I Spy Universe (DS)

While the Where’s Waldo? books were likely my first encounter with picture-based search-and-find style activities, I am inclined to believe my love for hidden object games truly evolved from the I Spy series of books. Taking detailed photos filled with small objects and asking the player to find certain objects based on rhyming clues made I Spy more than just finding one man in a crowd. Naturally, an I Spy game would pique my interest pretty easily, but I Spy Universe creates a pretty grandiose setting for its search-and-find gameplay in the form of outer space.

Even the small shred of a plot that guides the game goes for a larger-than-life concept to guide what is mostly just a series of hidden object puzzles and minigames. In I Spy Universe, the sun is dying, but if the player can find 36 objects scattered across the universe, they can construct a generator to get the sun burning bright again. What this means in gameplay terms is that you’ll need to do 36 hidden object puzzles, the special item from each screen only acquired once you’ve found everything outlined in the rhyming riddle that presents the stage’s items of interest.

The rhymes of I Spy are actually a much more interesting means of presenting your goals than just giving the player a checklist to go down like many hidden object games. The rhymes are mostly clear enough in what they wish for you to find since this game is meant to be played by young children, but they don’t just lay out the objects asked for in basic terms. You might be asked to find a certain number of objects for example, but it might ask for some clever thinking from the player, such as asking for the player to find a certain amount of horses… one of which is a seahorse. Other times the game might ask for the largest or smallest version of an object, or rather than directly requesting an item, it might instead ask for something like an animal’s leg or a certain number or letter that appears on that item. When you do find an item and tap on it on the bottom screen, it will be highlighted in the written version of the rhyme to show it has been taken care of, although the game doesn’t show a running counter for when it asks you to find multiple instances of an item, making it quite easy to lose track of the progress made with those items in particular.

The I Spy screens don’t exactly try to match the space theme too much, with only a few like one where a planet is made of items at least closely adhering to it, but others are simply just a beach or the difficult screen that is a picture of a mess of tightly packed marbles. While it is a shame the universe theme isn’t embraced much, the 12 game screens that are available are a decent batch. Some are certainly a bit easy like the one featuring giant brass instruments where there aren’t many good hiding places, but overall the I Spy style is present here in that the screens are packed with items that make finding things take a bit of time and require careful looking. There isn’t any penalty for just tapping around and hoping you’ll find an item, but the hidden object areas are rather large, unable to fit on the bottom screen in totality. Instead, the bottom screen shows a small square of the area zoomed in while the top screen can be made to show the entire area, both screens helping in different ways. It’s much easier to find the largest item when you use the top screen for comparison, but finding tiny items requires moving the lower screen’s view angle around. An unfortunate quirk of the two screen searching method is you can’t view the rhyme that’s meant to guide your search at the same time as the full area, although it is always possible to have a woman read it out to you for a refresher.

If you did a little bit of mental math, you might notice that there are only 12 unique I Spy screens but 36 items to find, and that’s one of the unfortunate issues with I Spy Universe. While it’s hidden object designs are creative and the clues sometimes clever, you’ll be repeating those stages, looking at the same screen multiple times throughout a playthrough. The items you need to find will change on revisits so you’re not doing the exact same thing every time, but it definitely stretches the design of them quite thin, easy ones only becoming easier as you learn the layout and hard ones either becoming a bother as they reappear or losing their edge on subsequent visits. The way you play the stages isn’t linear either. I Spy Universe presents its level select as you traveling between different colored zones where you pick between the two hidden object screens available in that zone. You can swap between the available zones freely so long as they’re unlocked, but you need to keep reopening zones after doing their two puzzles, and some zones will only appear after you’ve already repeated some screens in the early game. It’s certainly not the best structure for the experience since its trades variety for economical design, but there is one more element to I Spy Universe that adds in new gameplay styles along the way.

Minigames must be played every time you need to unlock a new colored zone, and while I’d contend people of any age can enjoy the typical I Spy puzzles, the minigames featured here are most certainly meant for minors. Some of them are ridiculously simple, such as sliding images of the same color together, and identifying the next item in a pattern is a breeze, but there are at least a few that aren’t essentially gimmes for an older player. The game where you match shadows to their well lit counterpart has a few tricks put into it where you need to note small details of the shadow before selecting your answer, and it can even be said the game subtly trains you for this timed minigame with the I Spy screen that is exclusively objects in shadow form. The game where you rotate tiles to guide a marble through a maze is also a bit more than the basics, but all of them are still incredibly lenient with their timers, their worst sin being too easy rather than sticking around long enough to be boring or annoying. They do probably crop up too frequently however thanks to the need to keep unlocking zones, but even just a few more screens to play I Spy on would have been preferred over these mostly shallow diversions.

THE VERDICT: I Spy Universe brings the hidden object gameplay of Scholastic’s book series to the DS well enough, the two screens able to allow different perspectives on the well populated areas and the rhymes present the required finds in an interesting manner that asks for more involved searches. However, the game stretches its 12 unique play areas through repetition and interrupts play with overly simple minigames, making it feel a little threadbare despite the search-and-find gameplay being decent enough.

And so, I give I Spy Universe for Nintendo DS…

An OKAY rating. Perhaps appropriately, I Spy Universe has about the same amount of content as your typical I Spy book, just made more portable and convenient. The riddle presentation is still a great way of structuring a hidden object checklist and the photographs are all different enough from each other even if some swing towards being quite easy, but revisiting them in the strange nonlinear order makes the game’s design lose a bit of its appeal. Taking breaks from playing will certainly lessen your familiarity and allow the pages to feel fresh, but having a few more play areas would be preferable over so many repeat visits to the ones on offer and the minigames that very rarely provide anything too interesting on their own. It is pretty much I Spy digitized, and a greater level of creativity or effort feels like it would have pushed that beyond the basic enjoyment of the format it’s translating into a video game.

I Spy Universe has quality when it comes to its hidden object screens but not quantity, the game trying to derive a bit too much from the few gameplay elements it has to offer. Perhaps if the minigames weren’t so simplistic they’d be the proper diversion that helps alleviate some of the repetition, but otherwise, this game that has you setting off into the vast expanse of the universe to save a dying star ends up feeling small and limited in its scope despite doing the hidden objects basics well enough.