Hidden Through Time is developed and published by Crazy Monkey Studios. It is available on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Android, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Macintosh operating systems. It was released on March 12, 2020 for $7.99 USD and $10.29 CAD.
I’ve always been a big fan of games like Where’s Waldo (Wally in the UK) and would spend countless hours when I was young poring through his books, looking for the infamous read and white striped outfit hidden in some crazily populated picture. The love for these puzzles never really went away as I grew up, however there hasn’t really been anything released to console that would do this genre justice. We got reasonably close, with some of the Artefix Mundi games that have Hidden Object Puzzles (HOP for short) as well as a Where’s Waldo game that released on PC, but for the most part our options have been limited. Hidden Through Time appeared on my radar around a month ago, and released on March 12th, however my initial high hopes were dashed by a combination of uninspired locations and a very steep difficulty curve.
My first encounter with Hidden Through Time was very promising. The premise is very simple, you are to look for a bunch of different items that have been hidden on the screen. These items are themed around different times in history, from Dinosaurs to Egyptians and everything in between. I immediately set about looking for the first few items, and had a lot of fun with this. After a few levels however I realized that I may have bitten off more than I could chew, as the difficulty seemed to skyrocket. It could be partially due to my old(er) eyes not being as sharp as they once were when I would look at the aforementioned Where’s Waldo books, however I simply couldn’t find anything I was tasked to locate. At the bottom of the screen there is a bar, that has all of the available items to find for each level, and you can pick these in whatever order you like so if you are stuck on one item you can simply move along to the next one. With this bar is a hint system, that is meant to give you some sort of clue as to where to locate an item. This would without fail get stuck every single time I played, so once I had found the item the clue was hinting at I wasn’t able to use it any more for that particular level/scenario.
Graphically speaking Hidden Through Time isn’t going to win any awards, but the visuals are more than competent for this sort of game. The colour palette is reasonably varied although after a while all of the ‘different’ themes seemed to blur into each other. To make this more distinct I feel the developers could have really utilized the ‘Through Time’ part of the title, and created worlds set in the future. This would open up the game to have more levels that felt unique, instead of an increasingly samey feel. Alien worlds, space, other planets, the interior of a spaceship, even a futuristic version of a city on Earth, any of these would have been a welcome change of pace and scenery. As I mentioned above, the difficulty for me spiked pretty quick. While the area you have to look over doesn’t increase massively, the amount of objects on screen does significantly. You’ll quickly go from a scenario with 10-15 items on the entire level, to a screen with 1000+ items on it for you to check. Some of these are hidden a little too well, and I don’t know how people were ever able to find them without resorting to using a guide. If I hadn’t done this on some of the later levels I would likely still be stuck on them!!
Sound in the game is pretty minimal, there are some fun sound effects that happen when you find an object, but other then that there is very little going on. I actually appreciated this as when I’m trying to find a tiny egg on a screen with what felt like a million other items the last thing I wanted was a bunch of sounds distracting me. I would have liked the use of some contextual sound though to help me find the objects on each puzzle, so for example if you were looking for a chicken the sound of one could get louder and louder as you got closer perhaps. This would definitely be a better hint system than the one that refused to work for me the entire time I played.
One saving grace that Hidden Through Time has is the online editor. On this you can make your very own puzzles, and upload them for others to download, play and then rate accordingly, depending on how much they enjoyed it. This was by far the most fun I had when playing Hidden Through Time, and a lot of the puzzles on there were more fun to play than the actual puzzles created by the developers. Making the puzzles is also a piece of cake, which I liked. You’ll see some very creatively hidden objects in the user created maps, so spending time with this mode is strongly advised.
I can’t help but come away from my playtime of Hidden Through Time feeling disappointed, and wondering what could have been. There were moments of fun but these were few and far between, and I more often felt frustrated with the design choices and poor placement of items. This, coupled with the broken hint system and the overwhelming feeling of deja vu I got from playing more than a few levels means that I would struggle to recommend this to anyone other than die hard fans of this genre.
JamieReloaded23's Rating: 2.5/5
Check out the Trailer
JamieReloaded23 Gamerscore addict & Manchester United fan. PR Manager for XenAndCL and occasional review writer for Xbox Game Reviews. Addicted to anything pickled. To connect with JamieReloaded23 follow him on Twitter here.
Comments