I’m back to talk more about casual games. Yesterday, I wrote about some of my issues with casual gaming and what needs to change. I only touched on the latter, so I’m going to go more into that in this post.
I have to emphasize once again that they NEED to put their options before the prologue. In this day and age, making me sit through a prologue without being able to silence it is inexcusable. This is why I skip the prologue 99 out of 100 times. Well, that and because the stories for all the Hidden Object Games (HOGs) are all the same so the prologue doesn’t matter.
By the way, the voice acting is stridently competent at best. It’s rarely terrible, but it’s rarely good, either. The best I can say is that mostly, it’s eminently forgettable. But to be fair, I rarely have the sound on when I’m playing a casual game.
Today, I tried a demo for one that had no options before the prologue. Fine. Whatever. I know this is the way casual games are. After the prologue was finished, there still was no options menu. What the fuck? This was not acceptable. I could not believe that there was a game in 2025 that did not have an options menu.
I kept playing, but I was irritated by the fact that I could not turn off the sound. Finally, after doing the first hidden object scene, the menu came up, and it included options (and I could turn off the sound). It was a good thing, too, because I was not going to play the whole game without being able to turn off the sound.
It’s just amazing to me because in hardcore gaming, the options are every growing. Being able to mute from the beginning is taken as a given, and there would be an outcry if it wasn’t there.
Hell, there are even some accessibility options in some games. Granted, there aren’t nearly enough options in not nearly enough games, but it’s not even a thought for casual games. There are no accessibility options, and most of the time, it’s not an issue because the games are very basic. There isn’t movement, for example, except for brief action moments in HOGs.
I will say that font is an issue sometimes. The font chosen and how tiny it can be. So if that were an option, I would appreciate that. Plus, dialogue speed. I read very fast, and once I’m done reading, I want to move onto the next bit of dialogue.
Everything seems so twenty years ago. As I said, I played casual games fifteen years ago, and the looks of them have changed very little since then. There’s a lick of paint and a bit of glitter, but that’s it. If I showed you stills from a casual game from twenty years ago, especially a HOG and one from now, I bet you prrobably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
As I mentioned in the previous post, they’ve added a few new things to HOGs in the past ten years, but it’s nothing big. Sometimes, you have to click on an area within a HOG scene in order to get one or two items from that other scene before returning to the first scene.
Another thing they do is have cutouts from the scene and then give you the objects you have to fit into the holes. Another new thing is to give a description of an item (“something that tells you the time”) and you have to decide what they mean by that. The problem with this one is that they’re not very rigorous in their QA. That means they might have a clock and a watch in the scene, and they only want you to pick one–but they don’t tell you which until you click on one or the other.
Another newish one is to have a general category like ‘animals’ plus a number, say, four, and you have to find four animals in the scene. There’s also ones in which you have to find the items in listed order. Sometimes, they penalize you for wrong clicks, and sometimes, they give you bonuses for how quickly you can find items.
They have different modes, too. Casual, normal, hard, and custom–or something similar to that. Custom means you can mix and match, and I just make everything as easy as possible because I can’t be assed. What I mean is that I don’t play these games for any kind of hardness, so just mainline it into my veins.
I started this post and yesterday’s by saying that casual game devs need to step it up, but I’m not sure what they can really do. As long as the games are $6.99 for a standard edition and $13.99 for a collector’s edition, and the devs are expected to release a game a year (basically), there isn’t much they can do. In addition, as long as the games are selling well (and I think they are), then there’s probably little incentive for the devs to make better games.
And yet. I can’t help but think that they could do small things to make the quality of life better. Oh, one thing that came and went (thankfully!) is morphing objects. That drove me crazy because it was part of the collectibles, and I never wanted to spend that much time on it. And yet, if there were collectibles, there was always a part of my brain that was obsessed with finding every little thing. And the morphing objects were so hard to catch for me. Oh, they were what their name implied–morphing.
Since my return to casual games, I have not seen any morphing objects, thankfully. That was a mercifully short-lived thing that was probably better as a concept than in implementation.
I know I’ve been talking mostly about HOGs because there is the most room for change there. In thinking about Time Management games, there is a bit of room for change, but not that much. I like the serving/selling people in different settings, but I haven’t really played those since my medical crisis. My reflexes are worse, and I just get stressed with any kind of timer.
As for solitaire games, there really isn’t much you can do with that, either. Well, that’s not exactly true. There are a few that are novel, but it’s mostly just a cursory ‘fairies are in trouble; save them!’ I’m not sure there’s much you can do about that, though.
I don’t know if i’m asking too much because casual games are closer to mobile games than hardcore ones. But it would be nice to have some variety.