HomeReviewsLandlord’s Super
Premature Evaluation: Landlord’s SuperWhippet good
Whippet good
Developer:MinskworksPublisher:The Yogscast
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:SteamFor:£15.49, $19, €18
Landlord’s Superis set in the dismal and rain-battered fictional town of Sheffingham, where the cruel rot of Thatcherism has taken hold and misery is chiseled into the haunted faces of everyone you meet. A well-observed mix of environmental design, an allegedly dynamic weather system that seems permanently stuck on inclement, and a visual filter that strips away all primary colours in favour of shades of nicotine-brown, articulates the mood of the era nicely. ImagineStardew Valleywith all the hopefulness stripped away, where instead of growing cabbages and marrying a goth you’re getting daytime drunk on £1.50 pints of warm ale and pissing in cement mixers.
It’s around this point, just a few hours into the renovations, that you’ll have exhausted everything there is to do in the early access version of the game. New jobs stop appearing at the job centre, the locals run out of things to say to you, preferring to stare into the middle distance with vacant expressions, and Sheffingham starts to feel a little too much like the inert graveyard towns it’s so artfully depicting.
This version is riddled with some fairly serious bugs too, game-breaking cracks you could fit your entire fist into. Stuff vanishes into thin air, tasks don’t register as complete and your character tends to involuntarily phase through walls and slide up ladders like a greasy poltergeist. At one point I emptied a bag of cement so thoroughly that every bag of cement in the entire game became empty and the concept of cement simply ceased to exist. It’s not possible to recommend Landlord’s Super in its current state.
Future versions could take things in an interesting direction, one in which players might chart a course through the home renovation according to their own political and moral compass. The makings of this can already be seen in the handful of opportunities to pilfer building supplies from unwitting Sheffingham residents rather than buy them from the tool shop. For now stealing things carries no consequences besides a few lines of sad dialogue from the victims, but there’s plenty of scope for your behaviour to shape a developing reputation in town.
