Find All

PC

I don’t know how your week’s going, but mine’s a mess. I’m exhausted, working a vast amount to produce so little, and just wishing everything was made of sofa. I think on another day I’d perhaps be a bit more dismissive of Find All, a one-screen hidden object game with about an hour’s play. I’d be wrong on that other day, because this is just the thing I needed.

I love all these post-Hidden Folks games, that use a black-and-white aesthetic, sporadic moments of animation, and a happy, smiley atmosphere. I mean, it must suck to be Adriaan de Jongh and realise your brilliant original game became a genre, and now any sequel you create will feel derivative of everyone else’s copying you. But still, it keeps me happy.

Find All is one such copy, but reduced to just a single scene, albeit a very large and detailed one. It’s a small stretch of town houses, and you’re asked, at first, to find all the cats. And then the dogs, and the plants, and the keys, and then the bottles, and perhaps some mice, then the racoons, and you get the idea. What’s lovely here is each you click on gets coloured in, with larger sections of the backgrounds fully coloured when you’ve collected everything in them. It works really well, and looks just lovely.

It doesn’t do anything special or clever beyond this. It’s just a very cheerful, sweet image with the odd animated character (including an ever-driving car being driven by a crocodile, and a hot air balloon floating overheard), and as you play it gets more colourful. That’s what I was after today.

It’s a shame a bit more effort wasn’t put in beyond that. There are no hints for instance, which made my task of finding the last bottle become one of tedium rather than pleasure. There are also no resolution settings, and the Steam achievement nonsense fired off at all the wrong times, and kept getting stuck on screen (although I’ve no idea if that’s the game or Steam’s flaw). And it could have done a better job of the colouring toward the end, perhaps shading more of the scene, rather than have it all suddenly filled in when you find the last object.

Still, it’s a buck, or 79p, so let’s not get too picky. And perhaps the title was a small clue that huge effort wasn’t going to go into peripheral details. I guess we should be grateful it’s not called “Find Stuff”. And yet, the actual little game is just lovely! So go figure.

Clearly a lot more of it would have been more lovely. It’d be great if this were level one of ten, or whathaveyou, but then if wishes were horses the universe would be collapsing in on itself as all causation and logic ceased to be meaningful, and no one wants that.

• Very Very LITTLE Studio
• Steam
• 79p/79c/$1

All Buried Treasure articles are funded by Patreon backers. If you want to see more reviews of great indie games, please consider backing this project.