Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos (PS3)
In 2022 I reviewed Judge Dee: The City God Case, a game that caught my attention because it is a hidden object game released on the PlayStation 3. Mostly I was curious about how it handled the genre on a system with a controller and a screen inevitably further from your face than a computer or touchscreen device, but it had many other problems that dominated my discussion of it instead. It was not the only hidden object game to be released on the PS3 though, and Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos is a much more appropriate example of the genre, relying purely on the puzzle type and thus a better way to get an idea of what playing one with a controller would feel like.
Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos isn’t entirely without a few ideas so it’s not just a plain selection of search-and-find screens. First, it contextualizes why you’re looking at still scenes filled with items in search of specific ones. As an agent of Interpol called in from vacation, you need to track down the international criminal Dr. Chaos as well as three of his top henchmen: Mister Smith, The Hammer, and The Artiste. While narratively you’ll be told someone like The Artiste is stealing and replacing artwork with unusually altered yet almost identical pieces, you will only really be looking at large areas for full-sized objects. In the game’s story these are identified as clues about the operations of the criminals, and while it can be odd that something like a pleasant golden retriever is supposedly tied to the investigation, other items like fake beards, CDs, and things like handprints better fit the theming. More importantly though, while the areas you explore are cluttered with a good deal of items to make the hunt for the eight you need per scene harder, they usually are placed in somewhat believable ways. Objects need to be on something or hanging, so while it may not be realistic something like the inside of a London bus has so much clutter, it means you can often disregard stretches of sky or distant areas outside of windows since things aren’t just illogically floating around.
That commitment to objects actually being feasibly placed helps the locations you’re exploring often look much nicer than if they were a pure chaotic mess. The stage at Radio City Music Hall in New York is definitely cramped, but you’ll know where to look and the game doesn’t get too cheeky with what it hides in the empty audience seats. Exploring a place like The Kremlin in Moscow though will unusually enough be a laboratory rather than something that better evokes the landmark, but in a place like San Francisco you can expect to actually see the famously curvy Lombard Street or be searching a street car. One other way the game can get creative about letting this globe-trotting adventure better mix the sight-seeing with the item finding is when it gets clever on what exactly you’re trying to find. You might be told to find “Radio”, but in the puzzle it’s actually the word Radio that is hidden rather than an actual device. You might be told to find something that would stick out like a whale or airplane that feels like it couldn’t be hidden well, but instead you’re actually meant to find the image of it on a sign or piece of paper. This can make finding an item sometimes much harder than you’d expect though, Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos already hitting on the inevitable hidden object game issue of the game designers having a different vision of what a standard object might look like compared to most players. Being told to find a pill for example would make you think it should at least be something like a capsule so it would stand out, but instead its a small white pill that can do too good a job blending into the messy object filled environments you’re looking through.
Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos does have a few issues caused by other concepts it attempts. Items you need to find are not always fully visible for example. This can work in situations where you only see the neck of a guitar and can reasonably assume that’s the item you’re looking for, but other times it can do things like hide a teapot behind other objects to the point it hides the distinct parts of the item and might look like something else entirely. One thing Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos does try to do is make sure you’re never looking for the same object twice in the same puzzle. While you are only given eight words to influence your search, some of them require you to find multiples. If it’s two dogs or teapots, their shape and appearance will be quite different, which usually is a nice touch save when the game feels like it strains itself a bit in differentiation. It is better than times where it will just throw a term like Eye Scanner at you since it’s not something with a clear real world frame of reference to influence your search though.
Luckily, while it stumbles sometimes in item choice, Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos still has a few ways to turn things back so you’re not staring at screens forever hoping to find something. When you travel around the world, each city will have three to four screens to explore and you’re given a fresh set of hints for that city. Using a hint will show you where an object is located so you can potentially get past the last holdout to move onto more puzzles, and there are even chances to earn more hints in a level. Each criminal’s section of the game also has hidden items related to them. Each screen has an object that can grant you bonus points, more time for searching, or an additional hint, and in a kind touch, the game also won’t penalize you for clicking the wrong spot so long as you don’t too it too rapidly. You can take a guess if you feel you have to or you can’t quite make out the object, and while there is an option to zoom in a bit with a magnifying glass, sometimes things can be a bit blurry still. Moving your cursor to select objects is handled well at least, the control stick moving it quickly and the directional buttons allow for more precise placement, but that magnifying glass also slows down the stick when active if you don’t want to swap inputs too often.
Most of your time with Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos will involve standard hidden object searches, but there are some special level types that usually serve either as bonus levels or are tied to the story as they provide the big case-breaking discoveries. Some involve finding “similarities” which can break from the realism a bit, finding CD shapes on the Statue of Liberty for example not trying to ground its item placement in reality. Others can be very devious, the vault door levels especially having you find things like a certain amount of 4s but the four can be represented in ways like roman numerals and generally are almost too subtle so you really need to scour the screen. You can fail an investigation, each city having a set thirty minute time limit that is shared across all of its available hidden object screens. If you run out of time you need to redo the entire city, and while the individual screens will ask you to find different objects, they are otherwise unaltered. A light bit of scrambling could make it more interesting, but at the same time it also helps you get back to where you were when most objects stay in place so you can more easily find the hidden ones. The special levels though will often completely change what’s hidden, the vault with 4s becoming something like a vault with hidden 2s instead.
THE VERDICT: Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos is a functional hidden object game on the PS3, filling a nice niche but not exactly pushing the envelope with its design choices. It does have the nice touch though of trying to having its puzzle screens not just feature famous cities and landmarks but item placement that tries to be somewhat realistic despite the chaotic clutter. At other times though it obscures too much of an object or makes it difficult to guess what it’s asking for, and while there’s a generous enough hint system if you want to simply move on, that can wound the pride of someone who is playing specifically for the challenge of trying to find everything. While it’s not completely by the numbers, there’s nothing particularly special about Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos that would make it worth picking over other genre contemporaries.
And so, I give Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. While mostly a straightforward hidden object game, the little touches that make Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos not completely run of the mill should still be noted. The special levels, the hidden items for little bonuses like more hints, and trying to make its hidden object screens feel logically possible if incredibly unlikely mean you’re not just passing through level after level of disconnected item scrambles. You would be better off with something like Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest that has a wider range of variety and the same grounded approach to its hidden object screens, but there is a place for the simple appeals of just finding hidden objects. You do get the little sacrifices of the occasional impressive clever hiding spots coming with the less reasonable ones that usually comes from branching out of basic item identification and that can lead to some frustration due to things like the lingering time limit though. The truth is, if it wasn’t for its console release, it would probably blend in with an incredibly crowded marketplace of hidden object games, and simply doing the expected design well enough isn’t going to turn heads or earn you a purchase. It might have been interesting to more heavily lean into the nature of items being clues, perhaps a section piecing together their purpose, and it still feels like a massive waste that the story introduced the idea The Artiste is making subtle alterations to art only to use that idea for a mostly goofy and quickly completed level. Some thought was put into crafting the game screens here, and a little more could have made it feel more like investigative work than standard hidden object fare.
Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos does at least stand high above Judge Dee: The City God Case. That game’s cluttered set of activities and poor hints for hidden objects really made it hard to find enjoyable search-and-find play, but Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos takes a fairly safe route and won’t be displeasing many fans of the genre. Looking at reviews contemporary with its release though, many were displeased not to find something deeper, but it’s not really a game shooting for broader appeal. It’s providing a decent selection of hidden object puzzles, and for those who like that type of play, they’ll be content enough playing it. When it comes to designing a casual game, sometimes that’s all you need to provide.