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5.4 mid-normal
Poser couple Anna Lyze and Will Scout are all set to unveil The Treasures of the Ages, the sum total of their priceless archaeological discoveries, when disaster strikes. Their arch enemy, Jacques, and his diminutive toadie, Toadie, steal the entirety of the collection out from under the couple's noses! The evil duo crash back into the museum just to give a final gloat and in their haste to exit a second time, Toadie drops something known as the Contrivance Device. Anna quickly recognizes it for what it is. By traveling to random cluttered locations and finding the random mundane objects the Contrivance Device indicates, the archaeologists can follow the supervillian and reclaim The Treasures of the Ages.
Yes, you've guessed correctly. This is a "find the item" game, like Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst. Except worse.
The evil Jacques has made a classic supervillian mistake: filling random locations with lots of mundane worthless junk and then building a remote control sized Contrivance Device which asks the bearer to collect certain random objects at the different locations... if the objects are correctly discovered, the device then points the bearer toward the location of Jacques and/or his secret lair. I almost made that mistake once myself; it's easy to do.
Anarchy Enterprises, creators of Hide & Secret, present the story of Anna and Will and Jacques and Toadie in comic book style cutscenes. These are simple but enjoyable to watch, and even have actors doing the character's voices. I was impressed. I raised one eyebrow like Leonard Nimoy. The gameplay starts out closely following the cutscenes, but unfortunately they soon part company. For example, early in the story, Will's blind fool love of pizza separates him from Anna. Even worse, she becomes Jacques' prisoner. Undaunted, Will continues to use the Contrivance Device to follow the villian. But as he collects items, Anna is somehow with him, collecting items, too. In two places at once. It's like Anarchy Enterprises just decided, "Hey, we're anarchists. We break the rules. Of physics." Or maybe they posit staggeringly unlikely occurrences of tunneling.
Correctly find an item and it will swing through the air, to be caught in Anna or Will's backpack. Larger items, like barbershop chairs, sometimes slow the game down as they fly across the screen - I guess it takes a lot of cpu power to swing a barbershop chair. (I tried myself and couldn't even budge one.) True story: Once while playing Hide & Secret I clicked on an elk. As it swung in circles out from the cluttered room, Will said, "Wow, I thought that only worked in the movies." So Will actually thinks that clicking on elk and making them fly into backpacks is some kind of movie magic...
What is he, an idiot?
Click on too many wrong items, and Jacques will give you a time penalty. This system is a bit more annoying than other "find the item" games, which only penalize you for clicking too fast. If your time runs out before you find the required number of items in each level, Jacques escapes and presumably Anna and Will fly their cargo plane to a pizza place, where Will eats so much pizza that he has to be taken to the hospital.
Items are repeated in different locations. You might be asked to find the same "old car" many times. I don't know how many times the Contrivance Device asked me to search for the "rooster lamp." And once it asked for a "molecule" ... which turned out to be a black star shaped child's plushie toy. I had to use the hint system on that one. (Because I had been looking for a molecule.) Worse than seeing items repeated, Anna and Will return to the same areas more than once, and all the objects are back in the same positions. After a while, you start to remember where everything's located. For a "find the item" game, Hide & Secret seems to have a real shortage of items.
Almost without question, the locations and items in Hide & Secret are drab and the items just look like they're floating in space. They don't have any shadows in the scene, and if they are shaded/highlighted, it doesn't always necessarily match their surroundings. I thought Abra Academy was cheap when it came to room and item design, but I guess I was wrong. This game is much worse. After playing Hide & Secret, I wish I could go back in time and give Abra Academy a score higher than 4.4. (At least Hide & Secret correctly colors items. No green lemons here.)
The in-game music is cinematic and perfectly matches the hungry Indiana Jones / way too much makeup Lara Croft theme that Hide & Secret is so desperately striving for. Unfortunately, the length of the single music track is about two minutes, so as excellent as it is, it might make your ears fall off.
If anything keeps you going in this game, it will be the well put together, but so-bad-they're-stupid, comic book cutscenes.
Ha ha, yeah they never explain why the clues lead them after the bad guys. I agree the same items keep popping up for you to find. Some are sooooo easy, like the peacock fan. They shouldn’t have repeates.