Sometimes you can go into a game with a general idea of what it’s going to be like. Whether you’re informed by the tropes and trappings of a familiar genre or just read into the advertising and artwork, sometimes knowing the ins and outs of genre conventions can be a blessing…or a curse. In our Moving Houses review, you’ll discover just what the hell we’re talking about, and whether or not you need to change your approach to this ‘interesting’ house-moving simulator.
If you want something a bit more fantastical, you can try out our review of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered or our South of Midnight review, both of which should offer you some much-needed magic.
What Is Moving Houses?
Moving Houses is a first-person simulation game that sees you slowly but surely packing up the entire contents of a home so you can move it to a new one. The game was both published and developed by Gord Games, a development studio headed by solo developer Gordon Little, known for some of his other titles like Ayre, a dragon-flight simulator, and Personal Hover Attack Tanks, a game that sells itself as Mad Max meets WWE. With that particular pedigree backing the studio, what is Moving Houses actually like?
Well, firstly, it’s a physics-based simulator game. You need to pack up all the small objects and carry all the boxes and furniture into a moving van. You start out picking up a handful of random garden tat, but eventually, you’ll have to pack up everything in the house in hopes of moving on. If you’ve already looked at the game online, then you probably know there’s more to it than a simple physics simulation game, but honestly, I highly recommend that you go in completely unguided, especially if you think you’re going to enjoy a somewhat spooky experience that will play with your expectations.
Do as You’re Told
As you would probably expect from a physics simulation game, Moving Houses has a pretty comprehensive tutorial. This thing will walk you through each new ability you have, from kicking to running, and also acts as your narrative guide. Early on, it’s about as basic as you can get. Most early instructions basically consist of “pack up X objects to open the rest of the game”, with occasional breaks for a new unlocked ability or minor mechanic. After a while, though, the tutorial narration starts to act up a bit.
After you’ve completed a handful of objectives, the tutorial will start to drop an occasional weird line, usually commenting on the house you’re clearing out, or otherwise alluding to events beyond the player’s knowledge. Of course, if you’ve gone into this knowing it’s going to be a trippy time, this won’t shock you. However, if like me, you actually didn’t even bother checking that this wasn’t just a real physics moving simulator, then you’re likely to be every so-slightly shat up by it all.
Uncanny, Uncomfortable, and Utterly Eerie
Moving Houses did a cracking job of delivering a storyline and gameplay that manages to make you feel completely uncomfortable in your own skin. Going into the game expecting a normal simulator, you’ll likely feel a jitter run down your spine when things start to go wrong. As the house begins to twist and malform in new non-Euclidean ways, you start to piece together a story of broken people dealing with grief and loss, but even as things begin to feel like they’re resolving, you’ll need to be prepared to have the rug pulled out from under you.
If you’ve heavily frequented the ‘horror’ tab on Itch.io, then Moving Houses probably won’t offer anything you haven’t seen before. The gameplay is a first-person explorative horror game with proper physics, so you can pretend it’s also a house moving simulator until the jam starts coming down the walls. Graphically, it could be put alongside almost any other standard indie game of the modern era, at least the ones that aren’t just cobbled together assets. In many ways, it’s almost imperative to the experience that you go into this with as little information as possible…which is probably a bit late if you’re hitting this part of the review. Either way, I don’t see the game having the same impact if you know it’s gonna’ get weird.
The Verdict
Moving Houses is a great experience for fans of strange experiences, though you’ll only get the full impact from going in without knowing what’s going to happen. There’s nothing special to the gameplay, music, or graphics, but the experience is well worth having due to the tone it produces and the way it plays with expectations to create an unsettling atmosphere. While I’ll never be able to experience this game the same way again, I’m so glad I got to experience it in the first place. Hopefully, some other folks will get to experience it the same way too.
Developer: eastasiasoft, Gordon Little
Publisher: eastasiasoft
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S
Release Date: 16th April 2025
Gaming Respawn’s copy of Moving Houses was provided by the publisher.
