Hidden My Game By Mom!

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 12:00:00 -0700

Hidden My Game By Mom is a quick, quirky, and delightful little puzzle starring a boy addicted to his handheld gaming device and his mother’s attempts to hide it from him in increasingly bizarre ways. You, the real-life gamer that you are, vicariously strike back against the parental anti-game tyranny you may or may not have actually experienced by interacting with the scene to find this boy’s game. The core gameplay revolves around collecting items and using them in clever and silly ways to reveal where the boy’s game was hidden, but this comes with a catch: Mom is also hiding in nearly every level, often in more absurd places than the game. Find the game, win the level; find Mom, you’re busted.

This simple hidden object puzzle takes on another level of meaning when moving past the zaniness of the what and moving into the relational why. Hidden My Game By Mom proposes the simple premise of Mom as antagonist, someone to be outsmarted and evaded. But as we progress, it’s difficult to leave the boy’s motives unquestioned. At one point, we distract the boy’s older sister from doing her homework so our boy can get back to his gaming. In another level, the boy digs through literal poop to be reunited with his cherished handheld. This is a caricature of both the boy’s love for his game and the lengths his mom would go to stop him, to be sure, but something rings true about his mom’s implicit concern that this all might be getting out of hand. And after a surprising and emotional gut punch of a finale, no amount of broken English in the UI can hide Hidden My Game By Mom’s core message.

A parent’s love might come out as riding a giraffe’s head or feeding an elephant your gaming device, but it’s love all the same. We can argue with the methods and the logic, but (at some level) we should try to appreciate that they were doing the best they knew how.

June's Journey

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:00:00 -0700

Hidden object games moved from their old dwellings in children’s sections of newspapers to new homes on touchscreens in the early iOS era, and every generation of the operating system sees a new app iterate over the same mechanics. More of the same isn’t always bad — it’s nice to have new apps with refreshed graphics to replace aging legacy games that are no longer supported — but nevertheless, newcomers must somehow justify their existence. June’s Journey had a promising plan to do so: wrap classic hidden object gameplay in a mystery story and toss in some city building-esque filler as a bonus. But it ultimately commits too many sins of other free-to-play, casual games to remain enjoyable, and a poorly executed progression system subjects players to numbing repetition.

The setting is fairly simple. June is a British WWI veteran nurse with a knack for quick thinking and insightful observations. Upon learning that her sister and brother-in-law were murdered, purportedly in a murder-suicide by her brother-in-law’s own hand, she travels to New York to find answers. Your mission quite literally becomes June’s: find hidden clues which steadily reveal more of the mystery, bringing you closer to the only answers that will make sense of the violence. As an aside, the family estate has fallen into some disrepair, so coins and resources gained from completing levels can be put towards decorating and renovating dilapidated structures.

The progression system is superficial, to say the least. Each hidden object scene can only be accessed after the player reaches the corresponding player level. Player level increases with flowers, a strange disguise for a typical XP/leveling system. But instead of earning flowers through playing levels and finding objects (which one could argue is the whole point), flowers are rewarded for buying decorations and upgrading buildings on the estate. This creates an illogical and contrived system of currencies: playing levels rewards coins and materials, which in turn are used to buy decorations and building upgrades, which in turn reward flowers that sum to higher player levels, which in turn unlock new levels one-by-one. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated, it’s because it is. Very little is gained from each currency exchange, and binding a player’s story progression to the number of trellises built and bushes planted can only be seen as a ploy to make content last longer.

The joy of a hidden object game is in finding things. There’s nothing wrong with adding extra elements to the gameplay; a good story is a boon to any game, and rewarding players with an increasingly sprawling and beautiful estate to mark their time investment is quite nice. But when grinding for levels and resources reduces finding hidden objects to memorizing where on the screen to tap, there can be no arguing that June’s Journey lost sight of its core gameplay which should have remained its soul.

hidden-object | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Hidden My Game By Mom!

June's Journey