Home Designer – Home Sweet Home

Home Designer – Home Sweet Home is not a HOG in the true sense of the term. It’s a series of hidden object scenes, alternating with match 3 puzzles, finding-pairs, spot-the-differences and mahjong minigames, without any connection to each other – there is also no story and no cutscenes. Solving each of these levels awards a certain amount of coins that you can later spend on buying items for decorating your house. You start with one empty room and progressively buy a couch, a table, a carpet or other pieces of furniture and when you have bought at least one item of each type you unlock the next room. Rinse and repeat until you decorate the whole house – that’s pretty much the full game (5 rooms in total).

All the levels are timed but the timer seems to be relevant only in regards to the bonus coins that you can get by solving a level and there is no option to turn it off. However, multiple types of hints are available; these recharge over time and using them does not have any penalty on the final score.

While there are plenty of items to pick from in the decoration shop, getting each of them requires solving several levels – depending on the costs and how fast you are, between 3 and 8 of these stages. That puts the game at a pretty high degree of grinding, even if the levels are rather fast to solve (there are usually only 10 objects required to be found).

Not only the items you can buy are varied but also the types of scenes with hidden objects – basically every type that you encountered before, it’s here too: lists of objects, lists of images, silhouette, find-one-at-a-time, night-mode (when you see only a part of the scene) and even one new type where you need to find specific areas of the whole scene (instead of objects). Too bad that the player can’t choose which type of puzzle they get when triggering the next level and also there is no level select (you can’t go back and re-do a level) – you’ll have to solve what puzzle is offered to you, no matter if you enjoy the type or not. Also, the levels are sequential and cannot be skipped.

Due to its repetitive nature, Home Designer – Home Sweet Home is a soft recommendation, aimed only at people who like this kind of gameplay. If you’re looking for a game that has a story, a point & click mechanic, maybe dialogues, Steam-integrated achievements (there are only in-game achievements) – then this is not it.