But enough for my dad to have mainlined it alongside the Elder Scrolls? With 25 of these locations in each game, each one returned to over and over but never with the same objects to find twice, there was so much replayability here, certainly. And perhaps haven't enjoyed the gag of "SYMPHON" etched into the base of the house. Objects were made hugely bigger than they ought to be, and that made them harder to find! You still haven't noticed the incongruously placed party hat next to the angel statue and the camel at the foot of the tree trunk. Perhaps you could justify that squirrel or the cat, but beyond that? A baseball bat as the top of the doorway? Improbably vast acorns? That enormous dinner fork on the branch, next to the rope attached to a brush? This was what made these games so good: that there was a degree of wit behind the layout. And best of all - and this is where so many copycats got it so wrong - nothing is really where it should be. Look at every pillar of the treehouse base, every surface of the branches, it's all just absolutely packed. And I'll be my bum you didn't notice one of them when you first looked. From the top down you've got an axe, a femur, a railway spike, a ballet shoe, great big knife, horseshoe, revolver, and acorn. Look closer and you have the maddest muddle of items imaginable. Take a glance and you've got a treehouse in a tree. For instance, let's just study this screen together: And you can't really appreciate how well SpinTop did it until you've suffered through some of the endless shovel-loads of examples you'll find all over your favourite app store. What there is instead is a degree of wit behind its design that makes it still an absolute pleasure to play. It insinuates there's a storyline here, but there never actually is. But back in 2009, it was much more straightforward, and Escape Rosecliff Island demonstrates this with aplomb. Nowadays you'll probably get a big old storyline about missing victims of a mad witch, or a young female cop on the hunt for a killer, with vestigial adventure elements crowbarred in, most likely involving crowbars. Over the decade or so since SpinTop's reign at the top of the genre, as I mention they've quite significantly moved onward. Done well, as SpinTop were wont to do (there was a reason PopCap bought them as their casual gaming empire grew), and it was a very pleasantly distracting puzzle game in which you squinted at your monitor trying to find where the bloody hell a frog could be hiding in this image of a garage. Done badly, as the genre most often is, this quickly becomes a drearily repetitive chore of finding the same items on the same screens multiple times, as the game forcibly stretches itself out far beyond reason.
You're given a list of ten or so to find in any given screen, and a time limit in which to find them. If you've never played one, a hidden object game is - in their purest form - a collection of extremely busy mostly static scenes in which hundreds of items are "hidden". Created at a point in that peculiar genre's history where they'd yet to start awkwardly evolving their way into a sort of proto-adventure game, but perhaps showing the first signs of leg buds as it tentatively sniffed the beach, it delivers the core of the formula as straight down the line as you could ever imagine. This is, if anything, the platonic hidden object game. Let's not build up some unnecessary suspense here: there is not. So I figured I'd play it myself again today to see if there's something more going on in there than I thought. So could my father have read this one random post, never told me about it, and then become completely hooked on this game? I can't find out.
I'm no stranger to Rosecliff! In one of my many proud posts on RPS about my fondness for hidden object games, I wrote about this exact entry in SpinTop's collection back in 2009. Let alone that he'd been plugging away at this hidden object game for seemingly years. But Escape Rosecliff Island? I don't think I'd ever once heard him even mention it. As my dad entered his 60s, he got rather stuck in his gaming ways, frequently returning to those classics for his post-work winding down. Skyrim, X-COM: UFO Defense, and, er, hidden object game Escape Rosecliff Island. Looking in his library on there, there were three games that sat atop his "most played" list, with hundreds of hours clocked up for each. After my dad died in 2016, one of the more peculiar things I had to do was go through his computer, log him out of everything, and close down various accounts. I have a mystery that will likely never be solved. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.
0 kommentar(er)
