Homescapes

Homescapes is a casual free-to-play puzzle game. It was developed and launched by Playrix in 2017 as a successor to their 2016 match-3 game, Gardenscapes. The storyline narrates about attempts of the game’s protagonist, Austin the Butler, to restore his childhood home. The game is available on Apple's App Store and MacOS, also on Android (Google Play, Amazon Appstore, and Huawei AppGallery).

Launched a year after Gardenscapes, Homescapes follows the adventure of the main character Austin who returns to his childhood mansion and begins to restore it. He tries to convince his parents not to sell the house, sprucing up the place. Helping him, players receive tasks in the To-do list that they can tackle by solving match-3 puzzles. Assignments range from installing new stairs and restoring the statues in the main hall to petting a cat. Completing every puzzle level, players receive in-game currency and a Star reward that is necessary to complete tasks. Coins are needed to buy lives and power-ups for puzzle levels or customize the mansion with more than 100,000 design patterns. Players can pick out wallpaper, furniture, and other decorations.

Homescapes' gameplay is similar to its predecessor, Gardenscapes. A board of each puzzle includes colorful tiles — teacups, books, bowties, buttons, lamps, teapots, and others. A player swaps two adjacent items to match three or more of them. Although Playrix added unique power-ups for the Gardenscapes' spin-off. Level 8 unlocks the Hammer, which destroys a random single tile. Rockets become available after level 14 and appear after matching four tiles in a row or a column. They cause a fire across the board, removing all tiles vertically or horizontally. The Bomb is given after matching five items and blows up tiles in a two-square radius. The Paper Plane is used to delete random distant tiles. After matching five tiles, a player can get the Rainbow Ball, which removes all tiles of the same color. Boosters and their combinations become available to the player as they gain experience and help a player to achieve level's victory conditions faster. Those goals usually involve collecting or deleting tiles of a certain color or in a certain amount. For example, completing a level where a spread Carpet onto every tile should be done, a player needs to match tiles on Carpet with the rest. To make the game more challenging, obstacle tiles appear on a level board (wafer cookies, carpet, boxes, yellow apples, and cherries encased in jelly, etc.).

After release, the game was repeatedly updated, one of the first add-ons was a Daily bonus. In the following years, developers have built a robust framework of recurring events or available for a limited period mini-games such as Flying High, Cake o’clock, Paper Plane Generator, Flint’s Adventure, and others. Overall, Homescapes had 7390 match-3 levels and 10 mini-games in September 2021.

Gameplay combines match-3 challenges with a visual novel. In an 18 month development period, three protagonists and over 30 supporting characters were created, whose stories appear along the game process. Leveling up by solving challenges, a player unlocks new chapters of a story and watches how Austin interacts with his parents and childhood friends; he also receives letters from them with bonuses.

As of November 27, 2021, it had 7921 levels