Casual Review

Full Review

If ever there was a title that described the joy of designing your own home, Home Sweet Home would be it. This game launches you on an exciting career as an interior decorator, facing challenges and decisions in designing homes, and racing against time when actually building them. In a way it’s two games in one, both fitting seamlessly into each other – just like matching furniture. And on top of all that, you can even build your own personal home with your income.

During the Design phase you’ll be given the client’s empty or mostly-empty home to furnish, along with a written statement of what the client wants their home to look like. You have to figure out these cleverly worded puzzles in order to answer the important questions: How many chairs do you need? Does the client prefers Asian or Country style furnishings? Do you need to install something special, like a pool table or a big TV or two fish tanks? Some of the clients have very strange tastes, like the vampire who wants everything in black, or the former Canadian secret agent who wants display cases and lots of reds and whites, to remind him of his glory days.

The easy-to-use menus list all the different furnishings and decorations in a row along the bottom of the screen, and all you have to do is drag and drop items from the menus into the house. This part of the game was the most fun for me: figuring out the client’s requirements, then dragging and dropping items of furniture and decorations all around the living space, flipping them around to face the right directions, and making enough space to fit in all the right items, while also making sure to come in under budget. With each new home to fix up, new items appear in the menus, like fancy wallpapers, computer desks, sofas and love seats, and stereos and TVs.

The Build phase of each level is a lot like a service game, except that you’re managing your three builders instead of a bunch of customers. Just click on a builder and then click on an unfinished furniture item, and watch it slowly fill in with color your builder gets to work. You have a limited time to finish each home, and you’ll often have to drag various tools to each builder to get them to finish their tasks. Fail to do so, and the progress on each item will actually reverse! Also, you’ll need to refresh tired builders by dragging coffee over to them, and send them to dump the trash after each task. In addition, the work goes by faster if you can match each color-coded builder to the right tasks. The problem is that the colored border around each item sometimes changes in a flash. If a builder is matched to the wrong task, there’s a big chance they’ll injure themselves and run around with a sore thumb like a headless chicken until you drag the first aid kit over to them – not an easy thing to do since they can only be treated when they stop running once in a while. It’s always a good idea to assign more than one builder to big tasks like painting walls, and strangely it’s the small items like chairs and paintings that can take longer because they only allow one builder to work on them.

The only real flaws in the game are here in the Build phase. Dragging and dropping toolbox items can be a pain because they are often stacked on top of each other in the toolbox, blocking your mouse clicks, and the penalty for not getting a tool is very steep, costing you a lot of building time sometimes. That, and the frustration of having to treat injured builders, sometimes makes this phase of the game more annoying than fun. Also, there seems to be an error where a builder working in the lower-right-hand corner of an L-shaped house can block the others from getting to the trash can, which can bring work to a crashing halt.

Happily, when you a break from all the tiresome client requirements, you can go to your own personal home and fill it with whatever furniture items you have unlocked, using your earnings from all your assignments. This helps to make each job its own reward – I kept wanting to play more in order to discover new items to add to my home!

Review by Poh Tun Kai