Cosy games are becoming increasingly popular on the Xbox, and I don’t think there’s a cosier series than Hidden Shapes. The games are about as fraught as a cuddle from a cloud. Just playing one for five minutes causes our troubles to float away. Had a bad sesh on Halo? Your best bet is to relax with Hidden Shapes: Cat Realm + Trick or Cats.
This is the third in the series, and it returns to one of YAW Studios’ favourite subjects: cats. They already had a run in their first game, Hidden Shapes: Animals + Lovely Cats, and they must have represented the series’ best sales, as they’re back here not once, but twice. The cats have been given a genre facelift, as ‘Trick or Cats’ has fun dressing up cats in Halloween costumes, while ‘Cat Realm’ tells a more joined up story about a feline knight and wizard in a fantasy setting.
For fans of the first games, precisely nothing has changed. It’s the same offering, with twenty puzzles in each of the two games, plus a ‘B’ version of each layout, where you can complete the picture’s second half. Some quick mental maths leads us to a total of eighty puzzles in total, which is not insignificant.
For people who aren’t aware what the hell these Hidden Shapes games are doing, well, it doesn’t take much time to describe. Hidden Shapes games are effectively console-friendly jigsaw puzzles. Instead of sorting or finding pieces, the pieces are all in the correct places. Easy, right? The only complication is that the puzzle pieces have been rotated through 90, 180 or 270 degrees, meaning that you have to tap on them once, twice or three times to restore them to their correct positions.
There’s no fiddly grabbing and dropping jigsaw pieces, there’s just a spot of twisting. You move your cursor highlight over to the piece you want and tap A to swivel. Soon, the picture begins to emerge, as you use the clues from each piece – a white line here, a curved structure there – to join it up with the next piece and so on. Once the puzzle is complete, fireworks go off, and you are onto the next.
We will fire off the usual compliments here. This really is intuitive and simple, making it ideal for virtually any age. The pictures, while more simplistic and kiddie-focused than we would normally like, have been made with the puzzle in mind. They flow naturally from one square to another, giving you all the information you need to keep solving the puzzle.
Better still, anything that could have made it tense, even in the slightest, has been stripped back and tossed in a bin. There’s no time limit. There are only four, arguably three positions that each piece could be in (since no piece starts in the right permutation), and you have a ridiculous number of hints to use, which replenish as you get more and more pieces in the correct orientation. We treated ourselves to an auto-complete of the last few puzzles because we had accumulated that many hints.
The result is a game that the non-gamers in our family love to pick up and play. You should have seen their faces when I showed them that a new Hidden Shapes game was out. That’s the impact that a cosy game can have, and it does make you wonder if games companies are missing a trick by not making more of them.
It’s incredibly hard to turn off our critical faculties, as the gamer in us does have some issues with it. YAW Studios still haven’t fixed the Picture A, Picture B problem. Each picture is split into two halves – a wizard on one side and a knight on the other, perhaps. In Picture A, you do the wizard, in Picture B you do the Knight. But the problem is that the images often overlap, and a rolling horizon might get broken by a Knight appearing on top. It means you get widowed lines, dots and stars that don’t join up to the rest of the picture. It means you’re finishing a partial picture, and that’s odd. We’re not sure why the artists can’t draw the horizon behind that Wizard on another layer, so that both Pictures A and B can feel complete; it’s a problem that rolls onto the next game, we guess.
There’s the art, too, which is functional rather than pretty. We particularly liked the Trick Or Cats pictures, with cats acting as Medusas and Hydras (it’s the second game we’ve played in two days that makes the Cat-thulhu joke, alongside Castle Full A of Cats), but we weren’t exactly going to frame any of the pictures for our living room. It got us wondering what would be lost if the images were more detailed, more colourful, and we’d love to find out. It’s more of a problem here, as cats – and their specific teardrop-eyed looks – are repeated so frequently, so the pictures can also feel samey.
But as the ASMR tickled the back of our neck, and the dreamy relaxation kicked in, we didn’t care much for its faults. Because this is the cosy queen of gaming. If you want to brainlessly toss away an hour or two of your evening, then Hidden Shapes: Cat Realm + Trick or Cats is where it’s at. You’ll emerge from the session afterwards feeling like all of the mental knots and tensions have been massaged into nothingness.
