The genius of hidden object games (and how to augment the genre)
A look at what makes hidden object games great - gameplay, mood, storytelling.
Core ideas
Hidden objects games personify good game design at a glance.
HOGs achieve a near-perfect balance between simplicity, complexity and accessibility.
HOGs can be educational, and have great mood.
Mystery is afoot. A fantasy world needs saving from formulaic evil wizards, or a strange crime case seems unsolvable.
You have been called upon to defeat the evil wizard or uncover the murder mystery and find the perpetrator.
To accomplish this, you will visit dozens of beautifully detailed landscapes or crime scenes, sometimes with a partner - human or otherwise, sometimes aided by a mobile alchemy or forensic kit.
You will step up to the challenge by developing your perception, being patient and... finding an inordinate amount of hidden objects and solving various puzzles.
It’s easy to love hidden object / mystery puzzle games.
When modern games obsess over the platitudes of reflective surfaces and ever-expanding world maps filled with baubles, HOGs / MPGs know how to use simple systems to achieve complexity.
A near perfect trifecta of game design brevity, aesthetic beauty, and accessibility.
Hidden object / mystery puzzle games make every design system count
There is a purity of flow in hidden object games that personifies good game design - and good design in general: complexity achieved through a combination of simple systems, no time waste, easy to understand, knowing where the strengths of the genre lie, gradually improving their design.
More complex video games often put resources in systems that are useless or incidental - an open-world map filled with bland collectibles; skills and gadgets poorly implemented; padding the game with endless combat encounters; borrowing mechanics from popular games without a proper understanding of their own design philosophy.
Due to limited design scope, HOGs have learned to make every game mechanic count, to only use systems that are completely necessary. Rarely is a mechanic wasted or an ability superfluous or incidental.
Each item and skill has a clear use, sometimes to the detriment of logic, but effective at maintaining focus and reducing player confusion.
Not much is needed to improve on this, but complexity can be increased without losing focus.
Consider lateral design:
Introduce puzzles with more than one solution
Make items usable in more than one way and in more than one puzzle
Consider basic RPG mechanics where a puzzle can change in various ways depending on player choice
Let players make choices throughout the story and show them the results.
Some HOGs are using extra abilities, such as supranatural powers or mobile forensic laboratories in police procedurals.
To maintain focus, new abilities should always be useful to progress the puzzles or story, but without the solution being completely linear.
Hidden object games understand mood
Puzzle games don’t have a lot of space for creating an expansive mood, but nonetheless they manage laudably. The formula is simple and follows the same brevity of design that pervades the genre.
Story scenes - the spaces through which the player travels - are visually interesting, and most are superb, focused on beautiful and detailed landscapes.
The scenes are mostly static, but often look like extravagant paintings, whether romantic, realist, or surrealist.
The design is not minimalist, but visual brevity is used in both a functional way and to keep the player perpetually interested and caught in wanderlust.
HOGs use their limited space properly, by filling every scene with details and making them aesthetically pleasing.
The soundtrack ranges from simple ambient tracks to more complex symphonic arrangements and bombastic crescendos when the “action” calls for them.
Yes, the music is sometimes formulaic, but serves the games’ purpose, as effective as symphonic music in mainstream movies. Ambient music is used to great effect, to augment the romantic or mysterious scenery present in many HOGs.
To improve this: use voice acting for every piece of text, or at least for every instance of dialogue.
HOGs tend to use a functional approach to voice acting, only present for major story points. It would be useful for VA to appear in more instances, including when inspecting items and scenes, and reading written notes.
Hidden object games are educational
Without being specifically educational games, HOGs rely on strong associative gameplay by always having the player search for the next puzzle solution and the correct item to use.
This leads to constant exploration driven by curiosity and a perpetual need for attention to detail, awareness of item use, basic literacy, and a healthy appreciation for mystery and fairytales.
Like most games, HOGs lack major literary value, but by focusing on storytelling, they provide a way to support literacy, and are a gateway and a booster pack for reading.
By being accessible and driven by storytelling, they are great at introducing kids to reading, puzzle solving and a general appreciation for more complex thinking patterns.
Puzzle solving may not have a direct use in our world, but it contributes to keeping the mind working and naturally creating new associations between ideas and concepts, something that’s universally beneficial.
Add the usual abilities needed to properly navigate the games: attention to detail, visual orientation, patience, making connections between concepts, and HOGs become more than just video games to form a perfect basis for educational apps.
And they don’t stop here: by focusing on aesthetics and beautiful scenes, HOGs maintain an appreciation for the visual arts in general.
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To improve: assist with progression and increase complexity by allowing more than one solution to a puzzle.
HOGs tend to employ linear solutions to non explicit puzzles - where an item must be used to accomplish something - but sometimes it makes sense for an item to have more than one use.
Some games have learned this, but instances remain where an item disappears from your inventory mysteriously and without explanation.
To assist people who have difficulty with the English language, provide hints when dealing with more obscure items and concepts. It’s easy to remain stuck when searching for various objects without knowing how they look like or what their use is.
Taking a cue from other games, HOGs should provide a hint system for said obscure items and concepts.
Following their own design philosophy, the hint system would be optional and non-intrusive. It would help with replacing the Skip feature and eliminating the frustration of being stuck and searching for items that the player has no practical, visual or linguistic reference for.
Artificial difficulty is maintained through “losing” items after they have been used in specific contexts - this should be eliminated in favor of progression and maintaining logical consistency.
Generally, if the player thinks an item would work in a certain context, he/she is correct.
Switch the game design to being more player-centric - allow players to engage the puzzles and story in a non-linear way. Even better, all of this can be optional, with separate options in the already present difficulty settings.
Hidden object games focus on mystery and fairy tales
In narrative approach, many HOGs might be seen as soap operas - whether fantasy, mystery, police procedurals, horror.
They are not games involved with politics or heavy philosophical themes, and their writing is purely functional more often than not.
The focus on mystery fits perfectly with a genre where progression is achieved by completing puzzles and clear objectives, and the only downtime is provided by short dialogue sequences and being stuck.
Fairytales have always been great at treating with more universal themes. Though their approach may be considered too traditional for modern times, HOGs use fairytales as templates to create their own accessible stories to great effect.
The games are doing some of their best work in the confines of their established genre, though they could always use a more experimental attitude in writing and narrative.
The best approach would be in both maintaining the focus on fairytales and mystery, while also taking more chances with themes, writing and narrative choice and reactivity.
Let the story breathe a bit and introduce proper downtime by letting the player spend time with characters without having to hurry the story along.
This allows more space for writing complex characters that the player would care about. Downtime and characterization can be sustained by optional reading and visual world-building material and conversations.
Granted, too much of a good thing might hurt the core design philosophy of HOGs, but all of this can be introduced gradually, without losing the focus on puzzle solving.
HOGs don’t need anything extravagant, but they already have a mostly mature player base.
Augmenting them with more complex stories and writing would help elevate a genre that is teeming with potential - educational, narrative, ludic.
Hidden object games are good for both casual and hard-core players
Thanks to the combination of casual gameplay and focus on storytelling and puzzle solving, HOGs are perfect games for both novice and hard-core players.
They achieve this in an almost subliminal way, without making it explicit to the player that the games should be approached in a casual or expert manner.
Difficulty levels are always present to accommodate everyone, and achievements are included for players who can venture forth without too much help.
HOGs allow the separate customization of various systems. Their visual language is easy to understand and navigate, though they lack in more specific accessibility needs, like color blindness and keyboard control.
Puzzles are almost always intuitive and supported by basic hints and a customizable Skip feature.
There may be an associative feeling of cheating and failing with this, but skipping is desirable when dealing with more frustrating puzzles, especially since no one wants to feel that progression has stopped.
To improve: make sure that puzzles are intuitive and not needlessly frustrating to pad the game’s length.
Hidden object games offer bonuses to the player
HOGs know some players want to keep a token of their experience after the story is done, so they perpetuate the healthy habit of offering game content for off-game enjoyment - wallpapers in the form of beautiful scenes, and songs from the soundtrack.
The practice of offering soundtracks for free has extended with time, but it’s still not present in most mainstream games. Ideally, developers could understand that players want to listen to their beautiful soundtrack outside of the game, so they should find an easy way to allow that.
The simplest way for this is to allow free off-game access to music files.
This should be a standard practice for both PC and console games - HOGs are the genre that understands this basic need well.
Image by Nicky from Pixabay