If you don’t have the sound of Suggs (of the band Madness) in your head 24/7, then I think there might be something genuinely wrong with you. Landlord’s Super is an open-world brickie ’em up, where you are playing Auf Wiedersehen, Pet in Thatcher’s Britain. For the Americans that think Great Britain is still Game of Thrones, Landlord’s Super is quintessentially the lower classes that are now 50-60 summed up. These are red-nosed men that support West Ham, drink a few pints of pale ale after work, and listen to Madness to recapture the fun of their youth. There is even a Michael Fish reference, or at least I read it like that.

Living in the fictional amalgamation of Sheffingham, you are the child of either a “displaced person” or someone from the HMS Windrush. The town itself is a rundown mess as a result of, as “Scouse” states, the mines being shut. This is the story of many villages up and down the country, from Fauldhouse to Treherbert. As a result, you live in a caravan that is as empty as the empathy in the north when Maggie (“the devil” in the north) died. You are effectively homeless and jobless. Everyone around you is miserable, there is a grey din over everything, and everyone looks like they sell bootleg tapes of films just released.

Playing as a construction worker, you have no money for anything and sell off scrap for cash while you meet the interesting cast of characters in Sheffingham. This includes Niel, who’s gone from living with Mike, Rick, and Vyvyan, to living under the bridge like a smelly tramp. Between selling scrap to Totter and doing odd jobs from the Job Centre, you’ll look to make money to survive and pay off a mortgage for your construction business. As a bit of a life simulator, you’ll need to drink, eat, sleep, take a dump while reading a tabloid, and even unzip to play hockey with the urinal cakes.

Stylistically, the art direction is rudimentary, with rough geometric shapes making up your hands and character models. This is all in aid of the depressing, working-class Coronation Street-style housing and dead-end prospects of the town. I won’t lie, there are a couple of instances where the style clashes with something, such as graphical fidelity. Performance-wise, I’ve not seen significant performance issues and most modern (year or two) PCs shouldn’t. Though on “Fantastic,” I have seen graphical glitches such as lighting on faces flicker. The sky doesn’t fall as a result of this, but it can take you out of the world for a moment.

The thing is, I don’t think those truly break the immersion too much for me, nothing so simple would for long. This grimy, working-class, Dell Trotter-type world of playing hooky with the convention that is expected of everyone is such a familiar feeling. Watch Dogs: Legion felt homely (in the British sense) in that wider aspect, but Landlord’s Super is concentrated down to the people too. Winston the delivery driver, Tamsin the barmaid, Scouse the local Dell Boy, and the rest are people I could point to throughout my life. All I need is the local drug dealer to complete my Pokédex.

That’s a lot of rhapsodizing about the setting of Landlord’s Super, but what is the story? As a construction worker, you’ve got a small section of land with a semi-built bungalow. I’m sure Dick and Dom will be grateful in the years that follow. Your job is to build it, get it looking nice, and start renting it out to generate a stable income to pay off the mortgage on the construction business. Before you can fully get onto building your house, you’ve got a lot of learning to do.

The end game might be to become a landlord and have a solid income, but on the way there you’ve got quite a bit of Job Centre-based work to do which is often odd jobs. This is cash-in-hand type of work such as dishwashing at the pub, laying foundations out the back of Ms. Kashmiran’s place at number 9, rebuilding the wall outside the pub after I tested my new sledgehammer on it, and putting a new roof on the church. Sometimes jobs such as dishwashing for Tasmin are done with a fade-out and fade-in. Though the construction work is the bread and butter.

If anything, Landlord’s Super is what Yahtzee Croshaw calls “the post-dad game.” It is like PowerWash Simulator and its ilk, focused on a basic job you’ll repeat often. Some jobs will offer something other than cash, like some tapes and a Phony Walkman to take the place of your crime/tv/wrestling podcasts you usually listen to. This is where I get to mention the economy, which is certainly there but isn’t the kindest to you. That’s Tory Britain for you. This reinforces the setting, as the talk of benefit scroungers on billboards and otherwise would make the Channel 4 series Benefit Street proud.

Spending a couple of hours laying bricks or mixing concrete exhausts you and makes you dirty. The life-sim aspect means doing too much work will exhaust you unless you do some casual day drinking and pork-pie eating. A working man’s lifestyle is summed up there. This is also topped off with the juvenile humor (I read it as such) of unzipping anywhere you like and letting loose or going to drop some twins off at the pool. Usually, I would complain about this, but then I got an achievement for becoming obese, which shows more commitment to the realistic idea than the usual tired fat jokes.

To get back to the point of the economy of Landlord’s Super, the goal is to balance your time effectively without setting yourself back too much. Being an idiot, I thought I might be better off knocking down parts of the house that was already standing, which only meant I had to spend time, money, and energy I didn’t have rebuilding. In fact, I attempted to do a Winston Igrahm, in that I passed out in the street, threw my back out, got put on invalidity benefits, signed on, and maybe (just maybe) got caught working as a dishwasher in the pub.

The day some slimy jerk reported me to the authorities, I’d made about £9.50 in scrap, £7.57 in benefits (unemployment and invalidity), and another £10.50 from a shift in the pub. I’m trying to build a house here, not a rabbit hutch! For reference, it is £1.50 for two pints of lager and a packet of crisps, as well as $1.50 for a plate of chips and steak and ale pie. That’s the cost of sustaining me. Additionally, it is about 20 quid for a single pallet of cement which is used to make concrete, mortar, and no-fines as well as 10 quid each for a pallet of sand or aggregate.

Believe it or not, most of these ingrateful sods that I am trying to rent out to might want a roof, windows, and nice doors. Things that make them feel secure. If I’m renting out to Walter Smith, I could leave the place looking like a building site, but if I want to charge serious money, I need to get a Tory in and that’s going to cost quite a bit more beyond the basics. Luckily you don’t have to deal with penguins, pelicans, and Inland Revenue, as there is only one place they can still their bills. Though your mortgage incurs interest after you’ve played a month(/season) in-game.

If there is something to complain about, it would be minor things like the highlighted silhouette of everything you try to put in your wheelbarrow. Maybe I am just stupid and need my eyes checked, but with everything being a foot above the wheelbarrow and lacking definition like shadows, it is difficult to place anything properly. Adding onto that being unable to tip it over to unload is quite annoying. It is half an hour (1:50-ish = an hour) of trying to put something in for it only to comedically fall out, then taking everything out and dumping it. It is only a few seconds but quickly wears on you.

Those issues and a bug or two stand out the most. One such bug was the wall I mentioned outside the pub. The task was simple enough: Use the bricks outside to reconstruct the wall. Great, it is something simple and gives me a chance to learn how this brickie work is done. After rebuilding it and doing all that I could with the tools provided, I couldn’t get paid. This isn’t just the case of tapes, no dialogue would trigger and allow me to complete the job. What am I getting paid in here, experience? Exposure?

Gameplay isn’t explosive, which given that the setting is such a significant quantity of what Landlord’s Super is, might detract from the enjoyment otherwise. Dishwashing isn’t involving because that isn’t the point. It is a steady and early cash flow, but other jobs aren’t the most involved either. You aren’t going to reinvent the wheel to undo a nail or hammer one in. Screwing something isn’t done by a complicated number of buttons, and nor is spreading some no-fines with your trowel. It is all a click or a click and hold because otherwise, you’re overcomplicating it.

Once you understand the overall complexity available with the building gameplay’s simplicity, you can create a reasonably nice-looking house for a town beleaguered by terraced housing in boring droves. The trouble is, once you’ve understood that, you want to knock the half-built bungalow you have down and start from scratch. It’s like Extreme Makeover crossed with DIY SOS but with only Julian doing all the work. It might sound like fun, but it is still going to take a number of hours and energy to do anything, including making the concrete.

It would be difficult to create a mid-century modern interior crossed with a Victorian exterior, but there certainly is some room for your own interpretations. I mean, the scaffolding is so malleable you place each clamp for individual sections yourself at whatever height you feel like. At that point, I might as well go out and become a cowboy builder in the first place. I’m already cutting the corners I need to in order to wonder who signed off on renting the place out. I even put nails in odd places to stress test the game at the best of times. I’d be a great cowboy builder, minus the racist opinions and reading The Scum.

Engulfed in the iconography of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet or generally Britain in the 80s, Landlord’s Super is one of those games most specifically for certain people. To someone who grew up around these characters or in the shadow of Thatcher-ism, everything will feel oddly familiar right down to the smell of a pub reeking of a workman’s worldly pleasures, beer, and cigarettes. Ultimately, I can’t help but love how homely Landlord’s Super is, it is the people I grew up around and those that influenced me in several ways. Without that, gameplay might otherwise be a bit of a remedial bore.

A PC review copy of Landlord’s Super was provided by Yogscast Games for this review.

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Landlord's Super

$19.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• I've found my people!
• Once you get it, the building has some complexity.

Cons

• Without the knowledge of the setting, there isn't much to enjoy.
• Often a little buggy.