When I interviewed the developers at Odyssey Studios last summer about their then-upcoming title Moviehouse, I was curious to see what sorts of obstacles they planned to challenge players with. I wanted to see how they could make the business side of the movie industry as exciting as the filming and acting. I knew we wouldn’t be getting an actual successor to Peter Molyneux’s The Movies, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.
Moviehouse puts you in charge of your own movie studio. Starting in the 80s, your task is simple. Grow your studio, develop your talent, make movies, sell them off to distributors, and repeat the cycle ad nauseam. As you grow, you’ll be able to scout locations, build props, unlock new genres of movies to make, and even invest in your competitors. Your productions are very abstracted, boiling down to casting a lead and supporting actor, laying out the budget, picking a couple sets, and dealing with a bit of cinematic technical detail like different camera angles or editing tricks. Once the movie’s complete, you can enter it into film festivals (if they’re available), sell the distribution rights to your competitors, or release them yourself (once you get high enough in the tech tree).
From a visual standpoint, Moviehouse doesn’t have much going on. It’s almost all user interface to one extent or another. Your “studio” is one of three static sets that become bigger and more grandiose as your studio evolves from small film club to corporate behemoth. Working with plot cards will give you pointers about which cards work best with which genres, with up and down arrows (and occasionally a dash to suggest it’s not good or bad). Navigating the interface is pretty simple, and there’s rarely any point where you’re wondering where you need to go. That said, graphical glitches and performance issues can impact your ability to navigate. And the one part that’s creative in any sense, the movie poster maker, is inaccessible until you unlock the ability to distribute your own movies.
If you’re looking for outstanding audio work, well, Moviehouse does not deliver the goods. The music which plays while you’re busy shuffling production schedules and ordering script rewrites isn’t particularly noteworthy or inspiring. It sits in the background, moving along, but not really influencing you in any way. Sound effects are decent, but again, not particularly outstanding. You’re not going to hear any voice work, so you’re free to imagine how the occasional person sounds while they’re barking orders at actors or the complaints your writers give you when you tell them to fix the problems in their script. But outside of all that, the sound aspects of Moviehouse are about as minimal as the visuals.
When it comes to the gameplay for Moviehouse, it’s technically playable, but the caveats are almost too numerous to list. At its core, Moviehouse is decidedly casual. But that casual attitude comes with hideous penalties in terms of advancing gameplay. You could pick the most ridiculous combos of plot cards and the worst that happens is you make a bad movie that nobody likes. Which doesn’t make you much money. Unfortunately, you’re never really sure exactly why something fails. Sure, you get notes after initial release. But there’s nothing to break down how a certain locale does or does not fit. You have no way of understanding the interactions of actors with each other. And plot cards which sound like they should work (like cattle thieves in a Western) sometimes get marked as not working with the genre. When you have a script which has a certain requirement like “50% of your budget must go to your supporting cast,” that requirement disappears from the production screen once you actually start making the movie, so if you forget it because you’re doing other things at the moment, it’ll sandbag you by bringing down the quality of the film.
The advancement mechanics are, to put it bluntly, a complete shambles. You have certain paths that you can develop your writers and directors, but some of them have penalties attached to them which feel so detrimental, you end up not taking them. As for research, what contributes to research and how much is remarkably opaque. Worse, past the initial stages, you’re stuck in the doldrums of “small” films because the research requirements are so ridiculously high, you essentially have to grind out stupid numbers of movies to get anywhere. With regards to your backlot crews, you have nothing to indicate what genres might fit best with which locations, which props fit with which genres, and how best to improve your backlot. Not to mention that you can waste a lot of time trying to scout locations of certain kinds instead of the game making it clear there are no more locations of that type by disabling the option. And nobody wants to see an “object.propnull” message when trying to build props. You can’t do any kind of improvements on actors you’ve worked with before until you’re at the casting stage. And at some point, you’re able to essentially buy out all of your competitors. I managed to do it by Year 9, which meant I didn’t actually need to make movies anymore purely for cash. Yeah, from short subjects to Disney in less than a decade. It’s not as cool as it sounds. Meanwhile, I’m stockpiling scripts and hoping that I get another research point because when you’re sitting on a billion dollars, you kinda want to do more than putter around making small films.
Compounding the advancement issues and general information opacity is another problem: performance. For a game which doesn’t have any fancy animations, high-poly character meshes, or eye-popping special effects, Moviehouse appears to be an absolute pig for system resources. Past about Year 10 (game chronology), you start running into noticeable lag when performing even basic actions like trying to pause to deal with multiple events or even confirming the completion of tasks by your staff. Improving actor quality while casting is increasingly likely to cause a soft lock, and I never seemed to get past about Year 12 or 13 without a hard lock showing a mustard yellow screen. One should not be having to restart a game or even their computer just to eke out another virtual month or two. Between performance problems and glacial research pace, the mention of achievements like streaming services and “cinematic universes” just seems like a cruel joke to pull on the player.
As I was writing this review, Winamp brought up “King of Hollywood” by The Eagles. I was particularly struck by the couplet, “All your talent and my good taste/I’d hate to see it go to waste.” And honestly, I cannot help but think about Moviehouse that same way. There’s definitely a desire to make a movie tycoon game present here. It’s got almost all of the right pieces, but they’re badly assembled and don’t function together worth a damn. I hate seeing this idea go to waste, but right now, this is one game that needs to go into turnaround. In theory, if the performance issues, pacing, and information display issues can be fixed, Moviehouse might be worth playing. For now, that will probably have to wait for a “director’s cut.”
Axel played Moviehouse on PC with a review code.
