Unravel the past of your ancestor’s home

Merge Mansion is a free puzzle mobile video game wherein you get to restore a mysterious mansion and discover your family’s great lineage. Developed by Metacore Games Oy, this is a unique tile-matching game that lets you create handy tools by combining objects on the screen. Instead of levels to clear, you will use these items to repair the mansion and progress through the story. 

Merging has never been this fun

The story of Merge Mansion revolves around a young woman named Maddie finally getting to discover the secret her grandmother’s been keeping behind her garden wall. This plot immediately kicks off without much preamble—and story-wise, the constant cliffhangers for each task done and lack of frequent cutscenes can make this plot feel shallow. Nevertheless, it’s interesting enough to keep you curious and keep playing.

Unlike other match-3 games, this one is about creating objects instead of getting rid of them. There are parts of the mansion you need to tidy up or fix. Simply combine similar items to create a new one at a higher level. However, the more you climb its tier, the more base materials you need. Unfortunately, the item spawners that you get have long cooldowns with no visual timers.

Another frustrating thing is the tutorial’s lack of advanced tips regarding your inventory space. Your slots are actually limited and so suddenly creating so many new items right at the start will leave you will little leeway for new objects. It doesn’t help that there will be some locked items on your board, which require either a copy of itself or in-game currency that can be quite expensive.

Quite the challenge

Overall, Merge Mansion is a nice little casual game if you want something that you can check on every hour or so. Its gameplay isn’t too taxing—although it does present a unique challenge compared to other tile-matching puzzles. However, the tutorial doesn’t fully prepare the players about the inventory system. Plus, no number countdown on the timers makes it hard to gauge when they’ll be finished.