Recent reviews by Useless Cabbage Ewen

Moviehouse is a disappointing take on the "Game Dev Tycoon" formula, set on - of course - a film studio lot. The premise is simple: hire a writer, and give them prompts like the genre, setting, hero and villain. Once they've written a script, you set the director off to produce it, and give them prompts like their budget for actors, who the lead and support are, what percentage of the budget should be allocated to X, Y, Z - and voila, you have yourself a movie. Over time, you upgrade your staff's creativity and craft points, which in turn allows you to write bigger and better movies.

Unfortunately, unlike Game Dev Tycoon, Moviehouse struggles with unbalanced mechanics, a complete lack of difficultly curve, and areas of the game that are completely superfluous and have absolutely no impact on the production of your films.

For the first few short films you make, you'll struggle with money - it's a fine balancing act between hiring reasonable actors and keeping yourself in the black. But after a short while, you'll start "investing" in other studios. After a couple of investments, you have a regular source of income that outweighs your staffing overheads, and you'll never need to worry about money again.

Your employees have a happiness meter, and I don't think I ever saw anyone drop below "extremely happy". Sure, they've not had a holiday in 20 in-game years and I haven't given my lead writer a raise in the entire 25-year existence of our studio, but it's all good because we did well at a festival.

My poor lead writer was still earning $1.5k a month while churning out scripts for billion-dollar movies.

Odyssey Studios have tried to add additional elements to Moviehouse to add some more authenticity to the experience. You can hire a "crew" who can scout for new locations (which you can select during the production), and create props (which you can combine with sets, on those locations). Presumably all of this is for bonus points - match up a horror film with some horror props on a horror set in a horror location and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank. Except unfortunately this mechanic appears to be completely superfluous to the game - an added extra that doesn't have enough of an impact to make it important, and in itself has very little in the way of guidance to help the player understand what its purpose is.

Ultimately, there was a vision here. It's a shame that, at least in its current form, Moviehouse falls short of being a solid entry into this Tycoon-style genre. Hopefully some of this feedback will be taken on board and future updates might flesh the game out into a more rounded experience. As it stands at the moment, I can't recommend it when it represents perhaps 2-3 hours of clunky playtime.

A fantastic pick-up-and-play title which is easy to play, hard to master, but never fails to satisfy.