The Tenants - Be the Landlord of Your Dreams (or Your Nightmares)

The word “landlord” carries a lot of baggage—so much so that I recently noticed a landlord community on Facebook change their name to say “housing providers” instead in order to distance themselves from the term. Perhaps that’s why the creators of The Tenants chose to name their game after the interesting and eclectic hodgepodge of individuals who live in your in-game properties rather than the character you actually play: a “housing provider” extraordinaire. But no matter how you feel about landlords IRL, whether you’re at war with yours or have always wanted to be one yourself, you will have fun playing this rental and renovation sim.

The Tenants by Frozen District is in early release on Steam and similar to another title of theirs, House Flipper, it lets you fulfill your dreams of cleaning, organizing, and renovating homes, all while making a ton of money in the process. It’s like all the building and decorating parts of The Sims without the micromanaging of characters’ lives. But The Tenants continues on where House Flipper stops—not only do you renovate properties, you also rent our your properties out to the unique and big-personalitied characters who live around the city, and you find yourself responsible for any problems they encounter with their homes in the process.

It took a few renovations before I really felt like I understood what I was doing, but after a while, I began to feel confident in my decorating skills. After I finish up renovating a bathroom for a client who was very concerned with “first impressions,” I know it’s time to sit back and wait for the agent to judge my choices. She looks at the toilet brush and gives it a heart-eyes-emoji reaction. The bathtub itself only gets a regular smile—I should have gone with the more expensive option. Just then, my in-game phone rings: my tenant back in my first rental property is having trouble with some mice. She’s already dealt with cockroaches and a broken radiator, the poor woman, so I made sure to deal with her issue quickly. That being said, professional pest removal was a whopping $1,600, so I sent my uncle over to deal with it instead.

No matter what stage of the game, there are always choices to make, whether it’s finishing that renovation on a deadline or ensuring your tenants are happy and want to continue living in your property. The more tenants you get, the more responsibility you take on, and it can be frustrating to have to stop and deal with problems, but you can always choose to be that kind of landlord and let their texts go unanswered if you prefer. It's all up to you, so if like making judgment calls, decorating, negotiating, and solving issues, then this will be right up your alley.

Advancing through the game further, I was pleased to learn that there are more job types than just renovations. I eagerly took my first assignment helping another landlord keep an eye on her open house and didn’t regret it. Unlike when I rent my own properties, I get to play with this other person’s money when it comes to background checks and tenancy histories, so I ran them on everyone. One particular woman seemed to love every item in the property I was showing, but her checks showed that she had gone to jail for a lot of icky stuff, and her previous landlord said she had been a bad tenant. To top it all off, her personality type was listed as “alcoholic.” When I saw she had a job earning $78 grand a year and was willing to pay a high price for the flat, though, I said “whatever” and rented to her anyway. (It wasn’t my property, after all.) I got 5 stars for the job, the other landlord saying in the review she left that she would have liked it if the tenant had a longer rental history but had no other complaints.

That seemed a little too easy.

And so far, that’s my major gripe with the game. This is where I’d like to mention again, however, that the game is in early release. There are still tons of changes coming, and I absolutely understand that. I’m going to talk about the game as it is now, but that’s not to say I think this is the finished product.

So, back to my grumbles. The game is fun, but gets repetitive, and the answer to getting 5 stars on renovations seems to be to complete the provided checklist with the most expensive items available, and that’s it. Easy. Since you renovate rooms and homes with your clients’ money—and there’s always more than enough of it available—this isn’t particularly difficult, which ruins a little bit of the fun. There’s no real question of which items to use (pick the most expensive version), whether they match (at least early in the game, they almost certainly won’t), or even where you put them (as long as they’re all accessible). The name of the game appears to be this: spend all of your clients' money that you can. That being said, perhaps I’m not far enough into the game for more nuances to be made apparent—or maybe that’s something that’s coming later in development.

Things are different, though, when it comes to renovating your own place. In my first apartment, left to me by my late aunt and cleaned and repaired by my handyman uncle, I was reminded by a pop-up that the nicer I made it, the more tenants would be willing to pay, so I bought expensive furniture and fixtures, aiming to make it fantastic, and quickly realized I was down to $17 before I’d added interior doors or painted the walls. Whoops! Since it’s my first place, it was guided by a tutorial-like system still, so I was encouraged to go ahead and try to rent it right then… and I did. Someone moved in and, aside from the pests and other mishaps, she seems very happy in her plain-walled, no-doored home. When she moves out, I can continue to renovate the space.

Overall, the game has a unique feel I really enjoy. I love the graphics and the fun, mumbly voices of the characters. That being said, at least early game, so many of the items and decorations you can put into homes are, for lack of a better word, ugly. From the floor patterns to the furniture, a lot of it doesn’t inspire artistic passion. What I love about decorating in The Sims is making everything look nice and match or complement each other, and there’s really very little of that here until you earn more items, but I suppose you have to have something to look forward to, right?

Speaking of The Sims, I long for cutaway walls when I’m renovating the narrow rooms in cramped apartments, and I’m so happy to hear those will be coming soon. Especially in the early properties, which are often small and oblong and have narrow rooms, it’s annoying to rotate the whole screen to just to set a single item down against a wall, and I’ll be glad when that work becomes a little more streamlined. Another thing The Sims has that I long for here is the ability to preview paint on the walls or different flooring with a simple mouseover. I hope that’ll eventually get added in too, as it makes it easier to visualize what you’re doing before you have to buy anything.

The scoring of your work at the end of every renovation is really fun. I love the faces by the prospective tenants as well as the agent who reviews my work, even if I do get offended when they make gross-out noises, haha. The reviews are great as well. They don’t differ a ton right now (if I get compared to a person’s brother-in-law with a spackling knife one more time…), but I think that’s another byproduct of being early access and can certainly be forgiven.

The renovation goals are pretty clearly defined with ratings and guidance available to look over throughout your work, which I like. There are also last-minute elite jobs, with a hint that you can put unique items from those jobs in your personal storage if you want some free loot. Either they didn’t tell me how to use storage, however, or I missed it (you don’t have to click to advance the dialogue if your uncle has more than one thing to say, so there’s a possibility I simply looked away and it’s my fault) but either way, I don’t see the option, so I haven’t gotten to be a sneaky thief on a renovation job yet, but I'm certainly having a good time.

The landlord side of things can be a bit enigmatic at times. My first tenant was happy with me one moment and moved out the next. (Maybe her lease was up, but nothing indicated this other than her text that she was leaving, so I’m not sure.) That being said, the tenants themselves are really fun, and while I’ll surely be unhappy if one never pays rent or decides to wreck my place, that's the risk you take being a landlord, isn't it? Meanwhile, my current tenant may or may not have a better history than my first (I couldn’t afford background checks with my first tenant—a poorly managed $17 leftover dollars only gets you so far), but he is an alcoholic, and the first thing he did after getting approved to move in was chug a beer and vomit in the toilet. I love it. I learned from the patch notes that there are apparently drug manufacturers too. I can’t wait to see what sort of wacky and frustrating tenants I might get next. There are also “babysitting” jobs, where a landlord pays you to deal with their renters’ issues for a set amount of time so they can get a break, so there’s no shortage of fun interactions and crisis management situations throughout the game.

You also have to keep up with your bills, of course, which the patch notes say is becoming more streamlined soon. Renting out an apartment is new to me, and I'm not really sure how much it makes sense to charge the characters yet, so I don’t know if I’m renting my properties above or below market rate, but I do know I’m making a profit and able to pay all my bills on time, so maybe that’s all that matters.

To conclude, this game is a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to see where the developers take it next. They recently announced that they’re on pace to deliver the 1.0 version of the game in 2022 along with some other helpful fixes they’ll be implementing soon, like the ability to queue actions for your dear uncle when he’s helping repair and clean properties for you, and additions like a new district, item color variants (yay!), deposits, inspections, evictions, and more!

Through this game, you can be the landlord you always wanted and cater to your tenants’ every need—or you can be an unforgiving tyrant and make your occupants keep up with rising rents while you skimp on pest control and repairs. You get to knock down walls and decorate your dream home with someone else’s money. You can manage multiple properties and rent to all sorts of crazy characters that sometimes you’ll love and sometimes you’ll hate. The Tenants really has it all, and I'm definitely going to stick around to see how it continues to develop.

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Tomb Raider (the 2013 Reboot)- Revisiting Lara Croft

In a previous article, I made the argument for replaying more recent "old" games—meaning the ones from last year or a few years ago, not just the ones from your childhood. I feel like we miss out on a lot of wonderful gameplay if we only stick with either what's brand new or what's so old it's retro. There are so many wonderful worlds to explore that are in between!

That being said, I’m no different from many gamers of my generation: I’m a sucker for remakes. I have the remastered versions of the Spryo trilogy, the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, and Shadow of the Colossus all on Playstation, and I've even the new version of Katamari Damacy on my Switch. (Pokemon Snap is coming out in a few days too!) There’s nothing wrong with loving these games; my argument is only that you don’t need to wait until games are this old to go back and enjoy something you’ve already played.

All of that being said, I’d kill for an opportunity to replay the early Tomb Raider games. Lara Croft has been an idol of mine since the first time I sat on the floor of my friend’s bedroom and controlled her polygon-addled body. Though those scenes look like little more than a loose collection of pixels now, I remember Lara diving into a swimming pool as my mom stood behind me watching, and, when Lara’s head broke the surface of the water and she took two big, deep breaths and treaded water, paddling backward a few strokes as she got her bearings, my mom shuddered and said, “It’s so realistic. I can’t handle it.”

And it did feel realistic. And despite what Ron Rosenberg, producer of the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot says about how "when people play Lara, they don't really project themselves into the character," when I played, I felt like I was Lara. I was this badass lady who could jump and climb and shoot and explore and collect. I can still hear the few mysterious notes that chimed when I picked up those little relics and found hidden medi packs. I dreamed about Lara’s adventures—which in my head became my adventures—and my friend and I always wanted more. We argued about where “secret-secret” statues were scattered throughout different levels and made up convoluted hoops to jump through in order to collect the uncollectible. We knew there really were secrets in the game, and we had the play guides to tell us exactly where they were and collected them all, but our hunger for adventure couldn’t be sated. We were sure there were more, secret secrets to be found. The unattainable loot born of our little-kid imaginations I remember best was in Tomb Raider II at the Great Wall: “You have to almost drown right here, then a door will open up. I promise!” my friend told me, and we died over and over and over, passing the controller back and forth between us with every new load screen, trying to find that non-existent passageway as a tiger paced the pool’s perimeter above us.

Ah, memories.

The real takeaway is, though, that we loved the games—and of course Lara herself—so much that we yearned to make them our own in every possible way, and there's certainly a magic in that that few other games have managed to capture for me since.

Like Lara, I was an adventurer. As a young girl in Arkansas, my spare time not in front of the TV was often spent in the woods around my house, keeping an eye out for snakes and snapping turtles, looking for places to climb, new areas to explore and, yes, treasure. Sure, the booty I brought home was quartz crystals and maybe an interestingly shaped stick or especially cool rock, but once I was introduced to Lara Croft, the my wanderings changed from those of a buck-toothed country girl traipsing through the pine forest just beyond her backyard to the adventures of a daredevil explorer, able to conquer anything.

But I have yet to find a great way to replay those games without an old Playstation (I do still have the discs, but not the console—that is if they’re even still readable). So when I saw the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot on Steam, I figured what the heck. Why not? It’s not like we’re getting remastered versions of the old ones any time soon anyway.

Tomb Raider I Lara and reboot Lara

My first impressions were mostly positive. If my mom thought those early Tomb Raider games were realistic, she wouldn’t know how to handle this one. Even though the game’s already “old,” I have a hard time differentiating between cut scenes and gameplay, and the character makes natural movements that make her feel even more real, like steadying herself along a rock wall when I have to cross a narrow path with a sheer drop to one side. The controls are intuitive despite the fact that this is my first time controlling Lara with a keyboard, and the kills are just as satisfying as back in the day.

The story confused me, though. Not because the new game did anything wrong, but because I didn’t realize that this Lara was essentially a completely different person from the Lara of my childhood. (I suppose the word "reboot" should have been my first clue, huh?) First of all, in this game, Lara is so young. It feels at odds with the mansion, hedge maze, and ATV course-owning Lara of the first three games I was so familiar with. While I was busy doing obstacle courses, racing to make it to that secret door under the stairs before it closed, and completing four-wheeler time trials (and, most importantly, while I was busy locking the butler in the walk-in freezer—a favorite pastime of my friend's and mine), I was picturing a Lara who was much older. Not as old as my mom, maybe, but definitely not as young as the rebooted Lara, and it was weird to see her portrayed as someone so wet behind the ears.

(As an aside, the Lara from the old games was apparently born in 1968, so she actually isn't that far in age from my mom. Weird. But the Lara of this reboot was born in 1992, which makes her younger than me now. Double weird.)

Anyway, the Lara Croft I grew up with (at least in my mind) was never vulnerable. She had a handle on every situation, a trick up each sleeve, and a gun in every holster. She could take on goons, dogs, tigers, and piranhas; she could captain speed boats and outrun boulders. Regardless of how you feel about the movie, when Angelina Jolie was cast for her, I saw that strong, badass lady and thought “perfect.” This reboot Lara, though, doesn't fit that same aesthetic. Reboot Lara strikes me as much less confident, though certainly able to adapt and overcome, even if she falters a few times on the way. But that makes sense for this younger and less experienced version of the game's hero.

The original timeline Lara had supportive parents who were very involved in her life as well as encouraging when it came to her love of archaeology. Meanwhile, reboot Lara has a father who chooses work over her time and time again and a mother who dies in a plane crash. (Interestingly, in the original timeline, it’s Lara who was in a plane crash, and surviving alone is what ignited the fire in her for solo adventuring.) She seems almost tragic, and that doesn't mesh with the Lara in my memories at all. As a kid, I couldn’t imagine anything being done to Lara. Rather, she met everything head-on and left her mark on whatever situation she found herself in. No part of her was passive or caught off guard. Alternatively, this Lara starts her journey (at least the playable part of it) wrapped in a cocoon and abandoned, something already having been done to her off screen before we even get to get into the game. And, understandably, she is always looking to find her companions. This constant reaching out for others is decidedly human, and at the same time feels so totally unlike the independent Lara I knew as a kid.

That all being said, this game is a nice way to fill out Lara’s story in my mind. It’s a little startling but also interesting to see her flawed, at times trapped and bested, and, perhaps most shockingly, vulnerable, rather than the perfect long-jumping, wolf-and-dinosaur-downing machine of my memories. Even though I was the one back in the day who aimed our weapons at foes and timed all her jumps and dives and solved all the puzzles, pushing that huge stone there and pulling this lever here in order to dodge Thor’s lightning or tiptoe beneath the Sword of Damocles, it always felt like Lara was the smart one, the talented one, and the one who would get us through, whether or not it was my fingers on the controls. This game is different. It feels like this time, Lara needs me.

At first, I thought that was a product of age or how the world has shaped me as a person, but apparently it was the aim for the game all along. Rather than players imagining themselves as Lara, Ron Rosenberg was going for giving the player a feeling of guardianship. When characters play this version of Lara, he says, "they're more like 'I want to protect her.' There's this sort of dynamic of 'I'm going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.'" Despite the implications that a female lead can't be relatable and must instead be rescuable, the Lara of the reboot is a Lara who feels more real. She feels more like a capable friend rather than an untouchable agent with all the right moves.

Rhianna Pratchett, gaming writer who did the story for this reboot along with the 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider, talked about these choices in a New York Times article. “We wanted to show a character who was frightened and unsure, which was something that’s not often shown in video games,” she explained. And, while some have decried this young Lara who is vulnerable and still learning her craft as sexist in its own way, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, a professor of game studies at Staffordshire University, posits that “If it wasn’t for [this] reboot, Lara probably would have died a lonely, sexist death.” She surmises that Lara's legacy would have remained rather one dimensional and that “people would have gone: Remember the dark days when we had that weird woman with the gigantic breasts?” Despite the fact that many young female gamers like me were excited to play as a badass woman protagonist regardless, and saw her as more than just her cup size, I can, of course, see what she means.

I still love Lara and love playing as her, but with this reboot, the mood has shifted, as have the stakes. Before, a failure was mine, because in my head, the old Lara knew the way, and I clearly just wasn’t taking her to the right places. But now it feels like Lara needs my help, and we’re figuring it all out together. She’s gone from all-knowing guide I plugged myself into to more like an equal partner, and it’s a different kind of experience all together, but not an unpleasant one. Reboot Lara is less self-assured but is still strong and capable and ready to meet the challenges that she's dealt. In some ways, playing as her still scratches that nostalgia itch, but it’s also its own brand new thing, just with a familiar player leading the stage, and I like it.

Playing the reboot, I don’t get the same racing heart I did back in the day when a goon with a bat suddenly occupied the ledge I just landed on or an angry doberman ran around the corner at me, but Tomb Raider was the first game I played with such realistic dangers, and it’s hard to recreate that experience. (There’s also not an equal to the save-then-swan-dive-off-a-high-cliff-before-quitting-the-game of the versions of yore either. Did everyone do that, by the way, or were my friend and I particularly messed up kids?) But the important stuff is certainly still there, and the story and the realism shine. I’m excited to help Lara navigate through this new world and bring us both where she wants us to go. In a way, she is and isn’t the same woman from my childhood, but either way, I feel a new friendship forming—or is it a rekindling of an old one? Either way, it’s not exactly what I was looking for, but in a lot of ways, exactly what I needed.

Have you found a new relationship with an old game? Let me know in the comments.

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Banished in the Time of Quarantine

Like a lot of people, I’ve been home a lot more often lately. I’ve been trying to fill the time with useful endeavors—you know, those that contribute to growth and personal development. And I’ve been doing a lot of that, sure. (Well, maybe not “a lot.” Some. A small amount. ...Sometimes.)

Ok, well what I have been doing a lot of is gaming. All this extra time at home has led to me digging through my Steam library, finding those old titles I used to love but moved away from, and firing them back up. It’s been a really fun and refreshing exercise. It’s like bumping into an old friend and having some catching up to do and then reliving your favorite memories together. Or maybe it’s more like visiting your hometown: sure, you remember why you left, but it feels good to be there for a little bit, comfortable and surrounded by the familiar, doesn’t it?

One such game that’s drawn me back in during these unpredictable, pandemic-laden times is Banished by Shining Rock Software. It’s from 2014 but holds up just fine, and there are beaucoup mods to spice it up if that’s your thing.

In the game, you start with a few families and supplies (the number of which depends on whether you want to play easy, medium, or hard mode) and a few houses. From there, you have to build your town and help your villagers survive the harsh winters and (hopefully) prosperous summers while expanding your population. Which do you prioritize first? Food or clothing? Firewood or tools? The choices start to pile up quickly.

Your villagers can all take on jobs as laborers, builders, or specialists as you assign. You immediately have a lot you need to balance in order to ensure your town’s survival, but once you know what you’re doing, it feels good to cross things off your mental checklist, accomplishing so much while sitting in one place... during a global pandemic... alone in your house.

Ok, that got a little dark.

Anyway, Banished has plenty of curve balls to throw you, but at the same time, the experience of playing is one that is, at least once you get the hang of it, quite soothing. It feels good to watch your residents live well fed, warmly dressed, well educated lives. It’s fun to keep track of growing families and to watch your town flourish and expand. You get to rely on your own resiliency and careful planning... or fall victim to the lack of them.

Should you trade some of your precious tools for a new type of livestock? Is your town too densely packed to survive the destructive path of an errant tornado? Have you provided enough firewood and stockpiled enough food to get each of your families through the bitter winter months? The questions are stressful to ask but also incredibly satisfying to answer in the affirmative, and once you get into the groove of Banished, more often than not you see your success grow and grow—or at least you get good at bouncing back when you overreach.

When I clicked on the title in my Steam library, I thought my revisiting would be a brief foray for nostalgia’s sake and then I’d move on, but I’ve already logged more hours than I expected on my most recent playthrough, and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. What drew me back into Banished so completely? I think it’s the pace (slow, steady, ever progressing), the simplicity (there’s lots going on, but overall your duties are straightforward and well defined), and the control (you make all the decisions—you’re essentially the god of your little hamlet, and the success of your villagers is wholly in your hands). In short, the game offers pretty much all the things that we feel like we’re missing right now as the real world around us is turned upside down because of the pandemic.

Off the computer, things might feel like they’re crawling painfully slowly or rushing by in a chaotic hodgepodge of ever-changing circumstances, depending on the day. Nothing feels terribly simple or straightforward right now, and the new rules and rituals that we do finally get comfortable with suddenly change, so that the things we thought we knew become things we regularly have to reexamine, reconsider, and make new decisions about. And it’s no small statement to say that many of us have seen the control seep out of our lives over this last year. So many things that make us who we are and so many decisions we usually make for ourselves have been taken away, and no matter how you feel about that, whether it makes you seethe or you’re more than willing to do so for the sake of the greater good, it has still taken some getting used to, and even after a year, I certainly still don’t feel fully adjusted.

But in Banished, the antithesis is true. Everything comes at you as quickly or slowly as you want. When things are going well, you can watch your villagers speed walk around, fulfilling their duties at a lightning pace, and when something bad happens, you can bring everything to a halt and take all the time you need setting up your answer to whatever disaster has struck, all but ensuring your success. You can plan ahead and watch those careful strategies come to fruition—something that remains fulfilling whether it’s real-life accomplishments or the myriad achievements of the characters on your computer screen. You have all the answers—and the ability to dole them out as you see fit. And finally, unlike that pressing voice in the back of your head in the real world, reminding you lives are on the line in these risky and unprecedented times, if you mess up, the consequences are temporary, lasting just long enough for you to choose a new map and assigning a new name to the replacement town you’d like to build.

Banished has provided some semblance of accomplishment and control that, at least for me, has been missing as of late. While I know we’ll get back to what we consider normal eventually—and we’re well on our way now, I hope—having this escape where I can relax and feel comfort and control again has been medicine I didn’t even realize I needed. While it does get stressful when disaster strikes or your population outpaces your food supply, in the end, it’s a pretty soothing game—especially because you know you know you can make a difference, and unlike what’s going on in the world around us right now, you can see that difference, easily defined and quantified, being made right in front of you in real time. That sort of validation is something that’s been lost in the shuffle for a lot of us lately, but Banished can provide it in small, pixelated doses for those in need of a booster shot while we do what we can to stay home, stay safe, and wait for things to get back to normal.

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