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.