Hidden Folks (iOS)

NOTE: As is the nature of mobile games, it is possible this game may undergo changes to its gameplay design, monetization model, or it may include limited time events. This is a review of the game’s state as of August 25th, 2018.

 

Despite being such a prolific genre on the mobile platform, hidden object games rarely seem to capture the attention of players not looking for them. The genre has a very simple appeal, the goal paralleling things such as word searches, the I Spy books, and the widely known Where’s Waldo series. Admittedly, the goal of finding certain objects hidden in a larger image is an easy formula to make a game from and one that leads to little variation within the genre, but Hidden Folks managed to attract some attention from people outside the usual target audience. When searching for a cause, the enormous hand-drawn environments are most likely what drew in that special level of attention as they definitely help set it apart from the standard design of other mobile hidden object games.

 

Hidden Folks makes an incredibly strong first impression as well. The opening jungle area encapsulates the unique appeal of Hidden Folks perfectly and serves as an excellent showcase of what the game is trying to achieve. Every area in the game follows a similar design, introducing you to the new setting with a small location where you can see everything important on screen. You only have to find a few people or objects to move onto the next area of the level here, but these spots help teach you about the quirks of the broader setting. In Hidden Folks, you aren’t just tapping the things you’re looking for in a picture to show you found them. Environments are filled with little interactive objects such as doors to open, holes to dig, and devices to activate by pressing buttons or pulling levers. These actions, often accompanied by cute sound effects made by the developer’s mouths, can reveal characters or items that are actually hidden rather than just trying to blend in with their environment. The small stages will let you learn the interactions needed for the bigger pictures, and when you get to the wide open areas, the scope of them is genuinely impressive. You can zoom in for a better view or zoom out to try and fit as much as possible on screen as you can, but many locations are just too large to be viewed all at once, requiring you to scroll about to see the entirety of some of these absolutely massive hidden object challenges. There is one more type of level, one that is understandably rather underutilized. Some levels involve a pure focus on interactive objects, the player doing things such as clearing a path by tapping the right objects. They are bit too simple and unengaging to be puzzles though, so their rarity is likely born from the fact they aren’t very creative or necessary.

The game leads incredibly strong with that opening jungle level, and had it rode on a wave of similarly designed areas, it would no doubt be an excellent example of the hidden object genre and one that perhaps would serve as a good evolving point for the genre that potentially could help rope in new fans… but the creativity in the jungle’s design is quickly abandoned as you enter the next major location. The jungle’s large images could have been daunting, but they’re nicely segmented into areas you can compartmentalize. There are interactive objects, but not so many it takes away from the joy of just looking around the environment for the next find. Everything you need to find has a hint attached to it, and in the jungle you can connect them to at least a specific region if you don’t have a good idea where they might be immediately. In the later levels though, whatever design philosophy was used here is completely abandoned in favor of creating difficulty by flooding areas with way too many people and interactive objects and stretching the area out just for the sake of it.

 

While not universally bad once you leave the jungle area, you’ll begin encountering areas that stretch the game’s format in directions it shouldn’t go. The city, lab, and snow areas are all examples of the game’s new design direction at its worst. These huge areas are crammed full of nearly identical objects, with the city in particular bustling with hundreds of nearly identical folks. Most of the things you are intended to find in levels are people, and the people designs are deliberately basic, all of them a step above stick figures and usually having one identifying part of their appearance. In the later large levels though, they cram the humans together and then throw the crowds all over the map so you have to investigate groups closely to have any hope of finding the right character. The hints will give you a general idea but often not enough to whittle it down to a clear point of searching, and if the object or person you need to find is hidden, then you are in for a chore. In the city, there are tall skyscrapers where the game essentially wants you to open every window on the odd chance a character you’re looking for is hiding in there. In the lab, there are rows of lockers and shutters to open, the task of finding something no longer being about having a keen eye but instead putting in the time to open every interactive object. Some of these objects won’t remain open either, and if you exit the level for any reason, the ones that do stay open close. The city and lab are the worst when it comes to this, both packing in too many people and too many interactive objects, and since you can only continue to the next stage once you’ve found a certain amount of targets in the image, you’re bound to spend a lot of time on these stages in particular.

The snow area has it’s own failure, that being just an immense amount of trees for no real reason. It fills out the image, but not with anything interesting. There are things hidden between these trees too, so they can’t be completely dismissed either. It can almost feel like you’re going to get snow blindness from staring at these large black and white images for a long time searching for objects that are sometimes so small that an ant would dwarf them if they crawled across your screen, and that’s when you’re zoomed in close. There are options to change the general color, such as adding a sepia tone or reversing the black and white, but this also plays into the realization that for its enormous, sprawling, hand-drawn landscapes, it has hardly anything interesting to put in them. Let’s take a quick look aside at the Where’s Waldo book series, as it managed to capture the public’s attention with a very smart design approach. The large images weren’t just a bunch of people milling about, the characters were doing interesting things, with many small funny scenes to amuse you as you search for the character of interest. Even at the end of one book, where you come to a deliberate shakeup of that design ethos in The Land of Waldos where all the people do look just like the guy you’re trying to find, they tried to alleviate some of that with some cameos from other characters and didn’t just fill in all the white space with more Waldos. Well, Hidden Folks is essentially The Land of Waldos over and over and with no restraint on adding in more nearly identical characters. In fact, this can cause some issues, as the game seems to randomly generate the appearance of every unimportant character when you enter the image. In the snow level, I needed to find a woman making snow angels, her defining characteristics being a bun in her hair and a scarf. I see a lady matching that description and tap her, but it doesn’t work, because despite fitting the wording of the clue and the example image on the bottom of the screen, her scarf had the slightest difference to it. This was even worse in the desert level, where the game wanted me to find a vulture in a peculiar pose, and I found a vulture that matched it perfectly… but it wasn’t right. I still don’t know how it differed from the correct answer, but when you’re hiding a very specific, barely identifiable character in a crowd of similar faces, you need to ensure their appearance is at least impossible for the game to randomly give to another character.

 

Coming back to the desert level, that level, oddly, has the opposite problem of the city and similar levels. Where those levels are crowded with too much stuff, the desert is large and barren, the player essentially only able to have one area of interest on screen at a time, the rest of the time devoted to dragging your vision around in the hopes of stumbling across a new area to scour as you hope it has something you’re looking for. As noted before, even when you find an area, it’s not likely to stimulate you at all, the game of course giving it a little theme like “concert area” or “Native American camp”, but the characters are just walking about rather than trying to do something interesting or worth watching. They’re there as obstacles to finding the hidden objects, and while the scope of the area may wow you, the contents are banal, making your constant need to look through them even less exciting. The small areas that teach you the mechanics for the big ones become welcome breathers as you no longer have to strain your eyes on a world whose visual design only exists to complicate its task, and I really think part of the problem with the overall design is the devotion to black and white. If things had more color, characters could be more striking or more obviously varied, ensuring that a group of people doesn’t blend together into a dull haze of sameyness. It would not salvage the game completely, the worlds are still dull conceptually and offer very little worth looking at, but it could make that aspect easier to ignore as finding what you’re looking for would become a speedier process.

THE VERDICT: Hidden Folks has an incredibly interesting direction for its hidden object game design, but one it seems unable to figure out how to execute properly. The opening jungle area manages to make finding the hidden objects and characters in sprawling landscapes with interactive objects enjoyable and manageable, but once it moves on to new settings, Hidden Folks seems to be convinced that quantity of objects is equivalent to quality. Areas become packed full of nearly identical humans crowded together with barely any identifying features, and a flood of interactive objects fill the areas with what boils down to busy work, the player tapping every single one to see if they happen to be the one that arbitrarily contains the object their looking for. Coupled with the scope of the area design, these small problems are magnified to such an enormous scale that they can’t be ignored, leaving you searching areas that, while technically packed with hundreds of people moving about, still manage to feel lifeless and sterile, like they were put together by a machine despite the hand-drawn art style.

 

And so, I give Hidden Folks for iOS…

A TERRIBLE rating. It is with great disappointment I give this rating, as I do enjoy hidden object games quite a bit for the simple fun they provide and the idea of innovating on the core concept made Hidden Folks seem like it could be a cut above the genre’s flooded baseline of quality. The jungle opens promisingly, but creativity gives way to practicality in the later stages, the game packing too much into its large areas with no real concern for artistic direction or how it might impact the joy of searching. In some hidden object games you may get stuck on a well hidden item, but in Hidden Folks, it seems getting stuck involves you not clicking every last interactive object or not being able to spot a slightly different character in one of the many near identical crowds. Despite having some almost unacceptably tiny objects hidden for you to find, they become a relief from staring at the folks that occupy these crowded landscapes, and you at least very rarely have to worry about them looking like something else in the environment. The hints given on who you need to find are almost too necessary and thus if there is a lack of explicit references in one, it can make finding that character a chore.

 

A lack of differentiation is Hidden Folks’s biggest flaw, with everything else springing from the issues caused by having to scan over the images constantly to overcome the problems it causes. Hidden Folks went overboard on hiding its folks, making locations that are just plain boring to look around in and thus ending up with a searching game where the good qualities are also hard to find.