[u]Recommendation[/u]: I enjoyed this game, but I found the lack of an ending a little off-putting.
[u]Critique[/u]: This is a fun, open-ended game with several variations on the normal hidden-object mechanics and some other simple games, too. Unlike most hidden-object games, this one doesn't have a story [i]or an ending[/i], so there's nothing really to complete and the game will keep generating variations on the same levels over and over again for as long as you want to keep playing. The theme of the game is that you are redecorating a house, though all you ever actually decorate is one room of a house. This room has something like fourteen different "stations" in which you can place various categories of objects that you "buy" with the "money" that you earn from completing puzzles. Each station has a menu of around ten items that you can choose, each with its own cost. You can thus go with a consistent theme or go wildly eclectic as you go (and at any time you can replace items with other ones, so you're never locked in to one set of decor).
Each puzzle is timed, and you earn bonus "money" by completing the puzzle before the timer runs out (you can never "lose" a level in this game; you just get a smaller amount of "money" when you finally finish). No matter what type of puzzle it is, nearly all of them seem to have the same timer (the one exception was a variation on the silhouette searches, where you have to find 16 items in series, and the game moves to the next object if you don't find it in 20 seconds), which means that at first there will be puzzles where you will always get a bonus (for me it was word searches) and puzzles where you will never get a bonus (for me this was the silhouette searches).
Here are some of the puzzle types:
1) traditional hidden-object searches (you have a full-color picture of the things you are trying to find)
2) find the named hidden objects (you see the names of the things you're trying to find)
3) use the scrambled names to find the hidden objects (same as #2, but the names are jumbled)
4) fill-in-the-blanks hidden objects (same as #2, but some of the letters in the names are blanks)
5) night mode hidden objects (the screen is dark, and you have to drag a flashlight beam around to reveal parts of the screen)
6) magic window hidden objects (the screen is lit normally, but all of the objects you're trying to find are invisible unless outlined by a magic window frame that you can drag around the screen)
7) silhouette hidden objects (same as #1, but you only see the black silhouette of each object you're trying to find...often rotated in a confusing way)
8) cut in half hidden objects (same as #1, but you only see half of each object you are trying to find)
9) silhouette rush (same as #7, but you are only looking for one object at a time, and you only have 20 seconds to find each one)
10) Concentration (also called memory: the traditional solitaire game where you flips cards to find pairs)
11) Match-three quotas (a match-3 game in which you are trying to remove a minimum number of each shape)
12) Match-three drop mode (match-3 game in which you have to move several special objects from the top of the screen through an exit at the bottom)
I had a lot of fun with this game. In the past few years, I've discovered that I really like games with endings. I like being able to "finish" a game and then move on to the next game. For only this reason, [u]Home Designer: Living Room[/u] was mildly frustrating for me, because there is no end. You can keep playing and redecorating the living room forever. I also found it a bit irritating that you could never restart or replay a level: they're all randomly generated in the moment.
