Hidden Haunts

Hidden Haunts is another Hidden Object Game newly landed on Facebook, providing new scenes in deliberate disorder for you to look for the elusive items. As implied in its title, the game is backed by a mystery-enveloped story, similar to World Mysteries in this aspect, which leads you into a haunted gothic village, Lost Haven.

Greystone Manor is your first spot where you do the first search in the sitting room, finishing the scene and lifting the curse. You need to find the objects in the list and the Mystery Object revealed in image halfway to complete a scene. You can use the Hint when stuck, and wild, blind clicking leads to 3s’ suspension as penalty. As usual, scores are based on speed, skill, intuition and combo and rewards are coins and XP. And each scene has five Medals to fill in: while sometimes you will be asked to get a certain amount of Medals (by repeated play) for one scene to finish one quest, you may need to come back, re-searching scenes for XP so as to level up. Playing scenes costs Energy (50 in total to begin with), 10 per play, so you just can’t stay in for long without buying energy for cash.

Scenes are designed beautifully. Several rounds of searching may bring home to you some tips, one of which is that the hidden objects have the habit of sort-of ‘pasting’ to similar things, such as chess piece blending with chair handle, one penny in the center of a sunflower and a ruler on the surface of a hedge beam. The placement of objects is generally fair -bumble bee nestling on a pot of flowers and eggs placed in the hen-shaped basket- though you may still fail to spot them. But it’s not without quirks. For example, ‘Spade’ in the list, you search for the tool that you can use to shovel dirt, fail to spot it and finally use Hint only to find the narrowed scope circling a mark – the corresponding symbol in the card deck – on a sofa.

While scenes unlocked in the manor can be played without time limit, you can visit friends’ to try the Speed Search daily, finding as many objects as you can in 60s. You can do a little cheat by seeing the item list first before jumping to search, but it’s still a challenge. This quick search is also done alone, not competing against others.

It adopts the mechanics of mixed building and puzzle-solving, just as many recent HOGs such as Gardens of Time and Hidden Chronicles do. Playing scenes get you XP to level up, and level-up unlocks more structures and decoration (tagged with an amount of Insight) to add in the yard, which charges the so-called Insight meter to open more playable scenes in turn.

Hidden Haunt is just a typical single-player-featured HOG, bearing not much difference from others in the same genre. If you look for more playable scenes, it’s not a bad choice.

Hidden Haunts Screenshots: