Aug 14, 2017

Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart

The hidden object genre is deceptively simple and—for the thousands of people buying them on Steam—ironclad. You travel through an array of varied, usually brightly colored scenes, finding items, searching detailed setups against a random list (hammer, boots, compass) and solving simple logic puzzles. These games are a guilty pleasure even for those of us who pride ourselves on our kill/death ratios. And they are legion.

Whether you’re a connoisseur of objets cachés or someone ready to subject their eyes and narrative sensibilities to a wild ride, here are ten of the best. Trust me—I've played literally hundreds of them.

Hidden Folks

Steam store page

Think of this as your artisanal, hand-knitted socks and rye bread kind of hidden object game. It's an indie that owes a lot to Where's Waldo but brings with it a hipster, hand illustrated sensibility that hides a brutal difficulty curve. Sure, it's easy enough to find a monkey or a figure in a fancy dress, but a worm? A hair brush? You'll need to open doors, peek into tents and toggle switches to conquer this one. The scenes move from the compact jungle to the sprawling, frenetic world of the Hidden Folks factory where every cupboard and corner just begs to be explored. It's already had one free update. Fingers crossed for many more.

Stray Souls: Dollhouse Story

Big Fish Games page

Almost certainly the work of a game designer in a very dark place, Stray Souls features a clown that looks like Pennywise from It developed a drinking habit, lost his job as a manifestation of childhood fear and now hires himself out for casual gaming opportunities, smelling slightly of schnapps. This is the standard mix of hidden object scenes and mild puzzling, but they've skipped the usual fairytale or pseudo-historical inspiration and gone all-in on spooky dolls, amusement parks and graveyards. If you're clicking on hundreds of random objects, doing it for a bat shit storyline helps keep things interesting.

Eventide: Slavic Fable

Steam store page

Hardcore HO fans know that publisher Artifex Mundi knows how to deliver the goods, and it's not scared to go into a really deep Wikipedia spiral to keep churning out new plots. Slavic Fables goes all European with a forest demon called Boruta, who you’ll defeat with a mix of keen eyes and a habit of mixing dodgy potions from leaves. Slavic Fable aims for the triple threat of cute animals, a kidnapped grandma and demons to keep you clicking, and the whole experience is a deliciously smooth slide down the freshly waxed bannister of addiction.

Under Leaves

Steam store page

Rocks the look of your favorite childhood storybook, and for the seasoned object finder it has about the same difficulty level. What it lacks in complexity though it more than makes up for in bright, meticulous watercolor artwork and a calming, gentle aesthetic. It can get tricky in the simple way that looking for green lizards on an entirely greenish background is tricky, but the only thing standing between you and victory is ocular strain. Like dunking your frontal lobes in a short and sweet lavender bubble bath then fluffing them dry with a towel made of angel feathers.

Space Legends: At the Edge of the Universe

Steam store page

Kick-ass space lady Elizabeth Campton is here in a "just different enough from Star Trek jumpsuit" to explore the inky depths of the universe. Perhaps fairytales, cultural appropriation or terrible horror plots don't twiddle your Twinkie, and you're wondering if the delights of hidden object games are still for you. Space Legends is a rare science-fiction take on the genre, even if the developer has still managed to mash space together with medieval settings and steampunk. It's heavy on the puzzles and one of the better looking hidden object games on the store... if space opera romance book covers are your thing. And why wouldn't they be?

Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart

Steam store page

Everyone knows that if you’re fiddling with the corpse of an infamous dead pirate, in a storm, in an abandoned museum, and you decide to replace his jewelry, you’re asking for trouble. With a pirate-based storyline that is somehow more convincing than Pirates of the Caribbean has been in years, this offers a twist for the fatigued object hunter. Once your eyes grow tired of scraping elaborate scenes for random items, you can switch to mahjong puzzles for as long as it feels necessary. Because undead pirates love mahjong right? Again, that would still make more sense than Captain Jack Sparrow's narrative arc.

The Enigmatis Collection

Steam store page

You'll realize you're a HO professional when you dispense with the pleasantries and go all-in with the bundles. This is technically three games, but the bundle is a bargain as they’re all classics in the genre. I’m not sure hidden objects game have a Half-Life 2, but if they did, the Enigmatis Trilogy—The Ghosts Of Maple Creek, The Mists Of Ravenwood and The Shadow Of Karkhala—would be contenders. An immortal and nefarious preacher, a relentless detective, giant bloody great birds, and that’s before you even get to the ancient and secluded monastery.

New York Mysteries: High Voltage

Steam store page

A 1950s female detective rocking serious knitwear and a case involving executions and the ol' Sing Sing penitentiary. Yes, here High Voltage isn’t anything to do with a particularly complex series of wiring puzzles, but actual human beings getting executed. Don’t let that stand in the way of you enjoying vintage-themed puzzles involving miniature toy cars and fishing things out of aquariums, though. Purists might struggle with the hidden object scenes—instead of the classical list you have to find objects using silhouettes—but the crime theme and not-absolutely-terrible cutscenes should help them deal.

Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride

Steam store page

It’s a fairytale, as if scripted by the people behind The Bold And The Beautiful, with added kittens. Seemingly a tragic tale of doomed romance and having to do all sorts of shit for your twin sister, this is actually about rescuing a cat and then forcing it into a life of servitude. Just click your little cat icon on something out of reach for your humanoid limbs, say, on a high branch, and Mr Whiskers has no choice but to risk his life scrambling through a twisted magical world. Come for the drama, stay for the cute.

Morphopolis

Steam store page

A step up from the similar Under Leaves in complexity, but with the same natural themes to promote that "trying LSD at the garden center" feeling. The art is more detailed and intricate, and it’s easy to get distracted from hunting for petals by a particular attractive looking bee. There are simple puzzles here too, but none of the screaming and hollering that infests the human centric hidden object games. I mean, maybe the bee is a villain intent on kidnapping children, but it least it has the respect to keep it on the down low and go about its business attractively.

Jun 15, 2017

Factory Update: Available Now!!

Hidden Folks - Adriaan

Sylvain and I (Adriaan) are SUPER proud to announce that the Factory Update is available right now!! This update comes with 3 new areas: one small area to get the hang of the new theme, one MASSIVE area - the Factory itself - and one puzzle area to finish the game (for now!).

Also: new Factory Update trailer!!! *click on thing below here*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ5GcDePU8A
beep beep boop boop rktkrktkrktkrktkrktkrktktkrktkrkrktkrktkrkt hey! bbbrrrdddbbbppp brrr bbppp brrrrdrrr!

With 19,475 sprites, 3400 interactive objects, 921 characters, 540 sounds, and 28 targets, the Factory is by far the most complicated area we've ever made. You probably saw our making-of posts of the Factory over the last three days, but in case you missed them, check 'em out here!

Also in this update:

8 new languages: Arabic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Many small iterations to targets and clues of previous areas.
Improved a lot of the sound mixing throughout the game.
Massive performance optimisations!
... and more! Check out the changelog on the forums.

This update wouldn't have happened without the support of many of you: the translators, the beta testers, all the players leaving heart-warming reviews on our store page, all the players giving suggestions or commenting on our forums, the streamers, let's play-ers, and video makers, and all the other players who reached out to us, liked or retweeted our posts, or just lurked our feeds for all those juicy GIFs! A big THANK YOU to all of you!!!!

As you guys and girls keep refuelling our motivation to continue working on Hidden Folks, this is what we plan to do next:

Android.
Secret feature.
New areas.
?????.

But for now: HAVE FUN with the new Factory!!!!

- Adriaan de Jongh & Sylvain Tegroeg

Jun 15, 2017

Factory Update: Available Now!!

Hidden Folks - Adriaan

Also in this update:

8 new languages: Arabic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Many small iterations to targets and clues of previous areas.
Improved a lot of the sound mixing throughout the game.
Massive performance optimisations!
... and more! Check out the changelog on the forums.

Android.
Secret feature.
New areas.
?????.

But for now: HAVE FUN with the new Factory!!!!

- Adriaan de Jongh & Sylvain Tegroeg

Jun 14, 2017

Announcing the Factory update, June 15th - part 3

Hidden Folks - Adriaan

In this third post of Hidden Folks’ Factory announcement series, I (Adriaan) talk about the targets, their clues, playtesting, community translation... and I announce the targets of the Factory!

In our day 1 and day 2 posts, you read how we put together the stories and graphics of each area and how we added interactions, systems, and sounds to each scene. It is after all that stuff that we start thinking about the targets, the things you’ll have to find in the area. Both Sylvain and I make suggestions for targets based on the stories and the interactions in the game. We then go through our suggestions and cherrypick the targets based on a lot of parameters: whether the player has used the interaction required to find it before, whether there are other targets nearby, whether a target would have an interesting story to tell, how many interactions would be required to find a target, how difficult it is to see the target, etc.

(I almost put a map of Factory's potential targets here. Would have been a MASSIVE spoiler.)

So, we pick a bunch of targets and then reshape parts of the map to really make the targets fit in with their environment. We then ask my good friend Bram van Dijk to help us come up with the clues for the targets.

I’ll try to make sure a clue retains it’s “clue value”, the information that actually tells you anything at all about the whereabouts of the target, while Bram tries to make something funny out of it. Not the laughing-out-loud kind of funny, but the haha-omg-what-a-silly-joke kind of funny. A kind of 'funny' that, once you get it, you're like "pffffff alright I get it...". Yeah. Anyway - after coming up with a bunch of clues we're satisfied with, Sylvain and I reshape the area again if we feel that's needed to clarify the clue, but most importantly: we playtest the area.

We tell people to head over to a beta branch of Hidden Folks here on Steam and ask playtesters to record their session with the game. I watch every minute of every playtest to get a grip on people’s experiences. In general, those playtests lead to todo lists with hundreds of small and big things to be fixed. There are always a lot of sorting issues, and the specific wording of a hint will often distract players in ways we don’t intend to. So we reshape parts of the map again, rewrite a lot of the hints, fix all the bugs, and then ask the awesome community surrounding Hidden Folks to help us translate all the clues. Here's an unreadable snippet of the much, much larger shared Google Sheet the translators do their thing in:

The cool thing about Google Sheets is not just that it is super simple for people to use, but also that its API allow the translators to download their translation into a special version of the game (another beta branch on Steam) and see their text in the game, right after they translated it, without my intervention! Which is toooootally rad. Phew, technology these days.

However.... it turns out translating a game isn't as easy as just putting a bunch of words in a text field. We write all clues and jokes in English, which has two big downsides: a saying or rhyme that works in English will probably not work in any other language, and English doesn't have gendered words. This kept annoying the community (ughh so sorry folks) but their efforts and creativity is what really saved us there: translators kept talking among themselves about the meaning of the clues, tested their translations in-game to see if the clues fitted a target's context, and worked with me revising the clues when things were too unclear or just plain bad.

I wanted to mention that having such a wonderful and active group of people around me (see the in-game credits) was ultimately the reason to put that extra bit of care into the game, mostly because it was so nice to talk to people who obviously cared about what Sylvain and I were making for such a long time already. As a game developer, it's easy to forget sometimes that you're making a game for real people and that every minute of effort you put in it could translate to the enjoyment of others. With Hidden Folks, the community made that enjoyment - the result of our efforts - really tangible for me. So... thanks fam <3

When all hints are translated by the awesome community and all known bugs are fixed, we go through the game a couple more times to try to spot layering issues, sound-related issues, and other tiny bugs. Then, finally, I can compile a release candidate! (And then I test some more, and do QA... but I won't go into that today.)

When there's a Windows, Mac, and Linux build of the game on Steam and an iOS and tvOS build up for review on the Apple App Store, Sylvain and I then fully switch our attention over to finding ways to tell people about the update and sharing our excitement about it with you all! And this marks the end of the development process of the areas in Hidden Folks! If you are still reading this: awesome; definitely let me know in the comments if there was something that really surprised you in our three behind-the-scenes posts. Also let me know in the comments if there's something you'd like to see or hear more about in the future!

Now, as a final announcement before the Factory update releases tomorrow, here are the 28 targets of the new Factory scene:

Not only intern Ivo’s motivation is far below zero: so is he.

In this jungle of boxes, forklift spotter Sally found a particularly rare species. Look at that power! What a beauty!

Muhammad had a whole different idea of a boxing ring.

Yoko has the memory of a goldfish. Set her rollercoaster in motion and every lap will be a new and thrilling ride to her!

1. Heat the pan with no oil. 2. Throw your sausage in the pan. 3. Wait. 4. Wait some more. 5. Add some freezing foam topping. 6. Your perfect burned sausage is ready!

Nemo thinks he's safe behind glass, but he's an easy catch in open water...

Jasmin is so attached to her car, she will never leave it! Ever! Never ever! Never, never ever!

Are you serious, Toyoti? You need to be pulled out of a car again?!

Robby - whooping back and forth. Forever.

Bling-bling in da lock-r! yo yo yo yo

Daan will be dry in a second.

When this plant saw the end was near it decided to end the ride itself.

Garden fork. Garden. Fork. Get it?

How much Bruno is left in storage?

The high security warden is a key figure in this hiding scheme.

Sigge likes watching them sweat. So energetic! Power from the people!

What looks like an ordinary glass ball is, as a matter of fact, worth a hundred thousand Follars. It won't come as a surprise to you to know they safely locked it away.

From mechanic Melisa's point of view, it's pretty clear the chassis is broken.

To find Kiki, just follow the trail of a specific kind of fruit.

Conductor Stokowski rehearses with his orchestra. The horns are doing great tonight!

Mermaid Arial is chillin' hard underwater. Blub is a way of life.

"One more minute!" Huy yells, even though he has been clean for hours.

Nicotine isn't strong enough for Hot Hira; she needs something else to light her up.

Tammie is so TIREd of counting.

Toma was surprised her tire was delivered so quickly! But seriously; the assembly line needs optimization.

Armless Ayaz has to get out at the next stop! Let's just hope someone presses the stop button for him...

Train inspector Mark double checked the numbers and is certain this barrel train needs exactly one more barrel before it can depart.

Trainspotter Tara spotted a spot-on spot to spot some trains!

Trash pusher Page - someone's gotta do it, y'know, push the trash back and forth.

Your search for these folks and objects starts tomorrow!!