WHAT IS HAUNTED HOUSE RENOVATOR?

Haunted House Renovator is a first-person simulation game from Polish indie studio Image Power, published by PlayWay, released April 30, 2025 across PC and consoles. You play as a paranormal renovator hired by eccentric clients to restore abandoned, haunted properties — which means dealing with ghosts before you can so much as touch a paintbrush. It’s designed for cozy horror fans and interior design sim players who want atmosphere over actual dread. Anyone expecting a survival horror game or a fleshed-out ghost-hunting sim in the mould of Phasmophobia will find this too gentle and too slow.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The first house drops you into a moodily lit abandoned flat with a phone, a checklist, and very little direction. The original launch tutorial was universally criticised for being out of order and leaving core mechanics unexplained — something Image Power addressed with a dedicated tutorial location added in Patch 1.4.001. With the updated tutorial, the onboarding now walks you through cleaning, redecorating, and ghost banishment sequentially, which makes the first 30 minutes considerably less confusing than launch-day buyers experienced. The hook arrives when you first photograph a haunting and watch a bestiary entry materialize — suddenly the creature in the wall isn’t a random obstacle, it’s a puzzle with a specific, learnable solution.

GAMEPLAY & MECHANICS

The core loop runs in three overlapping phases: investigate, banish, renovate. When you enter a house, most spirits begin dormant — a flickering light here, a sliding book there. As you repair rooms and progress through the checklist, things escalate. The Wraith (the major haunting tied to the house’s former owner) eventually becomes active, roaming the property and possessing you on contact, triggering a brief puppet-string minigame to break free. To banish a Wraith, you must photograph all five associated paranormal objects, read its bestiary entry, and perform the correct ritual — each Wraith has a unique solution, which stops the mid-game from becoming mechanical. Minor hauntings follow a simpler logic: a Gremlin can be lured with treasure and caught in a net for a “nice” banishment, or simply hammered into destruction for a “mean” one. The Haunted House Renovator Gremlin nice vs nasty choice isn’t cosmetic — it feeds a running tally that contributes to which of the four endings you unlock. The fuse box is a recurring task in most contracts; you’ll need to locate the box, flip the breakers, and restore power before lighting tasks can be completed. In the launch build, a known bug caused the “turn on fuse box” task to remain on the checklist even after completion. This was partially addressed in later patches, but community threads still report edge cases where it fails to clear — always save before touching electrical tasks.

STORY & WORLD

The narrative connecting all contracts is more substantial than you’d expect from a renovation sim. You’re unknowingly working through the properties of members of a secret society, and each house peels back another layer of what this society did. The Ancestors — the Wraiths of former society members — aren’t just bosses; they’re characters with backstories revealed through the clues you photograph. The four endings are determined by how much “nice” versus “mean” energy you’ve accumulated across all banishments and by specific choices made during the final contract. Without spoiling them: there is a “pure nice” ending, a “pure nasty” ending, and two mixed outcomes — each with a meaningfully different final scene. The world outside the houses is essentially nonexistent; there’s no hub, no client office, no ambient city. It’s contract screen to haunted location, with nothing in between.

VISUALS, AUDIO & PERFORMANCE

Art direction leans into moody, muted realism — dim corridors, unsettling furniture arrangements, and light sources that flicker at precisely the wrong moment. The atmosphere punches above the technical quality: textures are flat and wallpaper resolution was notably poor at launch, partially corrected in Patch 1.4.001. Audio is the genuine highlight. Each location has its own ambient soundscape, and the moments of ghost activity are sold entirely by sound design rather than visual spectacle. On performance, the launch version was rough. Carpets spawned under floors, UI icons vanished after saving and loading, Wraiths could transform key collectibles into ducks (blocking ritual completion), and the infamous fuse box bug caused task-tracking failures. By Patch 1.4.001 in June 2025, the majority of critical blockers were addressed — but reviews from launch month tell a genuinely rougher story than the current build deserves.

MONETISATION & VALUE

One flat purchase of $19.99 covers the entire game across all platforms, with no in-game store, no DLC, and no season pass announced. For a game that offers 8–15 hours of content with genuine replayability driven by the four-ending structure, the price is defensible — especially post-patch. The caveat is purely about timing: players who bought at launch were effectively beta testers, and the Steam Mixed rating (48% positive in the launch window) reflects that frustration more than the game’s current state.

ACCESSIBILITY

The middle mouse button shortcut — which automatically equips the correct tool for whatever haunting is in front of you — is a thoughtful accessibility feature that reduces inventory friction considerably. The camera’s bestiary function serves a similar double duty: photograph a haunting to both progress investigation and unlock instructions on how to deal with it. Subtitle support is present. There is no documented colourblind mode, no difficulty slider, and control remapping had a launch bug that reset bindings on some setups — addressed in Patch 1.4.001 with a note to reset to default once manually. The game does not explain its systems well unprompted, which is the single biggest accessibility barrier.

MULTIPLAYER & COMMUNITY

Haunted House Renovator is a strictly singleplayer experience with no multiplayer mode planned. The community on Steam is small but vocal, and Image Power has demonstrated active post-launch support — pushing seven patches and one major update within the first two months of release. The developer engages directly in discussion threads, which earned back goodwill that the rocky launch had eroded.

HOW IT COMPARES

Against House Flipper 2, Haunted House Renovator wins on narrative and atmospheric tension — the secret society storyline and bestiary system give renovation contracts a sense of purpose that House Flipper 2’s sandbox mode cannot match — but it loses on renovation depth and sheer content volume, where House Flipper 2’s tool catalogue, sandbox mode, and mod support create a vastly richer design playground.

Against Phasmophobia, Haunted House Renovator wins on approachability and cozy tone — there are no jump scares designed to genuinely frighten, making it accessible to players who want ghost content without terror — but it loses on ghost-hunting mechanical depth, where Phasmophobia’s evidence system, equipment variety, and multiplayer chaos make the investigation feel genuinely dangerous in ways Haunted House Renovator never attempts.