When I was a casual game player (decades ago), I liked Hidden Object Games or HOGs as they were called. As the name implied, the main purpose is to find objects that are hidden in the scene. It’s pretty much as simple as that. At least it was when I played them. Then, the devs decided that they needed to make the games adventure games because, oh, I don’t know, they felt guilty about putting out the same game over and over again? Soon, they were putting in morphing objects and collectibles. I hate that shit, but I also feel compelled to find every one. Which is part of the reasons I quit playing them. Another was the aforementioned collectibles. The last reason was that I started playing “hard” games and relegated casual games to a once-in-a-while thing.
I still like HOGs, though, and Steam has started to have more and more of them on the platform. We now have a sub-category that I’ll call hidden cat games. As you can probably tell, that’s right up my alley. I love cats and I used to like hidden object games. What more do I need?
Well.
I feel a bit ungenerous in what I’m about to say.
I don’t like the way it’s being implemented. In most HOGs, the objects are hidden in a way to make them blend into the background. Plus, it’s usually ten or fifteen hidden objects per scene. The new breed of HOGs (and the one in which most cat HOGs fall) is to just throw a shit ton of objects on the scene, pretty artlessly.
In the case of the cats, it’s just hundreds of cats tossed in the background. There are some other objects to find as well, but it’s mostly just tons of cats. I’ve played several of these games, and I’m bored with it already. If there’s nothing else to reel me in, then I don’t really want to play it. I’m not saying it’s a cynical money grab, but, I’m also not saying it’s not.
How does this tie into the Steam Next Fest? One of the demos I saw was for one of these games by a developer of whom I had bought their two previous games–which were exactly the same. That’s three games in a year, which is very similar to how the devs in casual games dropped their games. Same game just with a palette swap. This series is really pretty, I’ll give it that, but it’s…boring. There are literally over a hundred object in each scene. If you keep the ‘page’ at the regular size, you will miss half the objects beacuse they simply won’t appear.
You can enlarge the page to the point where you have maybe one-fortieth of the page on screen. But then you have the chance to miss something when you’re scrolling to the next part of the scene. There is a hint, but you have to wait something like 2 minutes for it to refresh. I read a hint that if you go out of the level and go back in, then the time resets.