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6.8 sorta fun
Just when you thought things had settled down, it's The Case of the Missing Acorn!
Hidden Magic, from Dekovir Entertainment, is a hidden object role-playing battle game. You play either a male or female mage searching for your wife or husband, recently kidnapped by goblins while you were out picking raspberries (in the middle of the night). While your beloved was sleeping, a troup of goblins broke in, bagged him or her, and quickly disappeared back into the woods. Returning to your forest hut, you find evidence of goblins and a torn up map revealing where they were headed - a black tower on the other side of the world! That can't be good!
Tearing up their map and hiding its pieces all over your hut was probably not the best way to keep their plans secret (goblins are so stupid! but lovable, in their weird way) and you quickly grab your alchemy bag and book of spells to give chase. It's a quest!
Between you and the black tower is a meandering path full of dangerous foes. Luckily you know a few magical spells, and the bottomless bag of alchemist items you carry allows you to do battle with any evil creature you may meet along your quest. These encounters make up the majority of the gameplay in Hidden Magic. You'll be following the map when all of a sudden a Smokey Seeker or Zombie or Witch will pop out and attack. If you're a match-3 game fan, you might recognize the inspiration for this system in games like Puzzle Quest.
The battle screen is a set of shelves or tree branches or similar background containing several dozen objects from your alchemy bag. At the bottom of the screen are three spells from your spell book. (These are selected at random and you have no control over which appear in your battles.) You and your single opponent each have a set number of hit points. You goal is to cast spells at your opponent until the creature's hit points reach zero - do so, and you're the victor! To cast a thunderclap spell, for example, you might have to find a hippo, a dark fish, an egg, a black pearl, and the letter W. Find and click on each of them and they'll fly into your cauldron. When the spell is complete, nifty particle effects will attack your enemy, dealing some hit point damage. Spells require a certain number of hidden objects to activate, but the specific objects are random each time the spell appears during battle. The next time you see the thunderclap spell, it might ask for a red frog, a gold nugget, a blue butterfly, a lotus flower, and an acorn.
Oh, but that spell I just mentioned is impossible to cast, because there is no acorn in the game. I stared and stared and stared but I never found an acorn. I sent screenshots to Professor Quercus at the Botany and Zoology building at OSU and he sent back this reply: "Uesugi, there are no acorns in that image. Best of luck, John." So whenever I ended up with a spell that required an acorn, I had to give up and focus on one of the other two spells, even if they were healing spells or lower-powered attack spells which wouldn't do as much damage to the enemy. What a frustrating bug!
Any successful attack on an enemy will increase the amount of time that passes before its next attack, up to a maximum of sixty seconds. When you meet an enemy, you're told what its attacks are and what its main weakness is. Zombies, for example, hate fire attacks. Witches, as we who are deathly afraid of witches all know, are especially vulnerable to water attacks. If you successfully cast an offensive spell that exploits an enemy's weakness, you'll score a critical hit and do an extra 50% worth of damage. Unfortunately, you don't have the option of choosing which spells appear onscreen - all you can do is choose the best one out of three.
(As you get closer and closer to finding your beloved, you'll find new magic books with more powerful spells.)
The game tries to trick you by generating similar items onscreen at once. Different colored spiders when all you need is a red one, or many cloves of garlic when all you need is a single clove, etc. After the battle you'll receive a score based on how many objects you found, how many wrong clicks you made, how many hit point losses you accumulated, etc. In that manner, there is some small penalty for minor clicking.
Between these hidden object battle scenes are... hidden object puzzle scenes, in which you're asked to find broken pieces of various objects. During these scenes, gameplay is untimed and you can use hints which regenerate after thirty seconds. And you'll definitely need to use the hints often, because many of the broken pieces of shields, books, hooks, hammers, bones, etc. are blended quite unnaturally into the background. I found these screens to be a considerable chore to get through. Some item manipulation puzzles are here as well - you may have to cut a squirrel out of a bag and exchange some nuts for its golden key, for example. These puzzles can only go so far toward making finding nearly impossible to discern broken pieces of objects fun.
A varied amount of minigames are also present in Hidden Magic. You'll run across puzzles, match-3 boards, memory boards, cryptograms, and more. Overall, I can't recommend this game. I actually got a bit bored looking for the same objects again and again and again. I think Dekovir Entertainment should have added four times as many different objects in the player's alchemy bag, to keep it fresh longer. And more effort should have been made to make all objects appear more natural - and less like clip art - on screen. One candle (you'll know it when you see it) is ridiculously off perspective.
Some hints: Where is the acorn? There is no acorn. Don't even bother looking for it. (Unless that curious bug has been fixed by the time you read this review.)
Mousing over items in the hidden object battle screens pops up a tooltip. Until you know all the objects by heart, use it if you're unsure about whether you're looking at a black pearl or a black pin.
Don't focus too much on a specific spell - try to find as many hidden objects from the list at the bottom of the screen as possible. Dumping ingredients for multiple spells into your cauldron doesn't ruin spells. (In real life you cannot mix an apple pie and a chocolate cake together in the same bowl - it's a real mess! But here it's okay.) Even a lower damage offensive spell will buy you time, and getting a healing or dispel spell out of the way might reveal an offensive spell matching the enemy's weakness.
Download The Case of the Missing Acorn