Desperate Housewives: The Game (2006) Review

15 years ago, a popular soap opera focusing on the residents of one Wisteria Lane was entering its third season and many viewers could not get enough of the hit show. To capitalise on this immense popularity that would only grow as the show moved through its eight seasons, a tie-in videogame was produced for Windows. Handling the publishing side of things was Buena Vista Games, a Disney subsidiary better known today as Disney Interactive Studios. The developers were Liquid Entertainment, known at the time for their real-time strategy games, like Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard or their original title, Battle Realms. But this new title would be a different sort of strategy altogether, focusing instead on managing your time day-to-day in order to befriend and find dirt on your neighbours. This would be a system quite similar to The Sims’ classic life-sim gameplay, and a first for Liquid Entertainment. And so, the title Desperate Housewives: The Game was born in 2006.

In all honesty, Desperate Housewives: The Game is something of a shameless The Sims clone where you star as a brand new housewife moving into scenic Wisteria Lane with her husband and son. Now, given that The Sims is all but a genre definer for life simulators, you could realistically make that claim of any game in the genre that takes inspiration from it. However, what makes Desperate Housewives: The Game different is that the game just doesn’t handle the mechanics all that well. The title features a rather basic set of four needs, including Hunger and Entertainment, but there’s never much pressure to make sure any of the characters have met these needs. Heck, your housewife is more often prompted to make food for story reasons than her Hunger meter. And all that’s including the time limit you have each day from dawn to dusk to get everything done. The Needs never really matter, particularly seeing as you only ever control one character and the whole game is over after 12 in-game days. There’s not much time for your housewife’s Needs to ever come into play.

Really, none of the various little progress bars you have the option of filling ever amounts to anything. Desperate Housewives: The Game treats its simulation aspects as little more than window dressing, which would be a lot less annoying if the opening tutorial didn’t spend so long on those aspects. Other staples of the life-sim are attempted at and none of them succeed. Specifically, customisation is a huge disappointment here. There are a few good options for your housewife’s appearance, including the basic options like hair style and skin colour, but the attire options leave much to be desired. There are multiple options for the housewife’s top, legwear, and shoes, with the alternate option of picking a full outfit, but it all pales in comparison to The Sims’ plethora of options. And all of that is just the housewife. The husband and son are only ever-so-slightly customisable, offering the option to change their name and cycle through preset character designs. None of these were particularly appetising to me on a personal level, which was certainly not helped by the graphics, which definitely show their age.

Another part of Desperate Housewives: The Game that gets shamefully little attention is its mini-games. While these are, barring several repeated mini-games, actually presented as the side content that they are, most of them are quite disappointing.

Gardening and poker are almost too boring to mention, involving very little actual skill or fun. Gardening has the chance to be somewhat engaging with the ability to unlock more plants in your garden as you do more to protect it from dry soil, weeds, and pests, but I grew incredibly bored with clicking slow-moving bugs after a couple of minutes and struggled to put any focus on it, which never actually bit me in the butt later. And poker was especially disappointing, considering how big of a Texas Hold’em fan I am. Though maybe that’s just me being spoiled by games like Poker Night at the Inventory, which put their whole heart into the game.

Sneaking into houses and stealing stuff is one of the more common mini-games that you’ll have to succeed in, but that can range between being easy to the point of boredom and being incredibly finicky as to what exactly you have to click. You can always tell that something’s going wrong, particularly with all the flashing red lights, but your housewife never seems to move with urgency to stop a noisemaker and it often feels as though whether or not anything happens is arbitrary.

The cooking mini-game, however, is quite the blast. Certainly, it can be a bit simplistic at times, but the mechanics are solid, if easy to manage. The gameplay here is primarily stirring bowls, waiting for different dishes to cook on the stove or in the oven, and cutting vegetables with well-timed chops over a moving bar. Add in considerations like preheating the oven or making sure your pots maintain a temperature that isn’t too low or too high, and the cooking mini-game becomes something you can spend hours on. Honestly, this mini-game is even fun when going through and trying to get an A ranking on every single dish, with more dishes being unlocked as you complete dishes with at least a B rank.

However, even the best of the mini-games does little to impact Desperate Housewives: The Game’s true focus: its plot. The game centres on its original, 12-day storyline set around your new housewife, her family, and her mysterious past that she cannot remember due to a classic videogame and soap opera trope: amnesia. This amnesia hides some truly wacky twists that are right at home in the rumour-fueled soap opera setting that is Desperate Housewives and I can confidently say that there is enough to the overall events to keep any fan of the show (or soaps in general) engaged through to the end. That being said, most players might not want to go through the game more than once or twice, though the four different endings are certainly interesting enough to warrant such a task.

Additionally, the central housewife can also go around Wisteria Lane and other locations like the nearby mall to meet and get to know other characters. These relationships are represented by a set of two bars: one for friendship and one for respect. Of course, neither of these ever seemed to really have any sort of major impact. The only changes I saw were the ability to get each character to reveal their secrets to me at certain overall levels in our relationships. Not to mention sex with the male characters and a small amount of the female cast. However, none of these came to affect any other portions of the game. On the other hand, I will admit that the cast themselves are quite likeable and well-acted, with nearly every line of dialogue being fully voiced. I mean, I wouldn’t heap awards onto Desperate Housewives: The Game for achievements in acting, but the vocalwork is decidedly solid, with believable, if occasionally cheesy, lines and inflection. Getting to know the characters is its own reward, particularly when a given secret harkens back to the soap opera the game spawned from, though it would be nice if it came with more dialogue options later. It would also be appreciated if it weren’t so easy.

Ultimately, what I mean by that is a consequence of all these different haphazard elements just being thrown together. There’s the life-sim trappings, like relationship meters and Needs bars that don’t seem to matter, the mini-games that take a long time and are way too simplistic, the dedicated story that’s actually a highlight of the experience, and all of the characters to interact with. Some of these mesh together well, with some of the mini-games offering a fun break from walking from point A to B to C in order to snoop on your son’s girlfriend while others are completely disjointed. In particular, there’s the per-day time limit, with an in-game clock. Within a title more dedicated to being a life-sim, a clock like this helps to structure each day, forcing the player to decide what they need to do on a daily basis and what time they have in their schedule for extra fun. Here however, each day is meant to have its own story beats and there is no option to miss the events in most given days.

The solution to this dilemma presented by Desperate Housewives: The Game is to just stop the clock altogether. Just freeze it at an arbitrary time, like 5 PM, so as to allow the player time to complete whatever main objectives they’ve ignored in favour of chatting with neighbours or stealing everyone’s prized possessions for cash. But at the same time, all of the mini-games and most of the characters are still completely available, allowing you to max out almost everything the game has to offer whenever this happens with very little effort. This first happens as early as the second day of the game. While it’s certainly appreciated for someone like me that really enjoys finding shortcuts in games, it can take the wind out of someone’s sails if they were expecting an actual life-sim with limitations in place or a story-focused title that demanded careful decisions about who to befriend.

Really, Desperate Housewives: The Game would have benefitted from picking a lane. I can see a reworking of this title that goes all in on the story in a purely point-and-click or Telltale-styled adventure game system to work quite well. Alternatively, loosening up the story to work beyond the strict 12 days could have given more room for the life-sim aspects to actually function. However, what we have here is a game hampered by unnecessary genre trappings that were put together poorly. There’s a solid gem in here somewhere, with stellar vocal work and a rather fun and bombastic story, but the game just doesn’t seem to trust that those aspects will actually sell.