A Hidden Object Game That Is Like Circling Items In An Argos Catalogue
Open the Xbox Store in any given week and there’s a good chance that there will be some hidden object games there. That’s down to two publishers – Ocean Media and Crisp App Studio – emptying their back catalogues onto the Store in recent months. Crisp App Studio tends to stir in some out-of-licence IP (the recently released Detective Holmes: Hidden Objects being a good example), while Ocean Media have more of a scattershot approach. Depending on mood, they will attempt a more narrative-heavy approach, or they will take a pair of scissors to a homeware catalogue and produce something more generic. A good example of one of that ‘more generic’ category is Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition.
Take a look at one of the screenshots in this review and you will see what we mean. It’s a jumble of stock photos, Prittsticked onto a picture of a room or backyard. The aim is to connect the hidden object scenes with a very loose theme of ‘images you might find in a Homes & Gardens magazine’, but – at least to me – the effect is to produce images that are so inoffensive and charmless that your mind forgets them as soon as it has seen them. Or, at least, that’s what happens to me.
Slow And Steady Loses The Race
Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition doesn’t make a great first impression, and it’s not just because the hidden object scenes are a tad artless. The cursor moves at an incredibly sluggish speed, and there’s a bit of a jumpscare when you open the in-game menus: you can’t alter the speed there. I worried that I would be reviewing the game at about one fifth of the speed that I wanted. But there was the smallest sliver of salvation: in the main menu (not the pause menu), it was possible to move a slider and improve it. Although, we should note, even at top speed it was still far slower than other Ocean Media hidden object games. I’m not entirely sure what the thought was here, and we suspect it will get amended in an upcoming patch, as what is here is a bit pants.
The game structure is linear, and takes you through a rhythm of a few hidden object scenes and then a minigame-like puzzle, several times over. To give Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition some credit, there’s some handy depth to the item-locating. In each scene, there is the usual shopping list of items – sometimes an actual list, sometimes silhouettes, and occasionally a number of similar items (‘find all the cakes’ etc). But there are some bonus items too. There are two or three silhouetted items to find for bonus points, and Ocean Media have animated a few cats and dogs for you to awww over before popping them out of existence with your cursor.
There are also glittering spots on the image which open up into a kind of ‘sub-scene’. You might click on a shed, which zooms you inside the shed. There, you can find some of the more sneaky items on the list. It adds a neat extra dimension, even if it is – again – handled differently from other Ocean Media games. Normally, the publisher will add a colour filter to the items on the shopping list, handily letting you know if they are in these sub-scenes or not. For some reason Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition doesn’t bother, and while that adds some difficulty, it’s edged with frustration. I’m not sure why Ocean Media has neglected to include this feature when it’s in every one of their other games.
A Hidden Object Game With Occasional Hidden Depths
But ignoring the slow cursor, the unimaginative scenes and the lack of colour-coding on the shopping list, the hidden object aspect of Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition is pretty decent. It even educated me on occasion: I now know what a djembe, penny board and ‘tourist rug’ is (an instrument, a larger skateboard and a yoga mat, if you’re interested).
Outside of the hidden object scenes are the usual puzzles and minigames that Ocean Media like to incorporate so that you don’t hit fatigue. They’re occasionally imaginative, with board-game-like puzzles that I haven’t encountered before. One involved us moving bishop-like around a hex boar, and it had us confounded for ten minutes or so. There are familiar puzzles too, including some jigsaws, but they’re all skippable if you’d prefer.
There’s a chunk of content here, not least because of the ‘Collector’s Edition’ suffix. You get a bonus number of levels and puzzles, plus something called ‘My Room’, which lets you spend the coins/points from the main game on buying some furniture for a lounge. If it was a core part of the game, we would be lambasting it for being utter rubbish, since you can’t choose what goes where, and you run out of stuff to purchase after the halfway point. But it’s not core, and sits on the main menu for when you want it, so we won’t.
Not Even In The Top 3 Hidden Object Games From Its Release Week
We’ve played almost all of the Ocean Media hidden object games (we have no excuse for our actions) and we would slot Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition somewhere near the poorer end of the spectrum. That’s mostly because of negligence on Ocean Media’s part. Their hidden object games have a template that works, and for inexplicable reasons, Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition and AVI Games ignore that template. The cursor movement is too slow, the quality-of-life improvements aren’t there, and it’s generally soulless.
On a purely functional level, Sweet Home: Look & Find Collector’s Edition is fine. If you buy every hidden object game that lands on the Xbox Store then this will deliver on your expectations. You will poke items and be happy. But if you cast any kind of critical eye over it, or compare it to other games from the same publisher, then it’s lazy enough to be a disappointment.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sweet-home-look-and-find-collectors-edition/9NG906L1CK67/0010
