The Tenants PC Review

The Tenants is the latest game by Ancient Forge Studio, and you play the role of an agent with several property-oriented jobs. The game pegs you as a landlord, but that isn’t entirely accurate. You’re more a combination of the landlord, interior decorator, and “tenant-sitter”; there isn’t a word for it, but we’ll get to all that soon enough.
 

 

At its core, The Tenants is a management game. The screen can often get filled up with a variety of charts and screens and messages, and it can take some getting used to. In the early game, you’ll likely get overwhelmed at times as multiple systems overlap with one another, and you forget your way around. So, as a small tip for first-time players, you need to pay close attention to your phone. That’s where all the important information comes from!

The Tenants is all about managing, in various capacities, a series of properties. You are called an “agent” in-game, meaning you receive a couple of jobs through your phone that involve dealing with homes. These jobs give you the money you need for your properties, hence the landlord aspect. The non-landlord jobs typically come in two main overarching flavors: babysitting and renovation.

 

 

Babysitting in The Tenants is all about looking after the tenants in some other landlord’s house. This involves doing nothing at all until you get a message from them asking for something, and then you respond. This could be by getting them gifts or fixing whatever needs fixing in the house, such as a TV breaking. Hence this being called a form of “tenant-sitting” at the beginning of the review, you’re looking after grown people who constantly have a problem.

There is also another kind of job that is a form of evil babysitting, and that’s where someone wants a tenant to get out of their house, and so you come in and force them out through unethical, coercive means, such as hiring someone to play loud music until they get angry and leave. So, the game isn’t exactly doing a great job renovating the image many people have of landlords and speaking of renovation.
 

 

Renovation in The Tenants is basically like The Sims. You have a room or a house to renovate, and you have access to various tools to renovate it. You need to bring in essential utilities when required, like electricity and water, and then do the floors and walls and lay down whatever furniture the tenants want. During renovation assignments, you’ll be given a budget and specific instructions on what to buy. So, it will be very specific about the color of the paint on the walls, the type of floors, the furniture, etc. This also leads the game to often being little more than a very casual game.

The Tenants is a clicker game. It’s a more involved clicker game, but you’ll essentially be clicking on whatever they tell you to click on and then placing whatever they tell you to click on in the room you need to renovate. There isn’t much challenge to it, and the challenge comes more in the sense of micromanagement.

The Tenants is a game that loves micromanagement. You will likely have multiple jobs going simultaneously. This is where the stress comes in because you will want to do as many jobs as possible all the time so that you can build up enough money to do things like buying up properties of your own to establish passive income. Which you then use to buy up more places, renovate them, and rent them out to people for differing lengths of time. The Tenants is perfect for people who love min-maxing as there are systems that can be exploited to achieve optimal results.
 

 

To further your micromanagement skills, there are upgrades that can be attained that increase how long you can assign leases, how much you can get out of tenants, etc. It also helps upgrade your uncle’s abilities. Your uncle is basically a handyman who does whatever you tell him to do in the properties you manage, such as fixing things, cleaning any rubbish, and installing utilities, and he seemingly doesn’t get paid for it, so he’s either a slave or a retiree who doesn’t have much else to do. Either way, it’s an aspect of The Tenants that is better left unexplored.

This game is for those who enjoy a lot of micromanagement and a lot of random things flashing on the screen that you need to deal with. It’s a great game for keeping you preoccupied for a long while, but for anyone wanting something with a little more substance, it may not be for you. There’s no real story, and you mostly just try to build your personal property empire while doing a bunch of odd jobs on the side.
 

 

The Tenants is just a bit boring. But it would be a great time-sink as this is exactly the kind of game that could absorb dozens of hours if you need something to keep you occupied. It has a good list of things to do, but there’s no real, tangible goal in sight other than pure wealth acquisition. This may be fine for many people in the real world, but we usually want our games to have a little bit more to them.

However, it is worth noting that The Tenants is still in Early Access. So, expect a few more additions over the coming months.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed