Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest (PC)

It’s fairly common for a hidden object game to throw in some extra gameplay types on top of its search-and-find puzzles. Stringing together the item searches with simplistic inventory puzzles or quick minigames helps the player avoid spending the whole experience just staring intently at piles of doodads looking for the ones available on a list, the hidden object puzzles able to shine a bit brighter because they’re given room to breathe and can be more involved when they’re not holding up the entire experience. Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest is certainly a hidden object adventure at its heart, but while that is its major draw, its use of its extra segments is what really stands out about this title.

 

Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest, as its names implies, focuses on some very small residents of a magical forest, humans no bigger than your hand coexisting with anthropomorphic rodents. The kingdom of Brie is built for its tiny occupants despite existing in the shadow of toadstools, some structures clearly built by the residents while other areas see normal sized tools like scissors and a thread spool jury-rigged into the town well. The rodents that humanity coexists with have a few intriguing details to their society, the mice and rats involved in an uneasy alliance and the beavers being surprisingly pious religious types. The game’s hero Max sets out to make some money and find his father in this world right as an unexpected flood threatens to completely destroy the Brie way of life, but in crisis comes opportunity as Max steps forward to assist the mouse princess, find the cause of the drought, and learn the secrets that exist in this little society.

The setting and string of events do a good job connecting Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest’s activities together even though it never goes much deeper than a familiar fantasy adventure tale with it. It’s still nice to see a new area’s detailed backdrop and learn a little of the worldbuilding along the way, but the ending of the main story is shockingly quick to wrap-up. A quick secondary adventure exists to tidy up some of the loose threads and give a postscript to it all that, while reusing some minigames, avoids feeling repetitive because most of the main adventure tries mixing up the activities you participate in between the hidden object puzzles. While you can skip the minigames if you only came to the experience for the search and find gameplay, you’re missing a big part of what makes this more than a run of the mill item search. While a maze game or arranging parts of an object like a jigsaw puzzle are fairly typical minigame ideas, Tiny Tales also has you managing your balance while crossing a log, figuring out how to arrange a set of numbers so they reach the right sums when added up at different angles, and untangle a web of knots so no ropes overlap.

 

While those minigame types add a new twist to the gameplay to make it feel more like an adventure and test your mind in different ways, the way the same set of skills you use in hidden object puzzles manifest in puzzle solving is a real surprise. While inventory puzzles are a fairly standard form of point and click gameplay, as you go between screens you’ll often find yourself collecting quite a set of items and figuring out the use of them isn’t as simple as finding the lock for your metaphorical key. You’ll often need to solve a set of tinier puzzles in the area to get the right pieces to unlock another, item usage not just about spotting where an unusual tool could be useful but even finding the interactive areas in the first place. Searching for the interactive elements in an area and starting to piece together how your chain of events needs to unfold to get you the required items makes the puzzle solving deeper than just a distraction, and if you are having trouble spotting something important, a hint mushroom can be poked to highlight what you should be doing without giving away the exact action required. The mushroom regenerates after a while so you can push through with hints if something really isn’t clicking, but Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest isn’t so difficult that this feels necessary, especially since the customizable difficulty allows for the game to potentially automatically highlight interactive areas or actually add some challenge to otherwise easy moments. Constructing a spell by making runes overlap is a given in easier difficulties where you can only click what is needed, but the visual puzzle actually requires some figuring out if you remove some of the assistance, something you can do at any time during the adventure.

Inventory puzzles that require a good eye for where things can be used or found, clues to puzzles hidden in the environment, special collectibles laying around the world, and even some storybook segments where the tale being told contains hints at the objects you’re meant to find in the book’s pages all work in the hidden object genre’s focus on having a keen eye for finding important items, and thankfully when the traditional hidden object puzzles do crop up, they both have their normal appeals and some ideas in play that up their own variety. The hidden object screens will hide a set of items on a screen filled with clutter, the scavenger hunt guided by a list of unique items the player is meant to find or a specific type of object that is scattered about the area in high numbers. Clearing these screens involves finding and clicking on every required list item and this task naturally has the enjoyment of your search paying off, the excitement of a string of quick successes, or the satisfying release of uncovering the object that had been giving you trouble due to its hiding spot being more difficult than the other items. The detailed screens do their job in hiding the required finds, but there are also a few small ideas in play like objects that cover up other items and need to be moved aside that make searching a touch more interactive. The idea of objects shifting from one look to another like a mirage isn’t quite as well implemented, but there is also a special way you can complete hidden object puzzles if the item hunting isn’t working out.

 

At any time during a hidden object puzzle you can swap over to a match-two tile game called Monaco. While matching any two tiles that are adjacent to each other with the same symbol sounds easy, matching any old object isn’t actually the way you’ll make progress. Special tiles will appear that must be matched, with each time you can make these special matches removing a required item from the hidden object game. Making normal matches can build up meters to clear out a whole row or column if you’re having issues getting the correct necessary tiles near to each other, but mostly Monaco is a good way to allow the player to keep the game moving at a good pace even if a specific item in the search and find side of the gameplay is giving them trouble. Monaco’s tile matching also doles out the special tiles at a slow enough pace that it’s not a full replacement for hidden object gameplay, it often being smarter to just keep looking at the item screen rather than clearing a whole level by way of the matching minigame. A good mix of the two is definitely a more enjoyable way to engage with the only part of the game that would otherwise feature such similar gameplay repeatedly, so adding in these little change-ups to the expected item hunts ensures even its core focus is providing some creative little twists.

THE VERDICT: While definitely enjoyable as a hidden object game first and foremost, Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest does a good job of integrating the focus on finding items amidst detailed game screens into its adventuring side. The fundamentals of looking for required objects translates well to point and click puzzles and the amount of variables in play keep the adventuring segments from being straightforward lock and key affairs. Minigames spice up moments in between putting your eyes to work, and figuring out how to make progress in this colorful little world is helped along well by the decent diversity in gameplay types. With even the hidden object moments adding little ideas like the tile puzzle alternative or moving objects around to find the required ones, Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest feels like a robust but still approachable, casual, and relaxed game experience.

 

And so, I give Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest for PC…

A GOOD rating. While it can be said the mild inventory puzzles of other hidden object games often have you finding hidden tools to break through simple roadblocks already played into the genre’s focus on the satisfaction in finding important objects, Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest takes things a bit further by making their use and number great enough that it’s never too complex or too basic. The adventuring areas are all little hidden object screens of their own where you find clues, interactive portions, or valuable puzzle solving items, and with a decent enough world in miniature hosting your quest, it can actually be more engaging to do the activities outside of the true hidden object puzzles. The search-and-find gameplay is still a necessary part of the enjoyment so it isn’t likely Tiny Tales will win over people already cold to the genre, but besides a few gameplay shifts there for variety like the balance minigame or mazes, the idea of searching around for specific items really feels like it has spread outside of the specifically catered screens to color the rest of the adventure as well.

 

Improvements to puzzle difficulty or a deeper story and world could make this a better game, but keeping the casual audience on board was likely more important than seeing how far the idea of a strong blend of point and click adventuring and hidden object puzzles could be pushed. Making the activities between the main draw more than filler is what allows Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest to shine as a hidden object game, and to make it better would likely involve deemphasizing the cluttered screen scavenger hunts. The rebalancing needed there would definitely throw things off to the point it’s perhaps better to just enjoy what we are given: a hidden object adventure that spreads the search out of select screens and keeps delivering on that satisfaction in finding the right items needed to progress to something new.