Hat-trick! I haven’t been blogging much lately, but today it’s the third day in a row! And I have a very interesting topic to bring up: hidden object games, and why I hate them.

First things first: hidden object is a genre that give you a screen cluttered with items, and it’s up to you to find all the correct ones within a certain time limit. That’s it. Seriously, that’s it…and still, people love these games. A few days ago I tried a number of popular titles such as Cate West: Can’t Remember the Rest of the Name, and Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia. I had tried a number of these games about a year ago, and expected that a lot had changed. But no, it’s still almost the exact same gameplay. The presentation was brilliant, but the gameplay didn’t fascinate me at all.

Okay, I have to admit that there have been some changes: today’s games often feature heaps and heaps of different kinds of minigames in between the find-the-object screens, and these minigames are often very fun and exciting. Unlike the main screens.

Back to my dislike of these find-the-object screens. At first I thought that it was a fluke that these games did well, but it seems pretty proven that people love this style of game; and the point was driven home to me just when I was getting fed up with Abra Academy: Returning Cast after 15 minutes. I’m paraphrasing the conversation that occurred:

“Sweet mother of f-ck! I’m so bored at this game! I’m uninstalling this right now!”
“Hey, what’re you playing? Let me see.”
*Click click*
“Okay, are you done now? Seen enough?”
“Wait a sec…”
*Click click click click*
“Come on! I’m bored! I want to do something else!”
“No, wait! I have to finish this level!”
*Click click click…*

To my amazement I saw someone get instantly hooked by the game I was bored to tears with!

I started thinking about why I don’t like the gameplay, and I think it can be summed up in two things:

1. I really really don’t like spending too much time just looking at a single screen.
2. Too linear. I get very annoyed when I have to find ten random objects for no apparent reason. Adding a thin story on top of the game doesn’t help; I don’t see a reason why I can’t pick up any other similar objects, or try different things to find out which objects I really need. I think it smells too much of someone ordering me what to do, when I want to decide the best path for myself.

Now, time for an interlude. My new game, with the working name Wildhollow, will be a sim/management/adventure game where the main goal is to breed exciting (and valuable) new breeds of animals that you can sell. However, in order to do so you need to bring new genetic material to your stock. That’s where the adventuring aspects enter.

At first I thought of something along the lines of Harvest Moon. You’d breed animals and, once you have young animals, you could bring them along to travel the world and expose them to various mutagens give them new characteristics by magical means. This would be how you evolve your stock and eventually breed the most valuable animals. But I soon dropped that idea; it sounds pretty far-fetched to carry around your animals, and it would cost a lot to make everything animated like that.

Instead, the current game design revolves around static screens. You have a world map where new locations will be revealed continuously; at first you may only see your farm where you can watch your animals run around and play, and a nearby town where you can buy new goods, talk to people, or find items that are lying around. Talking to people and finding the correct items will eventually lead to other places, and the world will expand to show more people and items and even more locations. This is quite obviously derived from adventure games.

But all of the sudden something struck me: one thing that you always do in an adventure game is to look for items half-hidden in the background. Just like in the hidden object games. It may be an obvious connection to you, but for me it was slight shock realizing that a genre I love share features with a genre I cannot stand.

And the irony grows even more: just the other week I was asked if I’m pondering a hidden object game for my next project. “Not at all!” I replied. ….But I probably will end up with some hidden objects in my game. It kind of annoys me to think that when Wildhollow is finished there’s bound to be people comparing it to hidden object games, even though the inspiration comes from completely different places.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Games, Indie Games, Wildhollow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.