Hidden Object: Home Makeover

[b]Hidden Object: Home Makeover[/b] (HOG) [i]Game provided for Curator review[/i] Simple options for this one: Sound on/off, Full-screen and Normal (timed) or Relaxed Mode. [b]Story[/b]: You want to become a designer, and your grandparents - thinking it's a great idea - invite you to come stay at their place and fix it up for designing practice. As you finish each scene, you'll get a handy household tip (they really are very helpful tips!) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1834198248 [b]Gameplay[/b]: I wanted to try this because it looks so much like the original [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89981mQn3qI]Gardenscapes[/url] (which is not available on Steam). [i]Home Makeover[/i] has a LOT of similarities, including the basic premise of holding garage sales to make the money you need to purchase upgrades for your home. I recognize the music from another game, and it is absolutely driving me crazy that I can't remember which one it is! [b]Hidden Object Scenes[/b] (aka garage sales) are your major source of income for the game. They are all randomized junk piles with cookie cutter items that are used on every scene. HOS repeat but the objects will be in new places when you return. There are at least two gold coins hidden at every location, as well as an Origaming logo (15 total) for you to find. You can zoom in on a scene by holding down the Ctrl button. Customers come in looking for specific items, and these can be either pictured or written out. Each time you fulfill an order, the customer will leave behind some coins to pay for it. Collect up to four piles of coins at once to get a multiplier bonus. Ka-ching! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1834198550 Although I'd like to say that you just keep getting customers until you run out of time, there is a limit to how many people you can serve in one day. I'm not sure that there's any benefit to playing on timed mode besides the satisfaction of beating the clock. In addition to the HOS gameplay, there are also [b]Match-3 minis[/b] where you can earn extra money by finding a certain item. You have to dig through things by making matches, and when you find the item, you have to make it drop to the bottom of the screen to collect it. In timed mode, you have a limited number of moves you can make. The round ends when you either get the item, or when you run out of moves. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1834197818 [b]Extras[/b] - four different modes of quickplay, each with 3 difficulty tiers (harder tiers have greater rewards): [list=1] [*]Classic - Choice of finding by word, silhouette or picture [*]Memory - 15 seconds to memorize 5 objects which you'll need to then find on the scene [*]Survival - See how many scenes you can get through in 5 minutes [*]Memory Flash - Brain training! Memorize the layout of a room, then click to start. The scene will flash, and one new item will be added. Find it, another flash, and another item will be added. Rinse and repeat. [/list] [b]Verdict[/b]: I've got only about 30 minutes of game time in this one, but this is a game that you only play in short bursts. Since it's a straight HOG with almost no story, it's easy to put down and come back to later. I'm guessing that I'll be playing this one on and off for weeks. I like the challenge of trying to fulfill 4 orders at once to get the money bonus, as well as having 3 design choices per household upgrade. A simple game that is great to play when you just want to chill out for a while.

There is not really a decoration game and the match-3s are rather poor. You just have to play endless hidden objects, somethimes with a timer (the only interesting feature), afterwards you buy things for the house. That`s it. Not worth full price.

Hidden Object: Home Makeover is a relaxing, goal-driven, hidden object game where you help Emma redecorate her granny's house "down by the river". This will require an enormous amount of money. In fact, it will require so much money, one could simply have bought a new house for the cost of redecorating one room for granny. Fortunately for you, Emma is a sociopath who has turned her granny's invitation to "bring new furniture" to redecorate a spare room into permission to sell all of her grandmother's possessions in order to fund a shopping spree. Emma describes these possessions as "unused items" ... "unused items" like family pets, treasure chests full of doubloons, diamonds the size of a man's fist, a Thanksgiving turkey, and the occasional housefly. Emma's customers range from a Vin Diesel lookalike (with a totally not suspicious hat that simply says "SPORTS") who repeatedly asks for dozens of random tools to fix his wife's pipes, to a 6-year-old boy who on different occasions purchased from Emma a noose, pliers, and a squirrel. This raises the question - are these actual customers and items, or are they Emma's hallucinations? Is grandma even alive or did Emma send herself that invitation? Personally, I find Emma's potential severe mental illness to be one of the more interesting storylines upon which to base a casual hidden object game. Big Fish was really taking a risk with this one and it paid off in a big way. As for gameplay, the game is oriented towards rapidly finding a moderate number of easy to find objects over swiftly recycled boards, rather than poring over hyper-cluttered boards looking for difficult to distinguish objects. The boards can be played with or without timing. Objects to find may be presented as pictures, silhouettes, words, or scrambled words. There is a recurring match-3 game interspersed with the levels. Between levels, the player has a chance to buy hyper-expensive decor for granny's house. It was worth $5 to me, and I recommend it on sale at that price.

All there is in this game is, the same locations, finding the same objects over and over again. I found this game mind-numbingly boring.

Too basic to be interesting.

Simple low key fun, though the English translation of some of the object names could use clarification.