I haven’t played many hidden object games in the last few years, but I recently stumbled across the eighth entry in Sunward Games’ The Secret Order series on the Switch eShop, and since I’d played the first six games I figured I may as well see what Sarah Pennington has been up to. Not sure how I missed #7, but maybe I’ll track that down later.
For the uninitiated, Sarah has been living a very odd life since the events of the first game, where she was a perfectly ordinary person living a perfectly ordinary life until she was saved from an assassination attempt by her nephew from the future. She’s been to the past (a few times), to the Amazon, ancient Egypt, etc, etc, lots of various exotic locales where the problems of the day can be solved by rummaging through piles of junk to find random things and solving logic puzzles, and this installation in the series has her going back to, well, uh…
Look, it’s right in the title.
Anyway, the last time she was in the Buried Kingdom she made friends with a baby dragon and restored the proper ruler and all was well, which naturally couldn’t last.
Look, the plots in these things are usually pretty flimsy. Bad guys are bad, good guys are good, it’s all about the art and the puzzles.
And this game IS pretty, with lots of the colorful environments you tend to get in any HOG and some very detailed characters.
Yes, you talk to a skeleton who is also a harp. Which is pretty metal.
Admittedly, compared to Live2D or E-Mote, the actual character animations are pretty stiff and unremarkable. It would be interesting to see Sunward combining an animation system like that with their more detailed characters.
The art style extends to some of the weird things you have to pick up and carry around until you’ve found the right place to use them to solve a puzzle, after which time you typically discard them without a thought towards future purpose.
Well, you use this thing twice, because it’s an axe on one side and a hammer on the other. Unique tool, indeed.
And for some reason the developers put a mimic in the game? You carry this around until you find a rope that needs something heavy on it to serve as a counterweight, then the mimic gloms onto the rope for you. I’m actually OK with using this once and never again.
Unfortunately, while the art is top notch and the story had just enough weirdness to it to be interesting, the game as a whole is a bit of a letdown.
First, while this is a hidden object game, I had a heck of a time actually solving hidden object scenes on the tiny Switch screen.
I wound up needing to switch the game into “tile match” mode most of the time. This lets you play a round of concentration to clear the hidden object scenes, and that was kind of a disappointment. One of the big draws to any HOG is that it scratches the same itch as looking for “Nina” in a Hirschfield drawing or spending more time looking for the bunny on a Playboy cover than you do ogling the cover model, and playing a HOG as not-a-HOG doesn’t give you nearly the same feeling of being clever.
There is something about being told that you need to find a “bow” in a scene and needing to figure out whether you are looking for a projectile weapon, a violin bow, or a hair ornament, and whether it will be right out in the open or maybe just barely visible as an object in a painting, and I didn’t really get to enjoy that because it was frustratingly difficult to find things on the Switch’s screen and the virtual pointer didn’t really allow for precision clicking. Some sort of zoom or magnification setting would have been really helpful here, or letting you use the touch screen to select things rather than forcing the use of the joycons.
I realize that I have just seriously dated myself with the earlier references. Fortunately, the average HOG enjoyer is probably old enough to get them.
Second, it’s super short. Like, you can make any hidden object game shorter if you abuse the “where do I need to go” button and fast travel, much less the hint button and puzzle skips, but this is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short. There aren’t very many hidden object scenes at all, and few puzzles that aren’t a matter of just using every item in your inventory on them until one of them works.
This is published by Artifex Mundi, who tends to have pretty steep discounts on their eShop games when they go on sale, so I suspect I paid closer to $3 than the $15 list price they ask for this. At $3 it’s a good deal for about 3 hours of light puzzle solving. At full price I would have been upset.
Maybe I should figure out which game was #7 and give it a go. I suspect if I actually play it on the TV instead of in handheld mode I will have much less to grouse about.