This is a spot the item game that also takes you on a journey through different time periods. You are task with finding specific items and must zoom, interact and uncover things to find each one. It's ideal for young players with colourful hand-drawn visuals and without a strict time limit. Hidden Through Time is an absolute gem of a game. The basic idea is simple but couple that with the scale of the levels and some of the obscure hints it’ll provide plenty of hours of hide and seek. Hidden Through Time is a cute game of hide and seek with objects scattered throughout the wonderful history of our world! Use cryptic hints to discover every secret as you explore the colourful hand drawn levels. Find enough objects to advance to the next stage, and make your way through all four great ages!
Find hidden objects in this Where's Waldo-style game that's great for families and groups.
When I was kid, I had the Where’s Waldo? video game on the original Nintendo (NES), which challenged players to help Waldo get to the moon by finding him across a number of cluttered scenes before running out of time. The game was really repetitive and the graphics were blurry, but I enjoyed it and I still look back fondly at the experience.
All of these years later, Hidden Through Time, a new Where’s Waldo-style game, is coming to console, PC, and mobile devices. It features similar gameplay to that old NES title, but with modern graphics and limitless replayability.
We had a chance to try the Switch version of the game.
What is Hidden Through Time?
Hidden Through Time is a hidden object game in the style of Where’s Waldo, rather than the style of story-driven point-and-click hidden object games (these games tend to include puzzles as well as hidden object scenes, among other features). The “Story Mode” doesn’t actually have a story; you’re simply asked to find the required objects in each level, and there is no time limit. The game starts in the Stone Age and gradually progresses through different time periods, making stops in ancient Egypt, the middle ages, and the Wild West.
How is Hidden Through Time played?
Each stage features a cluttered scene containing a variety of objects that fit the level’s time period or theme. For instance, in Egyptian levels, you may find cats, pyramids, and colorful market stalls. The objects you’re required to find are pictured at the bottom of the screen, and when you think you’ve found one, you can move your cursor on top of the object in the scene and press a button on your controller to mark it. If you’ve found the correct object (some items look very similar), it will be marked off of the list and you can move on to search for another item. There’s no penalty for incorrect guesses.
In each level, one of the objects is associated with a text clue that can help you find it. For instance, a clue for a banana in one level reads “A wild fruit, only found in oases.” This tells you to look for the banana in an area that resembles an oasis.
To move from one level to the next, you’ll need to find the required number of items. This number is cumulative across all stages, so if you find lots of items in earlier stages, you may be able to skip finding objects in later levels (or even skip a level altogether) if you’ve already found the required number of objects to continue.
While most of the game is about simply observing a scene until you spot a required object, you can interact with the scene in some subtle ways by clicking on structures like tents and pyramids to view inside them. Required objects may be found in these areas.
Finally, in addition to the game’s Story Mode, you can create your own scenes in a map editor and share them with other players online, as well as play through levels created by other people.
How does the map editor work?
The map editor, along with the ability to play stages created by other players, gives Hidden Through Time endless replayability, since there will always be new ways to play even after you’ve completed the single-player stages.
Hidden Through Time Mac
When creating a map, you’ll start with a blank screen and are required to place each and every item, one by one, inside the scene. You can mix and match items from all four time periods, or go for realism by creating a scene that fits a particular theme or tells a story. As you place objects, you can set which ones are the required objects that other players will need to find. You can also type your own text clue for one of the objects.
Unfortunately, the map editor has cumbersome controls that take a lot of getting used to. There are four separate menus positioned on the outside edges of the screen, which allow you to do everything from selecting an object to place in the scene to changing an object’s orientation to “undoing” your last action, and so on. You access these menus using the d-pad. When you want to interact with the objects you’ve already placed in the scene (for instance, if you want to move an object to another location), you’ll use the left joystick.
Once you get used to the controls, you can create elaborate scenes, but the game could greatly benefit from a menu redesign, or at the very least, a more in-depth tutorial for players that are new to the mode.
Since we were playing on the Switch, we thought using touch-screen controls would improve this experience, but it was arguably worse. At one point, we inadvertently deleted an entire building and its contents from our scene, and even tapping the “undo” button couldn’t bring it back.
These control issues aside, we love the idea of the map editor and its potential for creating both themed and challenging new scenes to play.
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Is there anything else we should know?
The game’s Story Mode doesn’t feature a tutorial, and while it generally doesn’t need one, players should be told that you can zoom in on a scene to view objects more closely (this information is found in the game’s options menu). The default “zoom” level is virtually unplayable -- both when the Switch is docked (we played on a 55” TV at a distance of around 10’ 9” from the screen) and when playing in handheld mode. However, zooming in all of the way fixes that.
Hidden Through Time For Macbook Pro
What’s the final verdict?
While it may seem like we were pretty negative on Hidden Through Time, we actually really enjoyed the game. We’re definitely disappointed by the issues with the map editor, but if you take the time to become comfortable with the controls, the possibilities for unleashing your imagination are wide open.
The story mode is also a lot of fun, and even though it’s pretty difficult to find every single object in every scene, the ability to move on once you’ve found “enough” items prevents the game from becoming frustrating.
Hidden Through Time For Macbook
Finally, we love the game's multiplayer potential. While only one person needs to control the cursor, everyone in the room can search for objects in a scene and point them out when they spot them.
Hidden Through Time launches on Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android on March 12. The game will be $7.99 on console and PC, and $2.99 on mobile devices. It’s rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. If your family enjoys Where’s Waldo or I Spy books, we recommend checking it out.
Disclosure: SuperParent received a code to download Hidden Through Time for coverage purposes. Our coverage remains objective.
Hidden Through Time For Macbook Air
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Often, when I’m not sure what I want to play, I go browsing the new releases on Steam, Itch.io, and the Nintendo eShop until something grabs my attention. Usually, it’s a game that fits my mood, which, like a lot of other people’s moods lately, is a bit more anxious than usual. While in such a state, I’m almost more interested in playing something familiar and relaxing instead of something new. That’s probably why I’ve put so many hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and also why Hidden Through Time got my attention.
Hidden Through Time is a game where you locate hidden objects in a scene, similar to 2017’s Hidden Folks, the Where’s Waldo? books, and the puzzles inside the Highlights magazine at your childhood doctor’s office. It’s about as simple as a game could be: it presents you with some objects, animals, and / or people at the bottom of your screen, which you have to locate. Once you’ve found enough of them, you then move onto the next level.
This is how things progress in the game’s story mode, which doesn’t really have a story. Rather, it is a progression of 26 levels that take place across four fantastical interpretations of specific periods in human history: Stone Age with dinosaurs, ancient Egypt with giant gods walking around, medieval Europe with goblins, and the American Wild West. Each period provides a unique aesthetic, along with new sets of buildings, objects, and people. Aside from being visually pleasing, this also helps the gameplay from growing stagnant.
By the time you’re near the end of a time period, you will have adapted to become more efficient at parsing the levels for where things are, so it can start to feel repetitive. In this way, the change in appearance isn’t just visual, but a new challenge to adapt to the new visual language of the level. For instance, the Stone Age period is full of rounded and curved things; a lot of green between the trees, bushes, and dinosaurs; and trees and bushes are often overlapping or hiding other objects. In the ancient Egypt stages that follow it, it is more yellow, things are more straight line and square, while people and buildings are more densely packed together, yet not overlapping in the same way.
There are a lot of similar choices that might go unnoticed while you’re playing, but they show that a lot of consideration is made about how things are hidden in a scene. Generally, objects are near where you might expect them to be; a sword will likely be near a knight, and bread will usually be in a kitchen or at a meal. But the game also uses small scenes within the level to not only look amusing, but also as a way to draw your attention to an area where an object might be. For example, in one stage, you are tasked with finding a sword stuck in a stone that happens to be hidden near a wizard and a boy, aping Merlin and a young King Arthur.
When the game breaks from your expectation or if you find yourself confounded as to where something is, there is a hint system. These are some of the best hints I’ve seen in a game, as they are like their own little puzzle that tells you just enough to point you in the right direction. A hint in one level for a small stone statue was something to the effect of, “I made this so I’d be less lonely,” which tells you that you need to be looking for someone or something by itself and that they perhaps resemble the statue.
Perhaps the game’s best feature is that it has a level creation tool, which lets you quickly make your own levels and upload them for other people to play. The editor is all drag and drop, first letting you pick which of the time periods you want to use, and then giving you access to all of the buildings, people, and objects from it that you can use to populate your level. Or if you aren’t interested in making levels, you can just download other people’s, effectively giving you access to far more levels than you could possibly play.
Hidden Through Time is also available on pretty much everything — PC, Mac, iOS, Android, PS4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch — so you can play it however you want anywhere inside (and, eventually, outside) your home. The gameisn’t exactly revolutionary, but what it does it does very well.
Hidden Through Time was created by Crazy Monkey Studios. You can get it for $7.99 on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam (Windows and macOS) for $1.99 on iOS and $2.99 on Android. It takes about three to four hours to finish.