“Honestly, I don’t even know where to start.”
This is the opening line in an ad for the mobile game merge mansion, said of none other than the current Hollywood daddy of the moment, Pedro Pascal. And you know what? Same, Pedro. The same thing.
The ad continues, Pascal as the emotional core, introducing us to a young girl and her grandmother. “Everyone,” Pascal tells us, “is hiding something.”
It’s a hell of a lot of drama and intrigue for a seemingly simple puzzle game. But it’s not the first time merge mansion has raised eyebrows. Sure, there are some crazy ads for mobile games, but merge mansion seems to be on another level. There is a whole merge mansion film universe at this point, which ties into another mobile game, lily garden, All of this seems to focus on the aforementioned granny being arrested and revealing a message on her hand as she is being driven away. Sometimes the message is “He lives.” Sometimes it’s like, “You’re next.” Calm down, Grandma.
The latest ad, once again starring Pedro “The Mandalorian” Pascal, is now a live-action drama, complete with a Serial-like podcaster telling the secret. In the final seconds of the ad, we see a callback to the original animated commercial, while the actors morph into Disney-able versions of themselves and the image of an arrested granny reappears.
Continue reading: What even happens in these video game ads, help
In the meantime, merge mansion continues the hype on its App Store page, encouraging players to “spill family secrets”. The video of the grandma showing off her handwritten message while sitting in the back of a squad car is the first thing to appear on the store listing. The description is even written from that sweet grandmother’s perspective: “Maddie says I have secrets. I say what does Maddie know?! Our mysterious story revolves around my family’s mansion, which has stood empty for more than 40 years. You will help Maddie find out what happened and learn all about her and the Boulton family’s past as you renovate and restore the site together.”
And yet the gameplay itself seems rather tame: Most of it revolves around cleaning, gardening and other tidying up of the mansion. You can merge your cleaning tools to get better tools to complete the next job, and as you progress you are to unveil more of the weirdly cryptic granny’s secrets. However, I will admit that I haven’t uncovered all the family secrets yet. So maybe there are more twists waiting for me.
This isn’t the first mobile game ad to feature a celebrity, either. Kate Upton starred in her own over-the-top ad for Game of War: Fire Age several years back. But we just saw Pascal at the Oscars. He’s the star of HBO The last of us tv series Star Wars’ The Mandalorian. What on earth is he doing in a merge mansion Ad I came across while swiping on TikTok? And how much was he paid for what might be his strangest role yet?
