Hellopet House is a new game by developer NANALI Studio, published by Appxplore (iCandy) that combines elements from multiple genres into one bundle.
Promoted as a casual management game, Hellopet House is much more diverse than you’d expect at first. The plot revolves around Jane who travels to visit her grandmother in a quiet little town and ends up helping out with the renovations of her house. When she arrives, there’s no one at home to greet her except nana’s friend Mr. James, the handyman, who has already started doing repairs around the estate.
As Jane joins in the efforts of remodeling the house, she discovers the home is inhabited by many pets. As more renovations are performed and new areas of the estate are uncovered, new cat and dog breeds will be added to the menagerie.
There’s a virtual pet component to this game, so users are tasked with keeping the pets happy by feeding, playing, petting, and cleaning them regularly. Well-looked after pets produce Candy, which is a currency in Hellopet House that can be exchanged for several other things.
However, overall Hellopet House is built on top of a match-3 game skeleton, minus the puzzle-centric levels that require that players match gems of a similar color to hit the level objective. Instead, in Hellopet House you’ll have to take on and complete time management challenges. As it turns out, Jane has set up a business that delivers specific goods to pets, and so you’ll have to make sure these orders are put together and delivered as fast as possible.
The core of Hellopet House consists of these time management challenges. So in order to progress in the game and give grandma a new home, as well as unlock the complete gallery of pets, you’ll have to become very good at fulfilling your animal customers’ orders. This includes producing the items, arranging and serving them, all in a timely fashion.
In exchange for your efforts you’ll gain stars which can then be used to unlock renovations around grandma’s house and advance the story further. Eventually you’ll finally figure out where nana went, while getting acquainted with her host of charming neighbors and continuing to work on growing and expanding your own venture.
Many of you are already familiar with how time management games work, but Hellopet House brings its own challenges into the picture. In order to help you deal with them efficiently so that you can unlock new stages fast, we’ve created a Hellopet House beginner’s guide. We invite you to make good use of it by incorporating these tips, tricks and strategies into your gameplay in order to stay on track.
1. Always Prepare Items In Advance
The time-management levels in Hellopet House all follow the same classic recipe. Each of them includes a specific goal, but a select few can boast a number of conditions, as well. Most level objectives require players to:
• Collect a number of likes from your pet customers (not timed);
• Collect a certain cash sum (timed);
• Prepare a number of dishes for your pets (timed).
Always make sure you read these objectives carefully, and never lose track of them throughout the levels. In the same panel, you will be able to see whether there’s any extra requirements that you need to worry about. Violating these conditions (when the level specifies them) can bring about your instant undoing, so be careful not to:
• Throw away food items;
• Allow customers to leave;
• Waste any materials while preparing items (for example, burn food items).
The hardest levels to conquer are the timed ones, so especially during these challenges you should always prepare items in advance. There are different types of time management levels waiting for you in Hellopet House. During the first 20 or so, you’ll have to manage a restaurant, which then changes into a Flower Shop for the next batch of levels, and then morphs into a Carpentry Store. This rotation continues on and on so players will never stumble upon a dull moment.
Preparing items in advance is necessary especially during the restaurant-themed levels where you have to wait for a food item (e.g. stake) to cook before you can serve it to your customers. This makes it quite difficult to effectively serve orders when you have a large queue of customers waiting for their food. But never breaking the chain of production helps a lot. This way, when customers are pouring in with large orders in tow you’ll be able to always have items ready at hand waiting to be served.
Thereby, as soon as you’ve removed a group of food items from the stove, simply start the production another batch. This might not be as easy as it sounds, because during intensive levels with lots of customers, panic might take over, driving you to forget all about doing so. But even if that proves to be the case for you, take it easy.
If you don’t manage to win from the first go, no problem, you can try again, and it’s actually recommended that you give it another shot. Don’t give up after just a few tries, continue playing! Interestingly enough, the game offers up a small Gold Coin reward even when you’ve botched it. It’s a kind of consolation prize, as well as a ruse to motivate users to replay stages that seem unconquerable.
Things might seem a bit easier during the Flower Shop part of the game, because you don’t need to wait for the main items aka the flower bases to be produced. However, this part of the game comes with its own share of challenges, including customers’ patients being extremely thin. Your goal being to keep your customers happy at all times, you’ll have to move extremely fast to complete the orders during these level.
A trick you should apply here (or anywhere in the game for that matter) is to serve a pet part of its order to keep their satisfaction bar from plummeting all the way to rock bottom, and so prevent them from abandoning the premises.
2. Upgrade Your Production Lines (When Possible)
In order to improve workflow, the game allows you to upgrade your working stations. In the restaurant, for instance, you start off with only one (slow) stove for cooking the meat and bowl to place it when it’s done. While you’ll be able to tackle the first few levels by working with only one equipment, it’s nearly next to impossible to continue doing so especially when a large number of request start showing up. Thus, it’s imperative that you upgrade your equipment, as soon as you get the option to do so.
Upgrades cost Gold Coins and they are, by far, one of the most frustrating parts of this game. New equipment upgrades are unlocked extremely slowly in Hellopet House. For instance, you’ll have to play a lot of restaurant levels with only two stoves and serving food bowls, which becomes exasperating pretty fast.
Given the constant rotation of venues, players aren’t allowed to upgrade restaurant equipment while you’re playing in the Flower Shop or the Carpentry Store. In addition, even when you find yourself in the same location as the items you want to upgrade, you might still have to wait until a certain level in order for the option to actually unlock. The gap can be pretty large, as much as 40 levels in between.
This might hamper your ability to crush a challange and so you’ll be forced to replay certain levels more than you’d like to. The best you could do in these situations, is to maintain optimism and continue replaying the level that causes the problem. Don’t worry about using up all your lives, the game appears to suffer from a glitch so you won’t find yourself often in a situation where you need to exit the game and wait for your life reserve to get replenished.
3. Always Double Your Coins
At the end of each level, players can select the option to double their Coins. Of course, this doesn’t come for free, as you’ll have to watch an annoying ad in order to reap the benefits. Nevertheless, we recommend that you do so every time you’re done with a level.
This way you ensure that you have enough cash ready whenever a new equipment upgrade is unlocked and waiting for you. Remember that you really need those upgrades, because some levels make it extremely hard for you to succeed. Hoard as much cash as possible, and when so the upgrades are finally ready you won’t have to put off optimizing your equipment.
If you make it a habit to always double your Coins after successfully completing a level, you’ll be guaranteed to have enough cash at your disposal to purchase any upgrade immediately after it unlocks. Unfortunately, Gold Coins don’t serve for much other than that, so the excess you accumulate brings no extra value.
4. Try To Anticipate Customers Orders As Much As Possible
During really hard levels, try as much as possible to memorize your customers’ orders. Once you’ve replayed a level enough times, you’ll realize that your customers’ orders don’t change every time you reengage with the level. This is good news for you, because you’ll be able to put together a strategy.
Try as much as possible to remember the items that your customers are asking for. This should help save time and prevent pets from walking out when things start getting too hectic and they have to wait a bit longer for their order. And it will get hectic.
Take special care during the Flower Shop levels, because here you’ll have to work with only one pot for the flower bases. Compared to the restaurant or carpentry levels, where you get a maximum of three containers that can be filled with items form the production line, during the flower phase, you’ll need to make do with only one holder and that makes everything a lot more challenging. Even so, if you do your best to remember what customers are asking for, you’ll be able to put together orders a bit faster than you’d normally would.
5. Save Boosters For Really Hard Levels
Hellopet House levels can get really tough, and sometimes no matter what you do and how many times you replay the stage, it all but seems hopeless. If you think you’ve exhausted all your patience for one level, then you might want to consider using a Booster to crack the pesky challenge.
Boosters can be activated before a level stars and there’s three of them to choose from: Protection, Double Coins and Instant Complete. Now, once you’ve unlocked these Boosters for use, don’t go thinking that the game actually offers any of them for free (outside of the trial).
In Hellopet House this does not happen. Instead you’ll have to withdraw from your Gems reserve to buy a 3x Booster package and they don’t come cheap at all. This is why you need to be extra careful about employing those Boosters. Do so in moderation, even if you’ll probably get the urge to make use of them constantly.
Depending on the level objective and the additional conditions attached (if any), you’ll need to select the accurate Booster to help you finish the job. This is how their powers can help you out:
Protection – prevents dishes from being burnt or damaged, so it’s a Booster that should be activated during levels that require you not to damage items. A bundle of 3x costs 100 Gems;
Double Coins – double the earnings you collect during a level. You should use it during levels with objectives that require you to gather a sum of cash to win. A bundle of 3x costs 150 Gems.
Instant Complete – cooks or produces an item instantly. This Booster comes in handy during levels with objectives that state you should serve a certain number of products, but also during levels where you need to collect a number of likes or a sum of money. In the latter case, serving dishes quickly equals cashing in larger sums of Coins, because the customer doesn’t have to wait for a long period of time. A bundle of 3x costs 200 Gems.
What happens if despite activating a Booster you still can’t complete a level? Fortunately, you’re not completely out of options. You can spend Gems in exchange for power-ups that could grant you things like more time, additional customers or even allow you to resume the game after you’ve violated some of the conditions of the level.
6. Aim For Combos
Cooking combos result from serving a number of customers their orders in quick succession. At the top of your screen you’ll notice a bar that is divided into five segments. Once you serve an item, one of those segments will light up. The glow will disappear after a few seconds have elapsed and you’ve not served a second dish.
Combos are handy because they allow you to make extra money during a level, so our advice is to aim to activate the bar as much as possible. You should work hard to do so, especially when the level goal tasks you with collecting a sum of Gold Coins.
7. How To Expand Your Gem Reserve
Gems are terribly important in Hellopet House, because they represent the currency for purchasing Boosters. You’ll need to be prepared going into this game, because you’ll encounter some really though levels that will most likely require you turn to power-ups for help.
Securing progress is directly interlinked to your Gem reserve – the more substantial it is, the better your chances of moving along quickly are. Fortunately, the game offers plenty of opportunities to grab extra Gems, but you’ll have to prepare yourself mentally – as the process involves watching a lot of ads. If you too are looking for ways to collect more Gems, then continue reading below for a list of how you might be able to do that:
Play the third stage of a level
Each level is split into three different stages. In order to unlock the next group of levels, you’ll need to collect a number of keys. You can win these keys by playing the second or third stage of some levels. Keys aside, the first stage of a level usually rewards you with Gold Coins, while the second unlocks Candy and the third Gems.
Successfully completing the last one will thus have the effect of expanding your Gem collection. The only issue being is that stages get increasingly difficult, so you might have to spend Gems (on Boosters) to get Gems. The payoff is pretty consistent, though, as you can grab 10 Gems or more for one Gems.
Watch the Daily Ad Sequence
Every day, players can grab a series of rewards (which includes Gems), by watching a sequence of ads. Find the clapperboard icon located on the left side of the display and play those ads. There’s a wait of several seconds in-between them, but you’ll be able to get through it all within a few minutes. We realize ads are extremely annoying, but if you want to fill your Gem purse, we suggest that you find a way to get over your feelings and just do it.
Grab the Daily Reward
Like any self-respecting casual game, visiting Hellopet House daily has its perks. The game offers a daily reward which at least four times a week consists of Gems. What’s more, if you’re really starved for these precious stones, you can select to double your reward in exchange for watching yet another ad.
Play the Bonus Level at Full Force
From time to time you’ll stumble upon Bonus Levels which are basically designed to help fill up your Gem bag. Compared to normal levels, the Bonus ones are a lot easier to tackle, and so you’ll probably have no problem finishing off the challenge and grabbing a nice Gem reward.
Check the Missions
Missions, which can be accessed from the right side of the display, are another source for extra Gems. Whenever you see a red exclamation mark highlighting the Missions tab, check it. You can get rewards for all kinds of things. For example, simply launching the game gets you 10 Gems.
Take Photos of Your Pets
Remember we told you that your grandma’s house is teeming with pets? Well once a day, you’re invited to take cute pictures of the furry inhabitants. A red question mark will appear over the Camera tab in the right part of the display. Tap on it and take a photo. You’ll be rewarded with some Gems for your artistic efforts.
Link Your Facebook Account
Unsurprisingly, linking your Facebook account to the game will unlock a 50 Gem reward.
Complete Renovation Tasks Around the House
The game rewards your progress with gifts. For example, completing a sequence of tasks with unlock a present which contains Gems. Just be careful when spending stars. We’ve spotted a glitch while playing. The game reshuffles certain tasks even if you’ve already completed them.
Our recommendation is to simply ignore the clones and don’t spend precious stars on finalizing them again. Just allow them to continue to exist in Jane’s Journal. Some renovations might take time to complete (for example, installing the fridge). You’re given the option to speed them up (in exchange for Gems), but we advise against doing that.
Get a Free Gem Bundle from the Shop
You should make sure you check the shop on an hourly basis because the game offers 2 free Gems in exchange for watching a quick ad. You can get to the shop from the main screen. In the upper part, tap on the Gem count and then on the Get for Free button. Or swipe your card and acquired larger Gem bundles.
8. Feed And Play With Your Pets (Optional)
The virtual pet component does not influence the outcome of the time management levels or house renovations. They are simply totally separate elements of the same whole. Which means, you can simply ignore taking care of your cat & dog horde if you so choose to, as it won’t stop you from progressing in the game.
Each pet has four needs you need to fulfil in order for them to be happy at your grandma’s house. Nevertheless, it doesn’t appear that not taking care of a pet has any palpable effects. But if you do decide to go ahead and feed them or bathe them you will be able to collect Candy.
Pets who want something will show their desires through speech bubbles. You can try to tackle them by tapping on the respective bubble, but here the game boasts another annoying glitch. It’s pretty slow to register your taps most of the time, so instead it’s advised that you tap on the Book with a paw on the front cover and select the Collection tab. Here you’ll be able to see all the cats and dogs you’ve unlocked so far and whether they require anything. Tap on the respective animal you want to tend to and you’ll be taken directly to him/her.
Anyway, each action requires you spend a Heart. These hearts are replenished over an amount of time or can be filled back up in exchange for Gems. But again our advice is not to do that, conserve your Gems for more important matters like buying Boosters to use during the time management part of the game.
Keeping your animals’ spirits up yields Candy. This resource can be used for things like Adopting a new pet or dressing up your existing pets. For example, a wizard hat costs 50 Candy in the Decorate tab (access it via the Book with the paw on the cover).
Additionally, Candy can unlock fancier pieces of furniture during renovations. It’s not always applicable, most of the stuff you can get for free, but in some cases (for example, the kitchen sink or cabinet), you get only one free redecoration option, while access to the other two comes from spending Coins.
That’s it for our Hellopet House beginner’s guide. We hope you’ve enjoyed going through it and that you’ve found some tips that will benefit your overall gameplay. After spending a good chunk of time in the game, we know that the time management part can turn into quite a grueling experience, but hopefully our strategies will have done a good job at teaching you to deal with the challenges coming your way. If you have played the game yourself for a while now and you’ve stumbled upon a hot trick or cheat we haven’t covered in our guide, do not hesitate to let us know about it through the comment area below!