eiii: What are these hidden object games exactly? Are they just adventure games with more pixel hunting?
What Leroux said here. My impressions of the Enigmatis series, with preamble:
I played the early hidden object games, where most of the fun came from looking at an image with many, many different objects arranged haphazardly, like so:
https://www.unigamesity.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/01-agency-of-anomalies.jpg and trying to find the objects matching the words. The better games (especially the Mystery Case Files series) made use of a variety of ways to depict a given word, including synonyms: so, "plane" could be the vehicle or the tool, "Sun" could be the star in the sky or in a picture or the astronomical symbol or the abbreviation of "Sunday" on a calendar, etc. Worse games decided to cut corners and just made players search for objects by image.
Now if you look at the screenshots for Enigmatis (warning: heavy spoilers if you actually pay attention to the characters), not a single screenshot depicts the traditional hidden object milieu. That's because these games are actually very, very weird point-and-click adventures, and the hidden object parts are minigames.
You can see the genre evolve by looking at this series:
Enigmatis 1 has 18 mandatory hidden object scenes, and many (probably all of them) are repeated at least once with a different selection of objects to find. There are a couple situational minigames here and there, a point-and-click chassis (more about it later), and a clue-matching thing that works kinda like in Blackwell (except the observations of the lead character make you want to smash your own head against concrete). But ~40 screens of object-finding is a lot.
Enigmatis 2 has 7 HOG screens, reused, but you can play a pair-matching game instead. Again, some minigames, the clue-matching is here, but the bulk of the game is a point-and-click adventure.
Enigmatis 3 has 9 HOG screens and I think none of them are reused. I spent about 5 hours with the game and like 30 minutes looking for hidden objects. The rest of the game is a point-and-click adventure with production values AGS-using devs would kill for, characters moving, emoting, doing things, etc (sure, there are only 4 characters including yourself, but still), and generic but extremely satisfying object interactions.
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Now, about the adventure part.
The plot is primitive -- generic blockbuster fare, something a five-year-old girl could write. (It's also christarded and more than a little bit racist.) However, it still managed to pleasantly surprise me several times. More five-year-old girls should write blockbuster movies.
The meat of Enigmatis 2 and 3 is object interactions. By 3, the art of satisfying UI had been polished (hurr hurr) to perfection. Everything clicks, thumps, whooshes, whirrs, and audibly sparkles. As usual in point and clicks, you need to either click on an object on the screen with your mouse cursor, take an item out of your inventory and click on something on the screen, or use two inventory items together.
Mechanically, the main difference is that even on the easiest "casual" difficulty, there's little to no indication what on the screen is interactive and what isn't. Sometimes, objects that you can use inventory items on sport an onhover cog. Again on the easiest difficulty, you can have the game highlight objects that activate HOG minigames. (This is necessary, because HOG screens can activate and reactivate if there's a new plot development, and you wouldn't know to lolrandomly click on a disassociated area on a random screen.) Otherwise, you're alone with the hint button, so have fun clickhunting (exacerbated by the extreme level of detail in each scene).
Story-wise, you can't really predict and plan for anything. The games lack any sort of coherent vision for the puzzle progression. A traditional puzzle is a lock with a weirdly-shaped keyhole, or a piece of art (mosaic, statue) with its, er, piece missing. You wouldn't know where to go looking for one; what remains is to take note of it, solve all puzzles you know about and look for more object interactions until one of them produces the key/piece. The games don't leave you the opportunity to think, "hey, I saw a library earlier, maybe I should check there for the book I need". If you need to go to the library to get a book, you will be told so in no uncertain terms and record it in your quest journal. But if you need duct tape, it's in a safe in a vampire's mansion, and the lock is a Simon Says for no reason, and you won't know until you find it.
A few puzzles are repeated ad nauseum with nominally different objects (and I only played these three HOGs in like a decade). The third game even poked fun at the repetition. Key to door, mosaic piece to mosaic, missing limb/weapon to statue, something flat and sturdy to pry a thing open, something long to reach a thing out of reach, a wire to pick a lock. Inventory items are discarded when they aren't internally useful any more, so you might be looking for three different chisels within an hour. Dammit girl, was it so hard to keep the first one!? Others are telegraphed and workmanlike: something is frozen into a piece of ice (*click* "hey! maybe I could melt the ice"), look around for a heater. These employ cartoon physics, and not the good fun crazy physics but the uninspired ignorance of college dropout expats who think sunlight can be focused into a laser beam with a hobby store magnifying glass (but since most interactions are fairly pedestrian, they are also broadly correct). Still others are "original" within the trilogy at least, and also colorful and "satisfying".
Avoiding spoilers, I will only say AAA releases can learn a thing or two fron the general tone of the endings.
TL;DR the Enigmatis games were more satisfying than offensive and I don't feel like I wasted my money. YM of course MV.
