There’s a handful of games in every gamer’s library that sucks them in every few years. Games that somehow never get tiring. I’d wager that Minecraft is on that list for a lot of people. For me, Game Dev Tycoon is near the top. Every time I return to that game I find myself sinking hours into it. The search for the right combo of game elements and mechanics to make the perfect game is always enticing to me. Well, by similar metrics, Moviehouse: The Film Studio Tycoon presents me with a similar experience. And this time, in the very field I have a degree in. So needless to say, my hopes were high going into Odyssey Studios’ latest project.
Moviehouse starts by letting you select a name and logo for your very own movie studio. The game then gives you the reigns to start your movie empire, putting you in charge of creating scripts and producing movies, all through a series of actionable menus. I will talk more about the gameplay in a second, but that’s the general gist of Moviehouse. To accompany the simple concept are simple visuals and clean user interface. My only real negative with the game personally is that I think it is perhaps a bit too uninspired in its visuals. They aren’t bad, but they also don’t have a strong aesthetic to really grab your attention. Especially in the opening hours when the table you presumably hover over as you make decisions is barren to reflect your humble beginnings.
I find this game a difficult one to review because as I said earlier, I am very much so the target audience for it. I enjoy many of the aspects of this game that others may not. So while I will obviously state my opinions, I want to give you as much detail about the game itself as I can to help you make the choice on if it’s worth the purchase or not.
For starters, there are three main stages to making a film in Moviehouse; pre-production, production/post-production, and distribution. Pre-production begins with hiring a writer and tasking them with writing a script. Your job, as the omnipotent producer, is to choose what genre that script is in and what elements (setting, protagonist, and antagonist) you want it to contain. It’s up to you whether you want to create cult classic slashers or acclaimed dramas. Each genre has elements that work well within its constraints and ones that do not. Unlike genres, which are randomly unlocked from the start of the game, the elements change every time you open the menu. This makes it pretty easy to cheese the game and keep re-rolling until you get a selection of elements you want.
Personally, I liked scribbling notes in my notebook about what genre combinations work and don’t work together, but for players who don’t want to do that, the game also has icons under each element to signify if you used it before and it’s genre compatibility. As you keep playing, you will naturally unlock more genres than the two or three you start with along with new elements to experiment with. As your studio grows in size, you can hire multiple writers. But for the first few hours of the game, you will have a linear movie pipeline where one person writes script after script to be produced.
Speaking of, next, we move on to production and post-production. In the game, these both are bundled together under the “produce” tab. This starts with picking a director and giving them a script to bring to life. It’s in your control what the budget, cast, and production values of the movie are. Once again, as you play, you will unlock bigger production values and if your movies are successful you will also have more money to play around with. At the start, money can be very tight and while going bankrupt is always a looming threat, there are several fail safes (such as loans and buyouts) to prevent you from having to close the shutters.
The last step is distribution, which is actually a stage that I am currently in with my own real short film, What Remains. And just like we are doing with our short film, you have to submit your Moviehouse film to film festivals. This will help get some eyes on the film and open it up for distribution to the public. Because the game starts in the 80s your only options are theatrical releases, but (say it with me now) as you play, you will unlock more options such as VHS home releases. A key part of the distribution stage is that you get to see critics and audience reactions to the film and just like in real life, they don’t always correlate. The critic’s scores especially can feel a bit arbitrary as they pop up on the screen (with one referring to my film as “not perfect” while giving me a perfect score) but the audience ratings are more enticing to chase perfect scores and get feedback.
Everything I just described are the core aspects of the Moviehouse gameplay loop but there are a few other things to note. For example, as you are going through production, you will get a question about the movie-making process. These are often simple and ask you things like “How do we show that we’re at a new location in the story?” and then present you with three options: the very clear right answer (establishing shot), the not-so-right answer (close-up), and a way to skip answering the question all together using money (hire someone who knows). While these did remind me of my freshmen year Intro to Film classes, they don’t really make much sense in the context of the game as a whole because I highly doubt a director ever ran to a producer to ask them what a close-up shot was.
Furthermore, as your company grows, you can also invest money into other studios as a side income source and you can hire crews to build sets and create props that you can use in production. Perhaps the most “producer-y” thing you’re responsible for, is managing your worker’s happiness. You have complete control of how much they work (either on a film or training to get better at making films), if they get a raise or not, when they go on vacation, and more. It’s important to keep your employees happy and things such as doing well (or not) in a festival will impact their morale.
If what I said there sounds too complex for you, then you’ll be happy to know that some of those extraneous elements (not employee happiness) can be almost entirely ignored without really hurting your business. The sad thing about that is that it really makes all those things feel like last-minute additions to buff out a rather slim game. The glass-half-full way to look at is that new players won’t have to juggle too many game mechanics. The other side speaks to a game lacking compelling content trying to justify its price tag.
To follow up on that, it may seem like you’re playing aimlessly and pumping out movie after movie, which I suppose makes you feel like an all-powerful movie studio in its own right, and to appease that are a few checklists to give you goals to work towards. To be honest, this is pretty lackluster and if what I described already isn’t enough to pique your interest in the game, then these checklists and the varying bonuses they grant you aren’t going to change your mind. Moviehouse is pretty open-ended and it’s best you know that going into it. It’s not a game I would focus all my attention on at any given time. Rather, it’s one I will play alongside whatever podcast I’m catching up on or TV show I’m binging.
I already mentioned Moviehouse‘s simple visuals (which present the plethora of menus in a pleasant color palette) and the soundscape of the game matches. It’s nothing to write home about but it’s also not bad. For me, I often muted the audio after the first three or so hours so I could listen to other content. Before I end this review, however, I do want to mention two things about performance. The first is that the game did freeze on me twice, requiring me to restart it. Luckily, I didn’t lose much progress thanks to frequent autosaves. The other is that the bar you adjust during production is really finicky. On several occasions, I would adjust the bar one way and it would suddenly jump to another place. This is an in-frequent glitch that isn’t game-breaking but is frustrating when it happens.
With all that said, I still want to warn you that my final verdict on the game will be slightly more positive than someone who doesn’t have my particular background. So read through the entire review and see if everything I say about the game is something you find fun before you make the purchase. While I still don’t think Moviehouse is as good as Game Dev Tycoon, it’s still a game I have put nearly a dozen hours into across three studios and one that I will return to again. It’s just hard to ignore the plethora of “buts” that follow any recommendation I can give. Moviehouse: The Film Studio Tycoon is available now on PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
