Barn Finders Review: A Point-and-Click Sim Better Suited for Mobile

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in March of 2020, Barn Finders by Duality Games finally hits Steam this month. In this point-and-click single-player simulation, players travel to abandoned barns and storage units to gather items to sell in their pawnshop, fulfill jobs for family, friends, and other customers, clean and repair old items, and recycle trash for cash. The game is somewhat open, requiring players to really search every corner of the barns and lands to find treasures and complete jobs.

Players can attend storage unit auctions and outbid the competition to access more exclusive items to fix up and sell. They can build their pawnshop and haggle with customers to sell items for the best possible price. The game leans into its redneck theme, with running gags related to everything from thick accents to moonshine and golden rolls of toilet paper. For lovers of games like House Flipper or Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, Barn Finders offers a unique and immersive experience that places players right into the pawnshop action.

While the gameplay is fun and often immersive, the controls are a bit clunky to work with, the story and plot feel a bit too linear for creative play but too thin for such linear play and the tutorials available are not yet thorough enough to help players just starting out and trying to get used to the mechanics. Given the difficulty of movement and the general search, find, fix and sell objective, the game may have been better suited to a mobile platform.

Players begin at a pawnshop in a small bedroom. They are awakened by Uncle Billy, the character’s uncle who owns the shop and who they have just recently moved in with. The player is given a series of tasks to complete and must navigate around the shop to complete them.

Soon, players can travel to their first abandoned barn to seek out a decoration that one of their clients has requested. They will search the barn and recycle trash for money, transport valuables to their shop, and search for the special map item. They can then travel back to store, fix up and sell, or pack and ship the items they gathered. The rest of the game follows the same pattern, with players traveling to barns and auctions to get items they can fix up and sell for profit. In the meantime, it appears a mysterious alien is lurking, watching the player’s every move and seemingly studying them.

Barn Finders is admittedly immersive, forcing players to really look in every nook and cranny to find items and to interact with special objects to enter hidden areas and complete tasks. This realistic searching places players in the action, and it can be a challenge to clear every possible collectible on a given map. The process of cleaning and fixing up items for sale and welcoming customers, as well as making upgrades around the shop using resources gathered, feels authentic, and the graphics are typically rather detailed.

For all that’s great about it, however, Barn Finders is not a perfect game. For one, the controls are difficult to get used to. The combination of the mouse and the keyboard can be confusing. Players must turn by moving the mouse and grab objects using a left click, but they can only move forward, backward or to either side, crouch and jump using the keyboard. First-time players may struggle getting a handle on these seemingly random controls.

The plot also lingers somewhere between too thin to make the game truly story-based, but also too linear to make the game truly open-world. Players must complete actions in a sequence and can only explore one barn at a time. There are a finite number of items to find (though players can return to barns later for new objects). With such a loose narrative, but so little opportunity for free exploration, the game feels at once too rigid and too loose.

The tutorials could use a bit of work. Right now, they appear each time there is a new task or all together if a player presses F1. There are only ten tutorials, and none go far enough to explain the mechanics. Once a player gets comfortable with the controls and plot, it becomes intuitive, but there are some tasks – like traveling to other barns, bidding at auctions and buying gas, etc. – that could have used a little extra explanation via popup tutorial, as they are somewhat less intuitive.

Given the simplicity of the point-and-click play style, Barn Finders may have been better suited to mobile platforms. That would eliminate the issue with the controls, and the daily task linear simulation style would fit well with similar popular mobile games. Still, for what it is, Barn Finders is an enjoyable game with a simple premise and enough content and tasks to immerse any future flipper.

Barn Finders is available for PC on Steam. A PC code was provided to Screen Rant for review.

About The Author