A Hard-Boiled Hidden Object Game About…Finding A Dog In A Hat?
I’m starting to see a pattern in the waves of hidden objects games that appear on the Xbox Store thanks to publisher Ocean Media. For example, Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition arrived alongside Sweet Home: Look and Find, I Love Finding Pups, and Amazing Weekend Search and Relax in a pretty hefty four-game haul. There tends to be the boring, minigamey one that’s barely got a theme tying it together (Amazing Weekend, Sweet Home); there’s the one that has a half-hearted theme that just about ties the whole thing together (I Love Finding Pups); and, finally, there’s the one that’s a big old pantomime or telenovella, chucking around campy stories that leave you smirking. It’s these last ones that are the most fun, and Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition is very much in this category.
Two Games Fighting For Your Attention
What I love most about Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition is that it feels like it’s been made by two different people, and they are definitely not in agreement about the story they are telling. One person is determined to write a gritty detective story, full of twists and turns, culminating in a Bonus Episode that takes some surprising lunges into horror. This person imagines the main character, Casey Monroe, as a kind of female Humphrey Bogart, unpicking a plot to kidnap hundreds of dogs. Imagine a hard-boiled 101 Dalmatians.
The second person thinks that dogs look really cute in hats. They want to make a cute hidden object game where Lady Margaret’s dog, Lulu, has gone missing and you have to find them. But don’t worry! Lulu wears a little bellboy-looking outfit, so she is easy to spot. And that second person likes fantasy novels, so likes to toss in curveballs like Oracles and prophecies.
Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition is the result of these two people wrestling over a story, and it is as incoherent as it sounds. BUT it’s also campily hilarious for the same reasons, lurching from nu-metal villains to surprisingly ripped barmen. More importantly, it commits 100% to its story. Even when it makes zero sense, you’re happy that someone cared enough to try.
It’s Easy To Forget That There’s A Hidden Object Game In There
Outside of the bizarro story, Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition is a reasonably unusual hidden object game. It bends the usual Ocean Media template into interesting new shapes, and those shapes really help to keep the story momentum going.
For one, there are very few minigames or jigsaw puzzles in Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition. Personally, that’s very much a win: I’m not a huge fan of trying to move around jigsaw-puzzle pieces with a clumsy Xbox controller in hand, and commonly they slow everything down. But while the jigsaw puzzles that are here are indeed clumsy (they have the annoying habit of handing you the piece that you definitely did not pick up), they are infrequent and – better yet – they are mysterious. They tend to be valuable evidence for the case that you are working on, so you don’t know what picture they will make. Watching that evidence coalesce is actually quite fun, which is a big admission from me if you know how much I hate Xbox jigsaws. The ones here remind me of those Murder Mystery jigsaws that you can pick up from shops.
With minimal reliance on puzzles and minigames, Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition can focus on the hidden objects. And what I like about these is that they stick around. In most hidden object games, you don’t reach the point where the scenes are almost empty. It makes sense, as you keep the puzzle-flow going, but I’ve always been a bit sad that I can’t exhaust them of every single item. You know, like you were tidying up.
THE Hidden Object Game For The Obsessive And Compulsive
Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition doesn’t quite let you pick up every item, but it’s close. And that comes with its own appeal. A scene is so much easier once you have cleared it of detritus, and that comes with a feeling of reward. I was the one who made the puzzle easier for myself. I imagine this approach won’t be for everyone, but for someone as obsessive as myself, it was really quite satisfying.
There are also a few subtle variations on the hidden objecting. Most are a long, long shopping list, as you would expect from 99% of hidden object games. But there are also variants that rely on silhouettes, where you select things based on their outline; puzzles where you ‘pair up’ thematically similar items; and variants where you’re given a category – ducks, for example – and the remit to collect every last object in that category.
These aren’t all that new – Ocean Media and Crisp App Studio tend to lean on these different formats – but when coupled with the exhaustive approach to finding every item, it means there is just enough variety in the puzzles while you are sticking with each scene for longer than the average hidden object game.
I’m less convinced by some other quirks that are unique to Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition. Items are often completely different colours from what you’re used to. Bananas can be red, lemons can be blue. This is clearly to throw you off the scent, making the levels a smidge harder, but it adds a sense of uncertainty. If you see a lemon on the shopping list, your eyes naturally look for something yellow in the scene. And this creates doubt about what you’re looking for. Is Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition playing a dirty trick on me?
Like An Explosion In A Clip-Art Factory
The scenes are also messes of copy+paste. There is no rule of scale. In one scene, a drawing pin was larger than a sewing machine, which can be fun or annoying depending on mood. Items are thrown into a scene without any thought of whether they are actually lying on the floor or floating. Items reappear repeatedly in every scene – there is only one cat in the game, for example, but that one cat appears once in almost every level. And all of these in concert, as well as the blue lemons, gives the scenes a lazy, haphazard quality that could have been improved.
Which leads me to the most subjective issue of all. It may not even be an issue to you. There is a lot of art in Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition that feels at least generative-AI adjacent. You talk to people who have clothes that don’t make any sense. One bartender has a collar that kind of merges into his hairy cleavage, and I can’t imagine a human artist ever making that mistake. It just has that uncanny quality, and it will bother you proportionally to how much you hate AI-looking artwork (in my case, a lot).
The result is a hidden object game with a multitude of highs and lows. Its story is an utter, glorious mess, but therein lies a delicious, pantomime charm. The hidden object scenes are catnip for a player who likes to find almost every item, but those items feel like they have been cut out of a catalogue without any artfulness or care. The spectre of generative AI floats above it all.
As a hidden object game, Dark Town Secrets: Lost Lulu Collector’s Edition feels extremely rough-edged, but I can’t help thinking that it’s onto something. I’m hoping there are more secrets in Dark Town. That way, Ocean Media might be able to lessen the bad and bolster the good in a sequel.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/dark-town-secrets-lost-lulu-collectors-edition/9pcq7bqjb5d9
