It isn’t every day that someone gives you an apartment, let alone an entire block of them. I’ll admit, the whole-ass tenement that’s just landed in my lap is run down, disconnected from the mains, and filled with glowing green mushrooms.
My new digs also might be located in the sealed off district where they contain people infected with a strange and debilitating fungal infection. And fine, the name of the district is literally “Open Sewer”. Nonetheless, you’d be nuts to look a gift horse like that in the mouth, even if said horse is unfurnished and smells overwhelmingly of damp.
This is the setup for Obenseuer, a delightfully strange blend of survival game and life sim from the makers of spooky structural analysis puzzler INFRA. Currently in Steam early access, where it’s been since way back in 2018, the simplest way to describe it is House Flipper meets Pathologic, and it’s the latter influence that attracted me to it.
Regular House Flipper has never appealed to me. Given I can’t afford to renovate my own house, the idea of sprucing up an imaginary one seems like a mild form of torture. But if you throw in disease, depression, and some kooky NPCs, then pass me a paint-roller because I’m all in, baby.
Obenseuer sets the bar for weirdness high before you even acquire your dilapidated tower block, as a bunch of shadowy figures ask you via television screen what kind of addiction you have. From the four available options I select “mushrooms”, mainly because it’s more interesting than alcohol, and if you select “none” you get a worse addiction than if you just pick one outright.
I also have to answer several other questions, such as whether I have anyone close to me (Answer: my cat). And if there’s anyone out there who I think might “pose a threat” to me (Answer: my crazy neighbour). Oh, and in answering the final question about my health, I end up with a mild alcohol dependency anyway.
While the visuals are simple, the district oozes with grimy, eerie personality.
Having completed this questionnaire, I’m informed that through what the TV people believe is a clerical error, I’ve been given a whole tenement block. I’m also given a complementary relocation package, which includes some food and drink, some mushroom supplement (for my mushroom cravings), and a disconcerting teddy bear, and then I’m unleashed into Obenseuer.
The district is about the size of an American city block, comprising several shops like a pharmacy and convenience store, several rundown apartment blocks in addition to the one I own, and a lot of people living in caravans or just out on the street. While the visuals are simple, the district oozes with grimy, eerie personality.
My tenement is slightly separated from the district proper, located on the far side of a drainage canal and cordoned off by a chainlink fence. Here, some chancing citizen has set up a toll both seemingly designed to annoy me specifically, and it costs me ten Obenseuercoins (the district’s local scrip) just to access my tenement.
The apartment block itself is an absolute dump: with no water or mains supply, a stairwell that has collapsed halfway up the tower, and rooms littered with all manner of detritus, including many piles of fluorescent yellow bags that all read “BIOHAZARD”.
Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me. Obenseuer’s renovation system is both intricate and convoluted. Before you can even begin decorating any apartment, it must be personally surveyed by you, then cleaned of detritus and wall graffiti (which requires you to buy cleaning fluid to remove).
At this point, you can hire a local contractor to do specific jobs for you, everything from fixing up the walls to fitting kitchens. Yet even the simplest job costs twice the amount of money you start out with, and that’s just for labour. You must also supply the parts. Planks, nails, bricks, metal sheeting, even construction tarps must be factored into your financial equations.
At the outset, you can earn money by working for a local rooftop farm (which, to be clear, is a farm on a rooftop, not a farm that grows rooftops, though that would probably be more helpful) or by recycling bottles at the nearby bottle bank.
Neither brings in a whole lot of cash, however, and what little money you earn is often frittered away attending to your personal needs—eating, drinking, sleeping, using the facilities (which in my case was a “bucket potty” I found in a nearby apartment storage unit), and managing your various addictions. The game even simulates your mental health, with actions like eating poor quality food potentially leading to depression.
It’s pretty punishing, probably a little too punishing with the current system balancing. It’s incredibly easy to end up trapped in a subsistence feedback loop, not least because serving one need can increase another. Just drank a beer to satisfy your alcohol craving? Now you need to pee! Also, while it isn’t entirely clear, addictions seem to be exacerbated the more you satisfy them, which may explain why my character seemed to be constantly inhaling mushrooms.
It’s pretty punishing, probably a little too punishing with the current system balancing.
That said. you can claw your way to success in Obenseuer, you just need to figure out how. You can purchase workstations to craft items that you can sell to local merchants. You can turn to a life of crime, breaking into people’s houses and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.
Simply poking around can often yield surprising rewards. Many areas of the district are bricked or boarded off, and these can be ‘accessed’ using the right tools, with many containing hidden valuables.
Assuming you can raise the funds to get an apartment to a basic living standard, you can then let it out to tenants located around Obenseuer. Different tenants have different requirements. Some only need the bare minimum, like walls that aren’t falling down and plumbing. Others are right prima donnas, requiring things like electricity and a functioning kitchen. What do you want next, an indoor toilet? This isn’t the Ritz, you know.
In any case, getting tenants in provides a passive source of income, which obviously makes renovating the rest of the block easier. But it will also help you pursue your real goal of unravelling the mysteries of the district.
I’m not going to explain much of this here, but there’s a lot more to Obenseuer than is initially obvious. Finding the right people, and taking on the right quests, can open up pretty massive new areas of the map. There’s some wild stuff going on right under your feet.
But you don’t need to delve too deeply to discover that Obenseur is profoundly odd. The local mini-market has a fully simulated checkout system. There are vending machines that dispense live rats. The general store is run by a robot made out of rubbish bags.
After poking around my tenement, I discovered that the crazy neighbour I thought I’d left behind was living on the first floor, and was absolutely delighted to see me despite my character seemingly having no memory of him. You can even ask him to pay rent, though something about him, perhaps the fact he had his face painted like someone had put a clown mask on a shark, convinced me this was a bad idea.
It’s also worth noting that, while the game is ostensibly about becoming a capitalist slumlord, you don’t have to engage with the tenement renovation at all.
You can just wander around chatting to people, subsisting on the meagre funds you collect from recycling bottles, or sticking every coin you have into the mushroom vending machine (there’s several of these too) and getting stoned off your nut on hallucinogenic mycelium. Obenseuer may still be deep in early access, but it’s already a fascinating and, provided you don’t mind applying a bit of elbow grease, surprisingly rewarding time.
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