Furnish Master Review (PC)

Heads up, avid interior designers — there’s a brand-new furnishing project on the bulletin board, and it’s bringing its own collection of wide-open spaces and decor wheels to your doorstep. Furnish Master has just touched down on PC, and it comes bearing gifts: a cozy aesthetic, and not to mention a treasure trove of customizable components and all things Feng Shui. So, if you’re looking to pivot into something that’ll grant you the freedom to flex your creative skills for a few or more hours, then you’d better boil a fresh pot of coffee and whip out the paving slabs — Alex Blintsov’s newly erected world is ready to go under the hammer.

Like a solid chunk of furniture arrangement sims, the goal of Furnish Master is to flesh out the bare bones of vacant homes and complexes in an orderly fashion. With an enormous selection of set pieces to choose from, as well as an entire wheel of customizable color schemes and other accessories, players must work to uphold the quality of the designs in each property around town—a task that involves chalking up an elaborate set of blueprints, and acquiring lavish materials to make dusty dwellings sparkle and pop beneath the limelight.

It goes without saying at this point, but if you are the type of person who can get a kick out of combing over architectural drawings and devising new ways to embellish them with your own internal list of fluctuating ideas, then there’s a good chance that you’ll find Furnish Master to your liking. For the sake of providing a bit more information about it, though, we’ll go ahead and dial it back a couple of notches. Here's Furnish Master, in a nutshell…

Pivot!

Furnish Master chalks up two modes for you to shovel through: Story Mode, an episodic series in which you swing from one location to the next, all whilst earning a profit from your renovations; and Sandbox Mode, a custom scenario in which you take full advantage of every tool and set piece in the basket to build and design your own tapestry of dream homes. Preference of mode set aside, both campaigns cough up the same thread of objectives for you to complete, with the primary goal being to embellish each room with furniture and theme-appropriate components, and to essentially tweak the colors, textures, and styles to suit the design at hand.

Furnish Master is incredibly simple to play, as it’s more or less the case of choosing items from a catalog, and adding your own custom features before cementing them into the blueprint of one of several locations. Think The Sims, or Unpacking, for that matter, and you’ll have a rough idea of what it aims to encapsulate. This is, in short, the basic setup for each chapter in the Story Mode: receive a relatively dirty or vacant plot of land, and evolve it into something a little more homely for the client.

If you can remember The Sims (the PlayStation 2 version of the original, that is), and its introductory levels, then you’ll likely recall some of the objectives that needed to be carried out in order to progress to the next property. If we’ve lost you, then just know this: there was a party that got a little out of hand, and in the aftermath of an incurable hangover, a lazy roommate who asked only that you clean up the mess and return the home to its former glory. Well, it’s the same basic setup here.

Room for More

After spending a good amount of time tidying up slices of pizza and brushing a few bottles beneath the rug, the world soon becomes your oyster, and the idea of becoming a full-fledged interior decorator soon becomes a boggling reality. But there’s a catch: not every client wants a cozy space to call their own; some of them want to purchase your services for other hands-on projects—lining up dominos to knock down, assembling train tracks, or shuffling pipes, to list just a few. And so, whilst the vast majority of your customers will need a good old-fashioned makeover, there are a select few who require a little more TLC, and a lot of these requests translate into bite-sized puzzles that go a little beyond mere furniture allocation.

As you’ll come to learn relatively early on, the key to being a successful designer lies within your ability to adapt to your client’s ever-changing desires. It’s one thing to be able to construct and bulk out a study, but if you lack the ambition to branch out into new fields, then you’re only going to wind up shooting yourself in the foot. No, to truly make it in this particular line of work, you must be willing to expect the unexpected, and always roll with the punches, regardless of the circumstances.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, what with a solid portion of the chapters revolving entirely around kitting out offices, homes, and stores, and the other portion being centered around odd jobs and questionably placed puzzles. On one hand, there are plenty of surprises to tuck into, most of which are relatively straightforward and without immeasurable molehills, whereas, on the other hand, there are several perplexing tidbits that require a little more time and effort to complete.

Spread Your Wings

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the puzzles are fun to work over, especially the ones that invite you to unleash your inner creativity and insert your own ideas into the solution. But there are others, such as the domino effect level, that don’t necessarily gel with the cozy aesthetic that the game spends the initial hours trying to fashion. At times, I found myself at ease, knowing that I had all the time in the world to make do with the tools I had at my disposal for a bread-and-butter renovation project. But there were moments during that campaign where that feeling of being content quickly departed and ushered in new flurries of emotions — frustration, being one of them.

Thankfully, the Sandbox Mode was always there to provide me with some well-needed respite — even when the campaign was running smoothly and there were little to no issues with the requests. And it was there, bathing in a seemingly infinite wealth of cosmetics and decor, that I was able to unlock a major chunk of my inner workings and paint them on an open canvas. With nothing to work towards, and no needy clients holding me back from flourishing, I often found that the creative suite was a whole lot nicer to work with, in general.

Although the Sandbox mode is, in more ways than one, a great deal more forgiving than its story-driven counterpart, the game, as a whole, is still as equally beautiful as it is mechanically sound. To that end, I can’t raise all that many complaints, as both of its given scenarios are not only easy to toy around with, but also conveniently clutter-free and compactly designed for the sake of keeping things simple and to the point.

Verdict

Furnish Master provides a great starting point for anyone who’s even the slightest bit interested in home improvement and architectural designs. It also generates a clean slate that’s both bursting at the seams with opportunities for players to unleash their inner talents, and a generous supply of mix-and-match pockets of odd jobs and decor-related requests. In other words, it’s a home away from home for avid architects, and not to mention a real page-turner that’ll give even the most die-hard Sims fans something to write home about.

To cut a long story short, if you’re the sort of gamer who, for one, prefers to eliminate the social and city-living aspects that tie in with the likes of The Sims and other life simulation favorites, then you’re probably going to find a lot to love in this indie jewel. Likewise, if you’d much rather bypass the camaraderie and dive straight into the breadth of a world that’s driven by Feng Shui and all things cozy, then again, you’d be right in thinking that Furnish Master is an ideal spot to set up camp and make your own.

All in all, you're looking at a solid campaign that'll take you anywhere from three to five hours to complete — and that is, of course, excluding the Sandbox Mode, which is another standalone component in itself. For what it's worth, though, if you're that serious about home renovation on a virtual scale, then you could quite easily scrape a dozen or more hours out of this one.