Video games are often about wish-fulfillment, and, for many players, their ultimate fantasy includes owning and designing their own home. Many games are built around this very concept, allowing players to create some unique and creative homes for their characters. If you’re looking for the best home design games to show off your creativity, here are some of our top picks.
The best home design games – our top ten picks
Sometimes games add the ability to design and decorate a home as a core feature of the game, while in others it is a fun add-on to the central gameplay. Plenty of open-world games give you the option to decorate the main character’s home base, but the games on this list are the ones that let you flex your creativity as you design your own house.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing is a series that allows you to design and decorate an entire island, but the adorable houses that people have created on their island can’t be dismissed. There are wallpapers, floorings, and a rich collection of furniture to build and place. Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers players the chance to create a home that is uniquely their own in a relaxing, chilled-out game environment. New DLC has expanded the game’s initial offering of décor even further. Pay off your loan to Tom Nook to unlock more rooms to decorate.
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Design Home: Real Home Decor
Most of the games on this list offer generic pieces of furniture to place in your fictional home. Design Home: Home Renovation offers a bit more of a commercial aspect to designing your own home. This game features furniture and brands that exist in the real world, allowing you to get a better sense of what your dream home might actually look like. This app starts out with you focusing on a specific room but eventually opens up to allow you to open up to an entire house for you to design and create.
Home Design 3D
This is a surprisingly robust app for Android and iOS that doesn’t offer a specific theme or gimmick. Instead, it focuses entirely on giving you a wide range of furniture, fixtures, and lighting options to play with. Create something similar to your real home or let your imagination go wild to create something completely different. This game does one thing but it delivers on it to perfection.
Home Design: Caribbean Life
If you are looking to see what your dream home would look like on a white sandy beach, Home Design: Caribbean Life is the best option out there. Available on mobile devices, this game allows players to set up a house in a tropical paradise, creating a home that showcases the beautiful beaches with their own personal style. This is definitely one that offers a bit of wish fulfillment, giving you the chance to see what life would be like living in some of the most beautiful spots on the planet.
Home Fantasy: Home Design Game
Most of the entries on this list try for an element of realism to their art style, but Home Fantasy doesn’t. Instead, it offers a more exaggerated, cartoonish visual style that feels like nothing you’d find in the real world while still having loads of items and furniture to fill your new house with. There is an element of whimsy and fun to this game that makes it stand out from the other apps on this list. The game doesn’t hide its content behind other gameplay or puzzles, instead focusing entirely on the design aspect of the game.
House Flipper
The unique thing about this game is how it allows players to take a dilapidated old home and flip it, turning it into a beautiful house to sell for a profit. The game offers several levels of difficulty, with the later houses requiring more work to fix but offering a wider profit margin in return. It is a fun take on the formula that many house-flipping shows on TV have used to great effect.
Home Improvisation: Furniture Sandbox
This isn’t the most polished game you’ll find on Steam, but it is so unique that we had to include it on this list. Home Improvisation: Furniture Sandbox not only lets you decide the décor and layout of your house; it also lets you build the furniture you use to make the house your own. You can make it as realistic or as weird as you like, letting your creativity go wild. It is a level of freedom no other game can provide.
Kawaii Home Design
Kawaii Home Design gives players the chance to build the cutest home imaginable. With a distinctive aesthetic, this one was created to appeal to a specific audience, but it commits entirely to the bit and isn’t ashamed of it. Fans of lolita fashion will feel right at home here. Not only can you unlock new furniture and décor during your playtime, but you can also get new clothing and outfits for your character, letting you live your most kawaii life.
My Home Makeover: House Games
This game casts the player as an interior designer in the employ of the incredibly wealthy, using their funds to build the perfect home for them. You’ll need to play a Match 3 game to unlock coins. These coins are spent on new furniture and decoration, giving you more flexibility in how you approach the design aspect of the game. There are a lot of different options to play with and the Match 3 gameplay is well implemented rather than feeling tacked on.
The Sims 4
No home design game list is complete without the latest entry in the Sims franchise. Though the focus in The Sims 4 is meant to be on the individual characters, half the fun of the game is building your ideal home. The game has plenty of unique items to fill your house with, ranging from realistic items to more absurd options. Though many of the newer options come from the game’s growing collection of DLC, even the base game offers loads of fun decorations to fill your Sim’s house with or even to expand it further into the lot.
