The Most Unpolished Hidden Object Game On Xbox?
Is there a genre as uncool as hidden object games? I ask this as a huge fan of hidden object games, having played almost all of them on the Xbox. Hidden object games just seem to be in the middle of a Venn diagram of uncoolness: the perception is that they are played only by mums, they take very few risks, they’re low-effort to make, and they’re non-games in the same way walking simulators are.
I disagree with all four of those, by the way. But I mention them because, if someone were to make those arguments, they would hold up Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear as proof. It embodies all of the flaws. It is everything that is bad about the genre.
Was There Ever An Enchantment 1?
While Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear is a hidden object game, it’s not a hidden object adventure. There is no story in the traditional sense: you are being moved from puzzle to puzzle on a conveyor belt, and there’s no binding story to make sense of all the henges, temples and fairylands. The best that Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear can muster is a book on the Main Menu screen, which tells a disconnected short story across a dozen or so pages.
It made me realise how much I missed having a narrative in hidden object games. I’m one of the first to complain about how ropey Artifex Mundi’s and other developers’ stories are, but they at least provide some pay-off to the puzzling. It’s gratifying to get a shonky, late-90s animation having found all of the spanners in a hidden object scene.
In Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear, not only is there no story and no payoff, but there’s no sense that you are approaching any kind of end. A progression tracker would have helped. Without it, we felt like we were Dante looping around a circle of Hell, doomed to eternally replay hidden object scenes, but this time with eggs. No, crystals. No, panpipes.
If you had said that the levels were endless, generating infinitely thanks to procedural generation, we would have believed you. Only a ‘Complete the game’ achievement reassured.
A Needle In A Bag Of Needles
Of course, endlessly playing hidden object scenes would be fine if they were good. With satisfying puzzles, Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear might have represented a bottomless pot of puzzling that we could dip our hands into occasionally. But the puzzles are unequivocally NOT good.
It might not be clear from screenshots, but the background art in Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear is grainy as f**k. It looks like a photocopy of a photocopy. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and artful they may have originally been (because they are beautiful and artful, and the artist should feel no shame in them). They are just reproduced without detail.
What makes this problematic is that the things you’re finding are also grainy as f**k. You’re finding a smudge within a smudge. Adding insult to injury is that the objects are indistinct in the first place. They’re often fragments of jewellery and dreamcatchers that you wouldn’t take a second look at. And to round it off, Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear often recolours the items in the scene, so that they camouflage with the backdrop – but in turn look nothing like the original.
Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear breaks about four different unwritten rules of hidden objecting. The result is that canvassing for items in each scene is joyless. Either you’re spam-clicking canopies and bushes in the hope that one of the leaves is a treasure, or you’re spam-clicking the Hint button. About the only credit we can give Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear is that it provides Hint and Skip buttons, plus a magnifying glass, so you can bypass stuff if you simply don’t want to engage with it.
The Long And Winding Road
There isn’t even the silver lining of knowing that a scene is done – that you will never have to do it again. Because the scenes repeat. Each backdrop comes back four or five times, but this time with symbols or crystals embedded. Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear didn’t actually need its bonus episodes. We were more than done.
Breaking up the hidden object slop is some traditional puzzling. Hangman is possibly the least offensive of these. You have seven chances to pick letters, and each word is something connected to fantasy and fae literature. The UI is ugly but it’s harmless enough.
Then there are hex-based puzzles, where you rotate the pieces to make a picture. The backgrounds are lovely photos of jewellery, and clearly the makers of Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear have found a wonderful jewellery-maker. But the jewellery is too abstract to make a good puzzle. Do these bobbly beads match up with these bobbly beads? Satisfaction with a jigsaw puzzle is watching a picture come together, but you don’t quite get it here.
And then there’s the traditional jigsaw puzzles, which have the same problem – the jewellery, paintings and sculptures just make for abstract pictures – with the bonus of being clumsy. The pieces are different shards of glass, so it’s mostly comparing triangles and trapeziums to see if they are the same shape. Which isn’t satisfying – quickly becoming the mantra of Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear.
Business Rather Than Pleasure
We got 100% in Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear, and we see the 1000G as an emblem of patience, stamina and stupidity. Because it wasn’t fun at all. It was business rather than pleasure, and we can’t help but resent Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear, just a little bit, for every minute.
Hidden object fans, run away. There is no story to speak of, the art is a washout, and it never seems to end. Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear is what happens when hidden object games go wrong.
Important Links
Enchantment 2: Sun’s Tear Brings Magical Hidden Object Puzzles To Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/enchantment-2-suns-tear-brings-magical-hidden-object-puzzles-to-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/enchantment-2-suns-tear/9NPNC55MSWM8/0010
