Apple / games / HOMESCAPES: PUZZLE & DESIGN
REVIEW
Homescapes is a renovation game wearing a match-3 disguise.
Playrix's mansion-restoration sequel runs cleaner on iPad than on iPhone, but the pull-the-pin ads it still shows other games haven't aged well.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Homescapes opens with Austin the butler arriving at his parents’ mansion to find the place falling apart, and within five minutes the game has told you everything it wants you to feel: nostalgia, a small renovation crush, and the urge to clear one more board so you can pick the new wallpaper. Playrix built this exact loop into Gardenscapes two years earlier and brought it indoors here. The match-3 is the price of admission. The rooms are the game.
What has changed since 2017 is the audience’s patience for how Homescapes gets advertised. The pull-the-pin puzzles you have seen in other games’ ad breaks — drag the wooden pins out in the right order or watch the character drown — exist in Homescapes only as occasional mini-events, not the main loop. The disconnect has been a regulator target for years, and the game inside has spent the whole time outgrowing the ads it runs.
The ads showing pull-the-pin puzzles you cannot play once you install have been a regulator target for years, and the game inside has spent that whole time outgrowing them.
FEATURES
Each level is a match-3 board with mechanics that have hardened since 2017: rockets clear a row or column, paper planes hunt a single target, rainbow balls clear a colour, and the bomb-plus-rainbow combo still wipes the screen. Boards introduce honey, ice, biscuit dough, and chain-pieces in roughly that order. Win a level, earn a star, and spend stars on renovation tasks set by Austin the butler — repaper the kitchen, choose between two armchairs, plant a hedge in the garden.
On iPad the design layer is where the app does its most interesting work. Furniture and wallpaper swatches snap to a grid you can scrub through with a finger, and Apple Pencil works for the interior-design picks even though there's no freehand drawing — it just makes tapping small swatches faster than a fingertip on the larger screen. Game Center handles achievements and the optional friends leaderboard for team events.
Monetisation is the standard Playrix stack: lives regenerate on a timer, extra moves cost coins, coins come from levels or in-app purchase, and a rotating cast of timed events sells boosters in bundles. The game is free with optional purchases and no required subscription.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The renovation loop is the genuine reason to keep playing. Levels are pacing — the reward is choosing the rug. Playrix has tuned the difficulty curve so the average player clears the early hundreds of levels without spending, and the meta-game of restoring rooms, watching Austin react, and triggering the next story beat does most of the emotional work that the match-3 alone could not.
The iPad build is the better build. Animations have more room to breathe, the design-picker grid actually fits the swatches on screen, and the longer sessions a tablet invites suit a game that rewards finishing a room rather than a single level.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The advertising problem is the one that has not gone away. For years Homescapes has been promoted with "pull-the-pin" puzzles — drag wooden pins out in the right order to save a character — that barely appear in the actual game. The FTC has flagged the practice across the mobile-game industry, and Homescapes is the example most often named. The game inside has spent the whole time outgrowing the ads it runs.
Difficulty spikes still arrive on a schedule that lines up with booster sales, and a handful of levels in the 200–400 range have a reputation for needing either luck or wallet. There is no cross-save between an Apple ID and a Google Play account, so a phone-to-tablet move inside the Apple side is fine but jumping platforms means starting over.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you want a comfort game with a small decorating reward at the end of each session, and play it on an iPad if you have one. Skip it if pull-the-pin puzzles are what drew you in — that is not the game on the other side of the download. Watch for whether Playrix lets the advertising creative catch up to the product; the gap has been the most honest critique of this franchise for half a decade.