My City: Apartment Dollhouse

Review by eFreeware

If you are looking for a digital dollhouse that a child can pick up without a tutorial, My City: Apartment Dollhouse is built for exactly that. It comes from My Town Games Ltd, sits in the Educational category, and is free to download, with ads and in-app purchases attached. The pitch is simple: a small apartment block and the street around it, populated with families, babies and neighbors that a child moves around and invents stories with.

The age guidance is 4 to 12, which is a wide span, and the game seems designed to stretch across it. Younger children get characters to drag, rooms to rearrange and objects to poke at; older ones get dress-up, room decorating and the search for hidden things. The pace is whatever the child sets. For a parent, that is the main appeal: nothing here demands a reaction speed or a skill level a small child cannot meet.

What I would keep in mind before installing is that this is open-ended play. The fun comes from whatever the child brings to it, so a kid who wants missions, levels or a clear goal may find it flat, while one who already narrates their toys will take to it immediately.

What a session actually looks like

The core of the game is moving characters and objects around a set of rooms and seeing what happens. The developer lists 12 locations, including two apartments and a clothing store, and each one is a small stage with things to touch. In the kitchen a child can prepare food; in the living room they can put a pizza in the oven, turn on music and set up a party. A plumber character can fix a leaking pipe, which gives one of the rooms a small task to complete before the decorating starts.

Dress-up runs alongside this. Characters can be given new outfits, and the clothing store is where the wardrobe side of the game lives. Rooms can be customized too, so the apartment is not fixed scenery but something a child rearranges. The developer also mentions hidden treasure and hidden gifts, plus two baby kittens tucked away somewhere in the dollhouse. Those finds give a session a bit of direction when a child wants something to look for rather than something to invent.

The important thing about all of this is how simple it is to get started. A child opens a room, moves things, and the game responds. The developer explicitly pitches it as a stress-free setup with no competition. Whether that reads as freedom or as emptiness depends entirely on the child.

Playing together on one screen

Multitouch support is the feature I would single out for families with more than one child. Two players can use the same device at the same time, which turns the apartment into a shared toy rather than a solo one. The game supports multitouch play on the same device.

The developer describes the game as open-ended. Some children will keep finding new arrangements in that; others will exhaust it in an afternoon and move on.

The 12 locations do give the game a reasonable footprint. Two apartments, a store and the surrounding street mean there is more than one place to set a story, and characters can move between them. The structure supports kids in building their own digital life stories by staying out of the way.

Ads, purchases and what free means here

The game is free to download and carries both ads and in-app purchases. I would not assume anything about the purchases or the ads before installing. The app is monetized on both fronts, which is worth knowing if you are setting up a device for a young child.

The games are safe for kids, and the studio's site carries a privacy policy, terms of use and a support address. That is standard practice for a studio of this size, and it gives a parent somewhere to look for more detail. The age range of 4 to 12 means the app is aimed at children who may well be using a shared family device.

My advice is to treat the free download as a starting point rather than the whole picture. If you are handing over a tablet for a long car ride, it is worth checking what the ads look like and what the purchases cost on your own device first, so there are no surprises when a child is the one holding it.

The kind of child this fits

This is a game for children who already play with dolls, action figures or toy houses and narrate what the characters are doing. If a child spends an afternoon arranging a toy apartment and inventing arguments between the people in it, the digital version will feel natural. The dress-up, the room decorating and the hidden-object hunting all feed that same instinct rather than replacing it with a task list.

It also suits households where two children share a device, thanks to the multitouch support, and households where a parent wants something a child can play without being asked to read much or follow instructions. The developer puts the range at 4 to 12, and the game does not push back on either end of that: a four-year-old can drag a character around and a ten-year-old can plan a party and dress everyone for it.

Where it will not land is with a child who wants to be told what to do next. The game is stress-free.

How it has held up since 2018

The game was released in September 2018 and was still being updated in August 2026, with the most recent change described as bug fixes and system updates. That is a long run for a children's title, and it suggests the studio is still tending to it rather than letting it sit. For a parent deciding whether to invest a child's attention in it, that kind of ongoing maintenance matters more than any single feature.

The install base is over 10 million, and the average rating sits at 4.1 from more than 74,000 ratings. Those numbers put it in the well-worn category: plenty of families have tried it, and the overall response is positive without being unanimous. I would read a 4.1 as a game that does its job for most people who want this sort of thing, with a minority finding it thin.

The content itself has not changed shape over the years. The apartments, the clothing store, the characters and the hidden items are the game. That is fine for a sandbox, since the value is in the play rather than the content pipeline, but it does mean there is no sense of a game that keeps growing.

A free dollhouse for kids who invent their own stories

My City: Apartment Dollhouse is worth installing if you have a child in roughly the 4 to 12 range who likes to make up stories with characters and rooms. The 12 locations, the dress-up options, the hidden treasure and the two-player multitouch give it enough surface for repeat sessions, and the absence of competition means a younger child can play alongside an older one without being left behind. The free download makes trying it a low-commitment decision.

Ads and in-app purchases are part of the package. I would also go in expecting a fixed set of locations.

For the right child, though, this is the sort of game that gets picked up again and again because there is nothing to fail at and nothing to finish. That is a narrow brief, but within it the game does what it sets out to do.

What's new in version 7.03.13

This update includes bug fixes and updated systems. Sorry for any inconvenience! Enjoy the game!