44 Hidden Naomis

(Patricianus just... stole my review? Dude.) Nope! OK, first of all, whoever decided the Steam page should have a jumpscare on it can get in the bin. Best argument for turning off auto-playing videos on Steam store pages I've ever come across. Anyway. The game. Let's get the positives out of the way. It controls well enough? The music's pretty nice? The visual design of many things, in isolation, is pretty decent? That's it, that's the strongest praise I could give it. Let's get to brass tacks. Let's start with visuals, just to get it out of the way. The backgrounds are garbage, blurry incoherent low-res messes that look like they may well be AI generated. Just smears of incoherent black and white "artwork". That's a contributing factor to the biggest issue the game has; the actual mechanical task of finding the objects. Fundamentally, hidden object games are a test of your ability to identify something in a busy image, that's it. For a game is this genre to be fair, the following have to both be true; [list] [*]The items must be identifiable as the thing you're looking for. [*]The items must be visible, or if there is some mechanism for revealing them, it must be fairly possible to guess or deduce the method to reveal them. [/list] To put it another way, I have to know what I'm looking for, and it has to be findable. That's it, pretty straightforward. 44 Hidden Naomis breaks both of these rules, regularly. What is a Naomi? I haven't played the game this relates to, so all I have to go on is what the game presents up-front, which is that Naomi is an anime girl. So you look for anime girls, click on them, and you're still short. Huh? Here is a none-exhaustive list of things that are apparently a Naomi: [list] [*]A tree (with a Naomi face on it) [*]A torpedo (with a generic anime face on it) [*]A rubber duck [*]A bundle of heart balloons [/list] I just want to clarify something about those last two. The rubber duck is... just a rubber duck. It doesn't have, like, an anime face, or Naomi's hair, or anything. It is exactly what you think of when you hear the phrase "rubber duck", nothing more. Likewise with the balloons; these are not Naomi balloons. They're just balloons. I cannot find Naomi if I cannot know what is and isn't Naomi, and Naomi can be anything. Is she a snarling minotaur? A goat? The sail of a ship? As it turns out, yes, these are all Naomis. So this isn't "44 hidden Naomis", it's "like, 20 hidden Naomis, and then the contents of our artist's doodle folder". This isn't fair, for the same reason as it would not be fair if someone asked you to nip in their room and grab their keys, and then got annoyed at you for not knowing that their keys are in fact a large inflatable beach ball. But, hey, you're forewarned now, right? Naomis can be anything, so... just look out for things that are out of place. (Maybe, some Naomis are in fact in form and position that fit in completely with their surroundings, so... Good luck.) No problem? But then there's that second rule, isn't there? Many of these Naomi's aren't actually in the image when you begin; instead, you have to click on something in the environment to reveal them first. And, fair play, it does give you a counter to see how many of these there are, so you can figure out this is something you have to do, OK. This... isn't inherently terrible, some hidden object games do this well. Like I said, it's fair as long as this is done in a way where the player has enough clues to identify what they need to click on. If your image had a row of buildings, and they all had closed doors except one set that was conspicuously open? I think it would be fair to expect the player to try clicking on that (and, hey, there's a Naomi, well done). In the second stage of the game alone, one of the Naomis is hidden in a small indistinct patch of water in a lake. Another is under one specific non-descript roof tile, on a roof with hundreds of tiles, in an image with many buildings with tiled roofs. I want to be clear here. That roof tile doesn't look different from the rest. The image doesn't clue you in that there's something hidden in that area. You are not told that there is a Naomi under a roof tile. You have absolutely no reason to think that you would need to click on any roof tile, let alone that specific roof tile. But the game still expects you to. And keep in mind, the other one I'm highlighting is [i]a random patch of water[/i]. This level has a river/lake running through it, a lot of the picture is just water. There are a couple of bits where you are in fact pointed towards a specific patch, a swirl in the water or such that, yes, has a Naomi under it, I get that... But not this one. This is just... click on a specific small area of empty space, within a large area of empty space. If you were to divide the entire image into a grid and ask me to put every square in order of how likely it looks to contain a hidden Naomi, this place would be right at the bottom, past the doorways and windows and saddle bags and baskets and every single one of those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ roof tiles. But this is where a Naomi is. So we've now strayed from "look at a picture and click on the anime girls" to "just click absolutely everywhere in the picture, every single pixel, one of them may hide a puffer fish which is somehow counted as a Naomi". One of the levels has every Naomi actually in the image from the start. This is the best level. One of the levels has every Naomi [i]hidden[/i] at the start, 44 random objects that the devs think count as "Naomi" to be revealed by clicking on 44 arbitrary places in the image. This is the worst level. But, hey, hang on; there IS a hint system. So that's not so bad, right? Maybe there are a couple of Naomis that are a bit unfair to find or reveal, but when you're close to the end and stuck, just click on that lil' question mark in the status column on the right, and you're golden; a circle appears for a while, directing you to what you missed. That's not so bad, surely? So you get stuck, and you click it, and... nothing happens. I mean, the button greys out, a timer starts, you hear the noise the game makes when a clue is brought up, but there's nothing on-screen? Well that's awfully weird, hints have worked before, what's going on? What's going on is a crime against interface design. It is the game kicking you while you are down. Friends; that status column on the right? That's drawn over the image. And the game doesn't let you drag the image further than the screen boundaries. That means that, no matter what you do, some amount of the right side of the image cannot be seen. Ever. On a standard widescreen monitor, when you are completely zoomed out, about 20% of the right side of the picture isn't actually visible to you. Zoom in all the way and that's lowered substantially, but it's there's always some of it covered up. That means 2 things. First, it's possible to take a good look around the image, and do a really good job of finding Naomis, but still not get them all because you just didn't zoom in quite far enough to reveal enough of the right side to bring them into view. Second, it means that if you click the hint button (which, by the way, [b]immediately zooms you all the way out[/b]), and it's hinting at something on the right side, that hint will also not be visible to you. And those hints don't stick around forever, you only have so long to realise what's happening. You click the hint button and see nothing, so you quickly zoom in a lot and drag the image all the way to the right side, quickly looking up and down until you find the hint circle, and the circle is centred around some random bit of scenery, and you click around this random bit of scenery until you find the very tiny area that counts, and that reveals, I dunno, a dead possum, and you click on the dead possum because that is your final Naomi for the level. Congrats. Stay far, far away from this game.

Nope! OK, first of all, whoever decided the Steam page should have a jumpscare on it can get in the bin. Best argument for turning off auto-playing videos on Steam store pages I've ever come across. Anyway. The game. Let's get the positives out of the way. It controls well enough? The music's pretty nice? The visual design of many things, in isolation, is pretty decent? That's it, that's the strongest praise I could give it. Let's get to brass tacks. Let's just start with visuals, just to get it out of the way. The backgrounds are garbage, blurry incoherent low-res messes that look like they may well be AI generated. Just smears of incoherent black and white "artwork". That's a contributing factor to the biggest issue the game has; the actual mechanical task of finding the objects. Fundamentally, hidden object games are a test of your ability to identify something in a busy image, that's it. For a game is this genre to be fair, the following have to both be true; The items must be identifiable as the thing you're looking for. The items must be visible, or if there is some mechanism for revealing them, it must be fairly possible to guess or deduce the method to reveal them. To put it another way, I have to know what I'm looking for, and it has to be findable. That's it, pretty straightforward. 44 Hidden Naomis breaks both of these rules, regularly. What is a Naomi? I haven't played the game this relates to, so all I have to go on is what the game presents up-front, which is that Naomi is an anime girl. So you look for anime girls, click on them, and you're still short. Huh? Here is a none-exhaustive list of other things that are apparently a Naomi: A tree (with a Naomi face on it) A torpedo (with a generic anime face on it) A rubber duck A bundle of heart balloons I just want to clarify something about those last two. The rubber duck is... just a rubber duck. It doesn't have, like, an anime face, or Naomi's hair, or anything. It is exactly what you think of when you hear the phrase "rubber duck", nothing more. Likewise with the balloons; these are not Naomi balloons. They're just balloons. I cannot find Naomi if I cannot know what is and isn't Naomi, and Naomi can be anything. Is she a snarling minotaur? A goat? The sail of a ship? As it turns out, yes, these are all Naomis. So this isn't "44 hidden Naomis", it's "like, 20 hidden Naomis, and then the contents of our artist's doodle folder". This isn't fair, for the same reason as it would not be fair if someone asked you to nip in their room and grab their keys, and then got annoyed at you for not knowing that their keys are in fact a large inflatable beach ball. But, hey, you're forewarned now, right? Naomis can be anything, so... just look out for things that are out of place. (Maybe, some Naomis are in fact in form and position that fit in completely with their surroundings, so... Good luck.) No problem? But then there's that second rule, isn't there? Many of these Naomi's aren't actually in the image when you begin; instead, you have to click on something in the environment to reveal them first. And, fair play, it does give you a counter to see how many of these there are, so you can figure out this is something you have to do, OK. This... isn't inherently terrible, some hidden object games do this well. Like I said, it's fair as long as this is done in a way where the player has enough clues to identify what they need to click on. Like, if your image had a row of buildings, and they all had closed doors except one set that was conspicuously closed? I think it would be fair to expect the player to try clicking on that (and, hey, there's a Naomi, well done). In the second stage of the game alone, one of the Naomis is hidden in a small indistinct patch of water in a lake, and another is under one specific non-descript ceiling tile on a roof with hundreds of tiles, in an image with many buildings with tiled roofs. I want to be clear here. That roof tile doesn't look different from the rest. The image doesn't clue you in that there's something hidden in that area. You are not told that there is a Naomi under a roof tile. You have absolutely no reason to think that you would need to click on a roof tile, let alone that specific roof tile. But the game still expects you to. And keep in mind, the other one I'm highlighting is a random patch of water. This level has a river/lake running through it, a lot of the picture is just water. There are a couple of bits where you are in fact pointed towards a specific patch, a swirl in the water or such that, yes, has a Naomi under it, I get that... But not this one. This is just... click on a small area of empty space. If you were to divide the entire image into a grid and ask me to put every square in order of how likely it looks to contain a hidden Naomi, this place would be right at the bottom, past the doorways and windows and saddle bags and baskets and every single one of those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ roof tiles. But this is where a Naomi is. So we've now strayed from "look at a picture and click on the anime girls" to "just click absolutely everywhere in the picture, every single pixel, one of them may hide a puffer fish which is somehow counted as a Naomi". One of the levels has every Naomi actually in the image from the start. This is the best level. One of the levels has every Naomi hidden at the start, 44 random objects that the devs think count as "Naomi" to be revealed by clicking on 44 arbitrary places in the image. This is the worst level. But, hey, hang on; there IS a hint system. So that's not so bad, right? Maybe there are a couple of Naomis that are a bit unfair to find or reveal, but when you're close to the end and stuck, just click on that lil' question mark in the status column on the right, and you're golden; a circle appears for a while, directing you to what you missed. That's not so bad, surely? So you get stuck, and you click it, and... nothing happens. I mean, the button greys out, a timer starts, you hear the noise the game makes when a clue is brought up, but there's nothing on-screen? Well that's awfully weird, hints have worked before, what's going on? What's going on is a crime against interface design. It is the game kicking you while you are down. Friends; that status column on the right? That's drawn over the image. And the game doesn't let you drag the image further than the screen boundaries. That means that, no matter what you do, some amount of the right side of the image cannot be seen. Ever. On a standard widescreen monitor, when you are completely zoomed out, about 20% of the right side of the picture isn't actually visible to you. Zoom in all the way and that's lowered substantially, but it's there's always some of it covered up. That means 2 things. First, it's possible to take a good luck around the image, and do a really good job of finding Naomis, but still not get them all because you just didn't zoom in quite far enough to reveal enough of the right side to bring them into view. Second, it means that if you click the hint button (which, by the way, immediately zooms you all the way out), and it's hinting at something on the right side, that hint will also not be visible to you. And those hints don't stick around forever, you only have so long to realise what's happening. So you click the hint button and see nothing, so you quickly zoom in a lot and drag the image all the way to the right side, quickly looking up and down until you find the hint circle, and the circle is centred around some random bit of scenery, and you click around this random bit of scenery until you find the very tiny area that counts, and that reveals, I dunno, a dead possum, and you click on the dead possum because that is your final Naomi for the level. Congrats. Stay far, far away from this game.

Well, the game is free. So everyone should form their own opinion about it. For me personally, it was over after the first level. The Hidden Naomis are nothing more than an endless click-fest on everything. It has nothing to do with fun anymore. So for myself...I can't recommend this game.