Why is this poor woman still freezing? The truth behind those mobile game ads

We've all seen her. This woman's had the misfortune of being abandoned by an impressively awful husband, often while pregnant or carrying a small child, or both. She finds herself in a derelict cabin with a broken window and fireplace and several feet of snow indoors.

Then someone playing the game makes every possible wrong decision. They light the fire before repairing the chimney. They give the baby a block of ice. The roof collapses. Everyone freezes. And you, a perfectly rational adult who never intended to download another mobile game, find yourself thinking, ‘Move over. Give me the phone. I can save them.’

That frustration is precisely what the advert is designed to create.

What are the freezing family game ads?

Known within mobile game marketing as the ‘freezing families’ trend, these adverts follow a painfully familiar storyline.

A woman and her children are thrown out of a comfortable home, betrayed by a partner or left stranded in the snow. They discover an abandoned cabin and must repair it by completing simple puzzles. Choose the correct tool, fix the window, light the fire and keep the family alive.

The adverts are often associated with games such as:

• Matchington Mansion
• Gardenscapes
• Homescapes
• Lily’s Garden
• Project Makeover
• Merge Mansion
• Gossip Harbor
• Tile Family

Although Gardenscapes and Homescapes made misleading puzzle adverts particularly infamous, they were not necessarily the first to freeze a fictional family for downloads. Mobile games industry analysis has traced earlier versions of the concept to Matchington Mansion, before the idea spread across match-three, merging and story-based games.

Once one company discovered that viewers would stop scrolling to save a shivering child, everybody seemed to acquire the same broken cabin.

Why do you keep seeing these ads?

Most ads try to show someone completing a task brilliantly. These adverts do the opposite. The pretend player overlooks the obvious solution, selects the worst possible item and creates a disaster that anyone with functioning thumbs could have prevented.

It is sometimes described as ‘fail advertising’ or ‘rage baiting’. The mistake is deliberate because watching someone fail at an incredibly easy task creates an almost irresistible urge to correct them.

The freezing family gives the puzzle emotional stakes. You're no longer moving a pin or choosing a window simply because it’s satisfying. You're rescuing a single-mother family from a grim and completely avoidable fate.

According to mobile games marketing analysis, these dramatic adverts can lower the cost of attracting each new player. They combine curiosity, urgency and frustration, three feelings that are very good at making people click.

They also tend to follow you once you have shown any interest. Watch the ad for a little too long, click on a similar game or interact with gaming content and the advertising system may decide that you want more of it.

Congratulations. You are now responsible for the wellbeing of every freezing cartoon family on the internet.

Do the games play anything like the adverts?

Um, no?

Download Homescapes expecting to repair a frozen cabin and you will mainly find a match-three puzzle game in which you help Austin the butler renovate a mansion. Gardenscapes follows a similar structure, while Merge Mansion is built around combining items and uncovering a family mystery.

The characters, settings or occasional mini-games may resemble the ad, but the advertised puzzle is rarely the main experience.

This became more than an internet complaint in 2020. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned two Playrix adverts for Homescapes and Gardenscapes after deciding that they were not representative of the games’ overall content.

Playrix argued that the puzzle mechanics shown in the adverts did exist as mini-games. The problem was that they made up a tiny proportion of games containing thousands of levels. The adverts gave viewers the impression that those puzzles were the main event when, in reality, players spent most of their time matching pieces.

In other words, the game technically contained what it showed, but in roughly the same way that a hotel technically contains a vending machine. You would still feel misled if the entire advert had presented it as a vending-machine resort.

How's the outrage started changing the games?

Here's where the story gets particularly strange.

People complained about fake mobile game adverts so loudly and for so long that developers began making games and mini-games based on the adverts themselves.

Some established games moved their advertised puzzle sections closer to the beginning, making them easier for new players to find. Others introduced more playable sequences resembling their most successful adverts. The industry has since developed a more elaborate version of the old bait-and-switch: give players the advertised mini-game during the opening stages, then gradually move them towards the game’s real match-three, building or strategy system.

Games such as Home Pin 2 and Home Pin 3: Homeless Adventure were built around the sort of pull-the-pin, repair-the-room and rescue-the-family challenges people originally expected to play.

Then came the wonderfully titled Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them! The game turns several familiar fake-ad puzzles into real, playable levels. It was successful enough to receive sequels.

The adverts had completed their transformation. First, fake gameplay was created to advertise real games. Then the fake gameplay became so recognisable that people demanded real versions of the fake games.

The subject now has its own online culture

Communities such as Reddit’s r/shittymobilegameads have attracted enormous audiences by collecting, mocking and analysing bizarre mobile adverts. People post jokes about the freezing woman’s terrible luck, the mysterious amount of snow entering one small cabin and players who apparently cannot tell the difference between a hammer and a live electrical cable.

The adverts are now so familiar that you do not need to name the game. Show someone a woman shivering beside a broken fireplace and they will probably know exactly what is coming next.

There's even a particular kind of fury reserved for adverts that offer a tiny close button, open the app store when you touch it and then reveal a second countdown. By the time the real cross appears, the fictional family may have frozen twice and you have reconsidered every decision that led you to downloading a free game.

Are these adverts going anywhere?

An advert does not need to be loved to perform well. It needs to interrupt what you are doing, hold your attention and make you curious enough to interact with it. Anger, disbelief and second-hand frustration can achieve that just as effectively as genuine excitement.

The adverts are changing, though. Rather than showing completely unrelated gameplay, more mobile games now include the advertised mechanic somewhere near the beginning. It reduces the immediate disappointment while still allowing the developer to move players towards the game’s main system later.

It is a slightly more sophisticated trap. You download the game to save the freezing family, complete a few rescue puzzles and, half an hour later, discover that you are managing a town, joining an alliance and being asked to purchase 800 purple crystals.

The best phones for playing mobile puzzle games

You don't need the most powerful phone on the market to repair a cartoon roof or match three brightly coloured objects. However, a sharp display, responsive touchscreen and dependable battery make longer mobile gaming sessions far more enjoyable.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 series is a strong choice for smooth performance and bright, detailed displays. It is particularly useful if your idea of mobile gaming extends beyond casual puzzles into more demanding titles.

Prefer iOS? The iPhone 16 series offer powerful performance, responsive screens and access to Apple’s extensive mobile game library.

The Motorola Razr 60 brings something different. Its foldable design makes it compact enough to carry easily, while the large internal display gives games plenty of room once opened. You can even snap it shut dramatically when another freezing-family advert appears.

Of course, if your response to an unskippable ad is less ‘download now’ and more ‘throw phone across the room’, there is another sensible option.

Browse our phone covers first.

They cannot stop the advert player from making the worst possible decision, but they may protect your phone when you finally lose patience.