Unravel the mystery or succumb TO EVIL
Hidden object games are One Of Those Things: you love them, or else you think the people who love them are mentally deficient in some way.
Part of the problem is the genre itself. In its infancy, the HOG wasn’t much more than a glorified feature from Highlights for Children: here is a picture, find 15 hot dogs.
Over time, the artwork has improved, and gameplay has gotten more sophisticated. Most HOGs have some sort of a plot now, which may be illustrated with animation, may have voice actors, may be more interesting than the game itself.
But as with anything, mostly it’s a massive glut of horse hockey shovelled onto the pile by lazy developers who know their bread and butter is bored housewives and retirees who will play anything if they’re desperate enough.
That’s why you sometimes get the voice actors who sound like they were fed their lines at gunpoint, the text with all the spelling and grammatical errors, the item lists that ask you to find “???????”, the hidden object scenes where your items have been coloured to blend in even though it makes no logical sense (thanks for the brown American flag, jackholes,) the hint system that highlights a quarter of the screen…
Crappy, fly-by-night HOGs come out so frequently and in such numbers that the “lifers” on Gamezebo will give a 5-star review to practically anything, so long as it doesn’t make them wish they’d spent their money on razor blades and crystal meth instead.
So it’s hard to make a determination as to whether or not a new game is worth your time, okay?
That’s why I’ve played Mystery Case Files’s Return to Ravenhearst and Madame Fate about a thousand times each. (Well, that and they friggin’ rule.)
Madame Fate used to be the pinnacle of HOGs: with the flimsy excuse of searching for a fortune teller’s killer… before he strikes!!! you play through about 20 hidden object scenes at a grody old abandoned carnival.
It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but the developers went out of their way to make this carnival as horrifying as possible, from the creepy carnival sound effects to the rotting debris everywhere to the carnies and circus performers themselves. The attention to detail is borderline hostile.
(Nobody should ever have to search for a single French fry in the half-masticated mound o’ grossness inside Franco The Fat Man’s mouth. Once you’ve done that, part of you is gone forever.)
You really get the feeling that you might be murdered, is what I’m saying. Murdered in real life by Art the Carny, who might ooze through your speakers and end you while you’re busy howling over one of the game’s puzzles. Murdered in a way that your mother will refuse to ever mention, except to say you were a good kid deep down, but she always knew it would happen to you someday.
Some of the time you wish you were murdered, because the puzzles are diabolical, but mostly you want to play this game forever.
Or until the next Mystery Case Files title’s released.
With an expanded, interactive story, integrated video, a proper soundtrack and a strong adventure game influence, Return to Ravenhearst is widely regarded as a game-changer for the genre.
(Before it came the original Ravenhearst, which is another favourite of mine, but not quite as good.)
In RtR, you’re asked to free the spirits of a murdered woman and her two daughters, who have been imprisoned at the derelict Ravenhearst mansion by evil, evil Charles (who also murdered the woman whose spirit you freed in Ravenhearst. Dude is off murdering The Ladies and imprisoning their spirits willy-nilly, basically.)
The estate is much larger than you thought, with a lighthouse out on the cliffs, a small underground village, its own railroad and a time machine–but oh no! I’ve already said too much.
The gameplay is incredibly immersive, not least due to ambient sound, the gorgeous artwork and the necessity of scrutinizing every little thing in every scene on the off chance that it might be important.
It seems like a pretty grim situation, on the face of it, what with the dead children and the eternal imprisonment and implied rape and stuff, which is why the touches of humour in the game make for such deliciously uncomfortable fun.
You don’t want to see the humour in the over-the-top cruelty of the signs Charles has posted around the underground village, the photos of the creepy old ghoul cuddling an infant, the dead man in the elevator, the love machine at the end of the game, but you’ll succumb to it, sooner or later.
But will you succumb… to evil?
(Probably not, don’t worry! I’ve played it many times and I’m barely evil at all!)
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
I don’t know about barely evil. Tinged with evil, I’d say. A touch. Of, you know, evil.
Takes one to know one, Evil-Lyn!
This is all new to me. I never realized this genre of game existed.
Ditto. Also, I always gave up at around 8 hot dogs in those Highlights Magazine things.
Well, if you’re interested, there’s usually a 60-minute demo. Try before you buy!
Big Fish Games has a huge selection of titles.