Absolutely Stuffed With Hidden Object Puzzles, But They’re On The Ugly Side
Playing Amazing Weekend Search and Relax Collector’s Edition is a bit like going to an all-you can eat buffet. You know that the food isn’t of the highest quality, and it’s probably not much to look at either – baked bean spillages in the scrambled egg, that sort of thing. But there’s just so much of it. It’s great value for money, and it leaves you stuffed. And I’m a philistine, so that’s often the kind of meal I want.
The laboriously titled Amazing Weekend Search and Relax Collector’s Edition definitely doesn’t look great. It’s one of Ocean Media’s cut-and-paste jobs, taking stock images of locations and scattering them with people in awkward poses, surrounded by items that have been cut from an Argos catalogue. The results are scenes that never feel real or believable. I’d go so far to say that they’re ugly: they’re a garish jumble of images that feel generative-AI adjacent, even if they’re not AI themselves.
Spanning The World, Hoovering Up Items
Amazing Weekend Search and Relax Collector’s Edition does have the jump on the simultaneously released Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition, though. You’re not locked to homes and gardens this time out. There’s a wide variety of places to explore, from public swimming pools to campsites, and that helps with fatigue. There’s a fair amount of variety that comes from the globe-trotting.
There’s no story tying these scenes together. This is a photo album of hidden object scenes, with three reasons to replay each one. The levels can be played with three different rulesets applied, and you get a star for each of the rulesets that you complete. These stars can then be used to buy upcoming pages of the photo album, revealing more hidden object scenes.
The rulesets will be familiar to Ocean Media fans, but they’re exhaustive and all present here. There are the traditional shopping lists, where the hidden objects are listed as words and you then need to find them in the scene. But there are also silhouette games, where you have to find items based on their outline; colour-matching games where you need to find items based on a small swatch of fabric; image-based lists; and scenes where you need to find multiple of one kind of item, like ten thermos flasks.
Spotting Items Soon Becomes Second Nature
You’ll soon develop favourites. I was a big fan of the colour-matching. For some reason, I’m blind to items as silhouettes, but I’ve got some kind of superhero ability to spot items based on their colours. I’m not sure where I can use that skill, but I’ll take it.
There is depth beyond these three ways to replay each level. There are three raccoons to find in these levels, and there are bonus items called ‘souvenirs’ to find in each scene. These can be viewed in a kind of bookcase from the main menu. You can also zoom in and ‘enhance’ some sparkly sections of the scene, which allows you to search neighbouring rooms or boxes for items on your list.
Playing each scene three times over never quite felt grindy. The rulesets add just enough variety, and there’s the pleasing sensation of mastering a scene. You know where each tricycle and pinwheel is, so you can complete the second and third iteration of the scene faster than the first. And just as the fatigue kicks in, you are moving onto the next scene.
And by golly is there a lot of stuff here. I’m still not done, if I am being honest: I have a few more scenes within the games’ Collector Edition content that I still need to complete to three stars. I have two achievements left to go. But I feel full: there’s at least fifteen hours of stuff here, I would suggest, and that’s both sizeable in hidden object terms, but also decent value for the £5.79 outlay.
Coming Across Minigames In The Jumble Sale
We haven’t mentioned the minigames and puzzles that appear every three hidden object scenes. They’re completely skippable – and we duly did on occasion – but they offer a bit of palate cleansing from the hidden object scenes. There are the traditional spot-the-differences and jigsaw puzzles, but there are some well-designed braintwisters too. You can be tessellating shapes to make origami cranes, or positioning dominoes to make a chain of images.
Amazing Weekend Search and Relax Collector’s Edition is probably the hidden object game that we have spent the most time on this summer. Plenty have been released, and we’ve played most of them, but this is the all-you-can-eat buffet of the bunch. It feels like two hidden object games smooshed together to make one. You certainly won’t be complaining about the value for money.
But while it’s a big bundle of stuff, it’s hard to ignore a slight lack of care. The images are nowhere near as coherent or enjoyable to scan as Artifex Mundi hidden object games, for example. So, while Amazing Weekend Search and Relax Collector’s Edition represents one of the bulkiest compendiums of hidden object scenes in recent memory, the quality of each scene isn’t quite ‘Amazing’, and it suffers as a result.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/amazing-weekend-search-and-relax-collectors-edition/9pgndbmt45tv
