Buying a Book May be the Better Option
A Spot-the-Difference game doesn’t strike me as something you can get wrong. Two pictures, several differences, and a cursor for pointing them out. You’d be hard-pushed to muck that up.
Zoo Clues tests that theory. It fumbles things that most other spot-the-differences get right, and the result is a game that is barely (and bearly) playable.
A Spot-the-Difference Safari
The pictures that Zoo Clues has chosen are of zoo animals in their enclosures. They’re chibi and colourful, making them decent subjects for a kid’s game. The characters are bold and the pictures clear, to the degree that you could imagine them being in a kid’s colouring book bought from The Works.
What I can’t shake is a feeling of artificialness from the pictures. When there’s more than one animal in the picture, the beasts look near-identical, from the expressions on their faces to their poses. It’s like they’ve been copy-pasted and rotated, rather than re-drawn. Each picture has the same grasses, clouds and fences. If a human made thirty of these images they would go mad with the sheer repetition.
Which raises the AI question. But it’s very easy to throw that label around when it could just be re-use of asset libraries. What’s important is whether the pictures feel authored and artistic, and the answer is definitely not. The pictures are soulless.
Something is Wrong With This Picture
Each of the pictures has ten differences to be found. Almost immediately, something feels wrong. There are substantially more than ten differences in each picture. That’s because the pictures are misaligned. You can see slightly further to the left in one image, and slightly further to the right on the other. The pictures aren’t the same.
It frustrated the hell out of our family. My littlest one, at seven years’ old, couldn’t wrap her head around it. She would be constantly up at the screen, pointing out a rock or tree-knot that didn’t appear in the second image, but of course it wasn’t a valid difference. And if your target audience is befuddled, that’s a problem.
A second problem comes from an odd source: the borders to the puzzles are big and intrude on the picture. They’re chunky foliage frames, and their leaves cross into the picture. Which, again, meant that our kids were pointing out differences that weren’t valid. After about five minutes of the game saying ‘no’ to every spotted difference, they ran off and played something else.
The actual differences, the ones that Zoo Clues want you to find, come in a few different categories. There are four or five that are incredibly obvious colour-shifts. A clump of grass is purple; a lion’s ear is green. These are so ludicrously obvious that you can check them off immediately.
But the following five or six differences are a different matter. It takes a few puzzles to learn what Zoo Clues tends to do. There is almost always a missing cloud, rock, grass tuft and/or fence post. Check those first. And then there’s almost always a missing toe, ear, leg or nostril on the animals. That will leave you with one or two differences, and it’s here that things get trivial. Because there will always be the tiniest difference in a muscle contour, a blade of grass or a lone pebble.
The Odd One Out, Emphasis on Odd
It turns out that Spot-the-Difference is a bit of an art, because it’s clear that Zoo Clues doesn’t have it. On the one hand, the differences are too predictable. There’s a system that you can follow, and 90% of the differences abide by that system. If you’re an adult playing, the pattern is obvious and ruins the spotting. And the remaining differences are too wildly inconsistent with the others: they are tiny, almost invisible to the naked eye, which doesn’t line up. They feel unfair.
It doesn’t matter that there is a Challenge Mode, as all it does is apply a star-ranking and a time limit. The criticisms overwhelm Zoo Clues. The pictures are fine, but become echoes of each other, as the backdrops and chibi eyes turn into a similar sludge. The lack of image alignment is such an obvious nuisance that you wonder why it wasn’t ironed out. And the differences never feel satisfying, swinging like a pendulum between obvious and ridiculously tiny.
Even at £3.29, we can’t build a case to buy Zoo Clues. There are plenty of spot-the-difference games out there, and most of them work. Zoo Clues, arguably, doesn’t. It might seem flippant, but buying an actual spot-the-difference book would be a better option than investing in Zoo Clues.
Important Links
Buy an Xbox Series X|S Optimised edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zoo-clues/9PF8LS0MJNXX/0010
There’s a version for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zoo-clues-xbox-one/9PMXG923CQLR/0010
And a PC drop – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zoo-clues-windows/9N4N3MC3ZDL2/0010
