, your answer might be, “That’s crazy, the puzzle is haunted, and why was someone paying you to finish a puzzle?” Since this is furnished master, though, it just led to me being pretty annoyed. On top of this, the leave job button is carelessly close to the catalog you have to open to shop for new furniture, causing me, with my poor eyesight, to consistently leave a job early and be forced to restart all of my progress by accident.
Overall, the game could use some polish. While it’s to be understood that some of these issues could presumably be due to the game being in early access, these are still issues worth bringing up. Hopefully, the developer will take the time to iron the experience out before the full release.
Pros
- Freeform placement allows you to really put your furnishings wherever you see fit and color items with a huge array of colors
- A sandbox mode that allows you to access all of the game’s furniture and change the size of the game’s assets
Cons
- Strange story mode that lacks immersion
- Poor control choices made by the developer
- Bugs and an overall lack of polish