Television has frankly been a boring recently and I find myself watching less than I used to (and if MIPCOM is anything to go by this week, this may well be a continuing trend). I have instead found myself videogaming a lot more recently and pondering what if anything can be learned.
For some reason I had a hankering to play a hidden object puzzle adventure game towards the back end of last week and I asked on Twitter for suggestions and thanks very much for those that did. A hidden object game is as it says – you get a busy scene with typically lots of objects in it and a list of objects, your job is to find the specific objects in the scene, and then you can move on to the next bit of the narrative. If you get stuck you can normally ask for a certain amount of hints and sometimes you’ll be against the clock.
I tried two games, one on recommendation and one as a punt. The first one, Madame Fate, part of the Mystery Case Files series (you can buy on Steam) is getting on for around ten years old and unfortunately feels that way, playing in a fairly small box on modern monitor resolutions, which makes the act of trying to find hidden objects in detailed scenes that much harder. This one has a carnival setting and a story involving finding lots of objects to stop a murder and thus is against the clock. Nicely you get several scenes you can jump between if you get stuck and there’s even some light puzzling elements (make ten words out of these letters, for example). Unfortunately I’m a bit rubbish at it.
Slightly more involved I played Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride on PS4 from Polish hidden object specialists Artifex Mundi (£11.99 at time of writing). The graphics, video and acting are not much to shout about, but there are a couple of things that made it lightly entertaining. It’s more of an adventure game in that you need to examine objects and use them on other objects to release other objects that are useful down the line – but it’s set up so that you’re not more than about three screens away from a place you’re meant to use an object – we’re not talking Monkey Island levels of difficulty, it’s mainly unusual key looking for unusual lock. Frequently you will have puzzles to solve that are to be frank not difficult (it’s not The 7th Guest), but mechanical enough that solving them is a dopamine hit. There are hidden object scenes where you might need to figure out combinations of objects (to get a gold candlestick, you find a brush, paint and paint it) or find bits of object that fit to make something useful, and whatsmore you can skip hidden object scenes entirely and instead take on a domino task. I probably got 6-8 hours out of it, and if it was a gameshow it would be something gently entertaining like Brainteaser.
I don’t know how far down the hole I’ll end up going. Here is basically the TV version of it:
I’ve noticed Artifex Mundi titles do seem to crop up on various indie bundle sites periodically; I’ve got some via Humble Bundle, and IndieGala seems to have dedicated Artifex Mundi bundles four or five times a year. Might be worth keeping eyes open if you want a handy collection to fall back on in a dull evening.
Nothing to do with gameshows, but I can’t help thinking of Tim Brooke-Taylor’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Cat-Poo”