Dream House Days is a short burst of fun. Additionally, most of its micro-transactions can be circumvented by its in-game leaderboard and time mechanics.
However, at the risk of sounding haughty or ungrateful, despite all of Dream House Days’ evident strengths it’s a somewhat middling game. Coming across as a Frankenstein’s Monster, created from parts of the developer’s earlier work - particularly Pocket Academy and Hot Springs Story - it’s certainly charming, but feels as though Kairosoft created it in their sleep.
Dream House Days isn’t bad, but compared to Kairosoft’s earlier releases, it’s somewhat sub-optimal. For players newly familiar with Kairosoft, they might find in Dream House Days a surprisingly beginner-friendly game. For veterans, it’s a mixed bag of hobbled-together mechanics and somewhat shallow gameplay.
The premise is simple: you’re a landlord in one of two areas - a small town and a city. However, the only difference between the two of them are the rooms: in the former you’re given 4 small apartments, while in the latter you’re given a medium-sized apartment and 2 small ones.
The end goal of Dream House Days is to climb to the fictional leaderboards in a variety of categories, each of which provides more bonuses and benefits for your apartment. In short, you aim to be the best.
To do this, you need to build rooms, invite people over to check out the rooms, and then sign them on. Tenants then pay rent and hang around, going to and from school or work, and some of them pay varying rates. Each room can be decorated by you (and only you), the landlord. Adding items and refurbishing the walls and the floors of each room increases the comfort and rent cost of that room, meaning that with more stuff you gain more money and higher comfort. When you discover item combinations, you can drastically increase (or decrease) the comfort level of the room, further enticing more wealthy tenants whom pay more rent leading to bigger and fancier rooms.
In a way, the way each room and area is gauged based upon the items that are in it is very reminiscent of Hot Springs Story. In Hot Springs Story, you rent out rooms for customers at your inn (which, ironically, lacks a hot spring), and the amount they’re willing to pay is determined by the level of comfort in that room. Certain item combinations in the room will yield much higher results, so the two games exhibit a pretty clear balancing act in terms of rudimentary finances. Since each item costs a certain amount of upkeep and upfront costs, you need to be careful with your funds.
However, what sets Dream House Days apart from Hot Springs Story is that it borrows a second element from another Kairosoft game. In Pocket Academy, you’re a principal, whose job it is to maximize student grades and performance so you can bring in money from tuition. However, a striking element in Pocket Academy is that each individual student lasts for three in-game years. When you compare this to Hot Springs Story and The Sushi Spinnery, the people aren’t necessarily customers so much as they are investments. Unless you’re willing to kick out your tenants, they’ll be there for a very long time.
I find it quite difficult to kick out my tenants. Dream House Days doesn’t necessarily have an overarching story, but through the radiant relationship system that organically emerges from tenants talking to tenants, you become acquainted with certain people and the fondness they develop for each other. Even though the game uses a Habbo Hotel isometric setup, it never gets in the way of somehow feeling like these people are less models and more like…well, people.
Weirdly, Dream House Days is the first Kairosoft game that makes me care about its inhabitants. One of the game’s features is the ability to ask the landlord (you) for advice, of which has a clear currency transaction. The research points you spend on this advice affects the chances of a positive outcome, which amounts to nothing more complex than a probability roll. However, the game frames these rolls as highly personal questions: students are worried about their exams, tenants are worried about their job prospects, and everyone is worried about their love lives. As a landlord, part of your job is to hear them out and encourage them. These things affect their income and love lives, which in turn carries on as tangible benefits or deficits in the form of income and (invariably) rent.
And you know what? It sort of works. Most of it isn’t more than a few seconds of your time, but there’s something haunting and cathartic about watching a tenant join your apartment as a student, grow up and become a CEO, get rejected by his next-door neighbor and then never fall in love again. There’s something in watching that old man eventually tell you that his time at your apartment is the best time of his life, thanking you for the memories before he tells you he’s decided to move to the mountains for a few last years of quietness. It’s unintentional and it’s not part of Kairosoft’s larger design, but it’s gameplay that facilitates that small spark of connection mitigating any dissonance associated with seeing them as scurrying little ant-like wallets. It’s a more complex variant to firing people in Game Dev Story and then hearing those same fired employees wishing you well regardless; it hurts, and I absolutely love those tidbits of naivety and well-wishing in Kairosoft’s games. In Dream House Days, since whole families can grow up and retire within your apartments, it’s half of the game’s uniqueness and appeal.
But even though I love the merging of property management and being an encouraging, busybody listen-lady to these people, it’s somewhat undermined by its shallow sense of challenge. Each apartment’s major limitation is size, and since the game’s established end goal is to have the best apartment in all of its myriad categories, the game strongly pushes for conformity. I find that in all of my playthroughs, the most effective way of dominating the regional and national charts is to make every room look exactly the same.
Because the tenants don’t have personal preferences or individual requirements, they’re essentially motivated by comfort and their finances are determined by their jobs. The chances of them getting those jobs are in turn determined by their individual stats, which can be raised through placement of furniture.. However, because they aren’t categorized with patterns, and tend to randomly generate their behavior, find an optimum layout, and you can effectively build each room to be exactly the same. As you load more and more tenants into your apartments, you’ll find yourself with more disposable income than you really know what to do with.
Hot Springs Story and The Sushi Spinnery both had the same issue, but in those games, it was mitigated to a degree by a false categorization setup, through randomization of money. Each customer had a certain amount of money they can spend and, in The Sushi Spinnery, characters had taste preferences. This constrained you in terms of what you can do, so you had to constantly cater to a wide variety of different folks. Likewise, in Pocket Academy, classes with certain averages and affinities tended to respond differently to each knickknack the school installed, so there was a fine balancing act of budget versus performance. Dream House Days doesn’t have that same sort of complexity; every room can be the same for every person, and the only limited factor is space. As people start families and have children and pick up pets, you’ll technically need more space for them, but there’s nothing stopping you from cramming in as much stuff into a small 4 x 4 tile room, churning out an array of slummy apartments. It’s simplistic, and once you figure out the formulas and learn to take advantage of the game’s limited engine, its novelty wears off far too quickly.
Another issue with Dream House Days is the game’s cumbersome UI. Since many items are smaller than Kairosoft’s standard tile size, you end up working with items that may or may not fit with other items. In many instances, you’ll end up placing your pieces in different directions or areas by accident, especially if you have big fingers or thumbs.
Misplacement isn’t normally an issue, but in this game there are two consequences to readjusting the position of your items. The first is a very minor financial cost, which is fairly standard in Kairosoft’s games.
The second makes the experience of readjustment a bit more obtuse. Objects cannot be readjusted while another object inhabits those same tiles. This includes the object being readjusted. For instance, if you want to turn the bed a different direction but keep it in the same area, you can’t do that. Instead, you need to move the bed somewhere else so it creates a blank space so you can move the bed back, but in a different position. It’s completely asinine. While the cost of moving that object isn’t much, in areas with large objects and small rooms (try rotating a bed in a small apartment with a family of 4 and a bunch of stuff lying around), you can eat up a considerable amount of cost destroying and rebuying items or having to move items around in an incredibly roundabout fashion.
Mechanically, Dream House Days is just a repeat of a lot of Kairosoft’s games, each of which have tackled them in the past more effectively. The game attempts to create this funky atmosphere where people scurry about, but it’s sort of bogged down by its shallow and formulaic approach to customization. Unlike Hot Springs Story or Pocket Academy, you can’t move these rooms from pre-determined sets, so you can’t control the macro-layout of your complex. Though I immensely – immensely – enjoy the landlord advice system, the rest of it comes off as somewhat middling. The user interface is a hassle to deal with and the game becomes laughably easy once you settle for an optimal room build.
I’m actually somewhat leery about this review myself; I can’t say I didn’t have fun while playing it, but the issue is that my fun came from the challenge that it presents, regardless of its brevity. Many of Kairosoft’s games are notable by their considerable difficulty curve for perfection: it’s pretty challenging to consistently get Game of the Year in Game Dev Story even if you consistently punch out triple digit values for all of your games; it’s really difficult to top the national charts for Hot Springs Story; and it’s much more difficult to apply successful training and dungeon teams in earlier levels later on against bosses in Dungeon Village. For Dream House Days it’s the opposite: once you get past the (not that hard) finances of the game, you sort of end up naturally dominating and jumping through ranks because of the game’s oversimplified metrics for success.
Joe Yang
@yaochongyang
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