A Hidden Pup Game With Surprisingly Few Pups
You might look at the title of I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition and think that you will spend most of the time finding pups. There are, after all, more cat-finding games on the Xbox than you could possibly imagine, so it’s not a huge leap to imagine hunting for dogs rather than felines.
It might be a little surprising, then, to find that you’re not actually finding all that many pups in I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition. I mean, they’re certainly there: in each of the hidden object scenes there are four pups to find. But they’re not exactly hidden, and four pups pale into comparison to the twenty or thirty other objects you have to find. While ‘I Love Finding Pups’ is technically true, you have to be pretty eager to find tambourines, wrenches and ladybirds too.
There are Plenty More Hidden Object Games in the Sea
Fans of Ocean Media hidden object games will not be surprised at all about this. Ocean Media have taken over from Artifex Mundi in being the most prolific hidden object game makers on the Xbox Store. Their games tend to take photographic scenes and then scatter completely unrelated items onto them. They tend to look like the jumble sales of a madman.
Ocean Media then release waves of these games onto the Xbox Store (there are three others launching on the same day as I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition) and their themes tend to be loose, if there’s a theme at all (I still love the half-hearted naming of So Much Stuff Collector’s Edition). I’d wager that you would go mad if you played them all in succession.
Which is a long way of saying that I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition is not quite as dog-focused as you may want. There are a few dogs to find in each scene, and some jigsaw puzzles – included to punctuate the finding – feature dogs. But mostly this is the usual Ocean Media repackaging of their hidden object formula.
Proudly Peeping for Pups
I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition takes you through a revolving door of puzzles. It starts with a traditional hidden object scene, with somewhere in the USA getting item-bombed. As mentioned, you need to find poorly hidden dogs (cute) and a shopping list of items that gets refreshed as soon as you spot an item.
I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition mixes things up by including a second scene. By pressing LT, you can switch to a second, thematically connected diorama, and find items there. The shopping list helpfully greys out any items that are not in the current scene, so there’s no confusion about where it might be. After finding all of the items, you get a star ranking based on your speed, accuracy and number of hints used (a helpful system that’s on a cooldown, and not particularly punishing if you use it).
These hidden object scenes are absolutely fine. The pictures are reasonably clear (a few items slink into dark, blurry backgrounds, but they’re rare), the shopping list is self-evident (I only had one instance when I wondered what they meant by ‘helm’, and it wasn’t a helmet), and it’s possible to find things at speed. The backdrops are a little blandly chosen, as they’re all real-world and middle-American, but they do a job.
After the hidden-objecting, you get whisked to a spot-the-difference. There are two dogs to spot here – again, not actually all that hidden – and then you need to find 12 differences between the two pictures. These differences range from bleeding obvious to near-invisible, and we averaged a hint on each, on average. For some reason, we seem to be blind to slats that are missing on houses.
These spot-the-differences are okay. They have a minor habit of stacking differences in very close proximity to each other, which almost feels like cheating. But mostly they are fine and we didn’t dread them.
Why do Hidden Object Games Love Jigsaws so Much?
Following that, it’s time for a jigsaw puzzle or a close relative to one. These are the ones that I ended up dreading. I’m not a fan of jigsaw puzzles on the Xbox at the best of times: they’re too fiddly to port enjoyable to an Xbox controller. I seem to spend most of my time awkwardly trying to remove them from a picture so that I can see what’s going on. But in I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition, they’re also erratically complex.
On some occasions, the puzzle is fine. Perhaps you just have to rotate pieces that are already socketed, or flip them over to make a picture. These feel ideal for pad controls. But other times, I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition goes rogue and makes the puzzle-pieces into tiny circles, ovals or cacti, and then chucks dozens of them at you. It just ends up like eating M&Ms with chopsticks. I skipped a decent 30% of them.
This pattern of puzzles continues for the length of I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition, and into its bonus content too: hidden object, spot-the-difference, jigsaw puzzle. On average they’re fine and do a job, just with jump-scares of overly intricate jigsaw puzzles.
Guilt-free Dog Adoption
All that’s left to mention is an adoption system. This is where the title of the game becomes a little more relevant, as you can spend stars that you’ve accumulated to adopt dogs. These dogs don’t do much other than act as a collection system and give you a different little buddy who sits at the bottom of your game screen. But hey: it’s nice to feel like I’ve adopted a dog and made their day.
I found I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition to be a little middle-of-the-road for an Ocean Media hidden object game. The pup-theming is a little half-hearted, and there’s no narrative to keep the momentum going, nor are the scenes remarkable in any way. But pups are cute, and being able to switch between scenes within a hidden object diorama is at least somewhat fresh.
If you love finding pups in random locations (it happens to us all), then I Love Finding Pups Collector’s Edition is a harmless little puzzle game. But while it’s cute, it’s a little perfunctory too. There’s not much here that points to genuine, human care being put into making it. The result can feel a little like yet another Ocean Media hidden object game being tossed onto the pile.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/i-love-finding-pups-collectors-edition/9p16l75l0s9l
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