The Game Is Afoot: But This Foot Stinks A Little
You’d be hard-pressed to find a publisher who makes as predictable choices as Crisp App Studio. They specialise in hidden object games, but of a very specific type. They find well-loved stories in the public domain – sometimes very recently in the public domain – and use it as a cloth to drape over their puzzles. We’ve had Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, Aladdin and now we have Sherlock Holmes. Winnie the Pooh has to be next.
What is variable is how much that story really matters. In some of them, like Wizard of Oz: Hidden Object Games, the hidden object scenes stick religiously to the prose (to the point that the game only gets halfway through the contents of the first book). In others, like Sleeping Beauty: Hidden Object Game, the story is used as a setting. You get scenes and items that could have feasibly come from their world, and you might get the odd appearance from the characters, but mostly they are pushed aside.
You Might Need To Ignore The Anachronisms
Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects sits snugly in the middle. The scenes in this hidden object game are all from Victorian London, or thereabouts. We say thereabouts because there’s the odd Americanism and contemporary reference, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. And the items are mostly of that period too, with the operative word being ‘mostly’. You get the odd revolver, bicycle or telephone that is higher tech than the decade would allow.
Between the levels, Holmes and Watson occasionally appear (Watson often seems to be brandishing a gun at Holmes, which raises a giggle). They attempt to string the scenes together under the pretense of a murder case, but they do an utterly rubbish job of it. They go missing for large swathes of the game, so you lose track of the story, and there doesn’t seem to be any logical throughline to the case. The two characters say things, but they don’t always make sense. On occasion, they even give up, and just say ‘look around for items, old boy’.
There’s no Conan Doyle case that is being alluded to, and the characters aren’t quite right (Holmes is far from a genius in this tale). It all meant that I zoned out, rather than paid attention: I lost interest in the story and pushed it into background noise. Don’t come to Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects if you want a detective yarn.
Controls And Hint Systems Are All Strong And In Place
Which leaves the hidden object scenes, which have their charms. I found it refreshing to play one in this period setting, rather than something fairy-tale or contemporary. There are a wide variety of locations within that bracket, too: you visit prisons, pubs and libraries. The events don’t just take place in people’s private chambers. It’s all on the brown side, but Victorian London was unlikely to be all rainbows and confetti.
Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects adopts the traditional structure of its games. You play each scene multiple times to increase your star ranking. Stars are needed to unlock the next level, so you need to keep inching that ranking higher. To ensure things don’t get too grindy, the items in the levels are remixed – some moved, some not – and you need to find one extra item per replay. With more items, you can gain more points, which in turn gives you more stars.
Artificial lengthening like this isn’t new in hidden object games: most of them try to keep you playing for longer by getting you to replay scenes. But I can’t help thinking that Crisp App Studio have some of the least likeable methods of achieving it. The walls that stop you playing a level feel more arbitrary than most: there’s not a clear indication of what you will need to progress, nor the number of replays that will be required. And in Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects, too little of the scene changes between replays. While the items are shuffled about and you get one more to find, there is no change in rulesets. You are always finding named items or spot-the-differences. You can’t try the same level, but finding item-silhouettes this time. Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects doesn’t work that way.
The Mystery Of The Disappearing Game Modes
What tends to happen is that you play each level two to four times before you can move on to the next. There is some enjoyment there: I quite like mastering a level, understanding which items stay locked in place and which ones roam. ‘Umbrella’ might pop up, and I will know exactly where it is. But it’s also very easy to stay on a level for longer than you would want. If you’re motivated by progressing, or find a level particularly dark or uninteresting, then you’re stuck with it. And you really need to be getting scores that are better than previously; if you stutter and hesitate, then you can often reveal a score that barely helps you at all.
I tend to be charitable about replaying levels as I quite enjoy it for my ‘mastery’ reasoning. But even I could feel the gears of tedium turning. I didn’t understand why Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects failed to incorporate new rulesets. Crisp App Studio has done that before. Why is this any different?
There’s also not a whole lot to do in each hidden object scene. There are no bonus items, no hidden objects that exist on a kind of macro level, needing to be spotted in every scene. And there are precious few deviations from the shopping list format. A couple of spot-the-differences spring up, but that’s mostly it. I’ve never been a fan of having too many minigames and distractions in these kinds of games, but to have none? There needed to be something to break up the hidden object spotting.
Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects is less elementary, my dear Watson, and more rudimentary. It’s shorn of story, bonus items, minigames and different ways to play each hidden object scene, and in their place is grind. Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects is simplistic and overly so. Sherlock would have scoffed at the lack of brain-power that’s needed to play it.
Important Links
Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects Is A Fresh Play Anywhere Mystery – https://www.thexboxhub.com/detective-holmes-hidden-objects-is-a-fresh-play-anywhere-mystery/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/detective-holmes-hidden-objects/9N6W383ZC80D/0010
