Skystead Christmas

This is a free HOG where you need to find little creatures. What makes the game interesting is that by clicking on the objects you need to find does nothing; instead, you have to throw snowballs at everything. Snowflakes are constantly falling and a meter on the right-hand side shows how much you need to get a snowball (of which you can have up to 5). You simply move your cursor over the flakes and you immediately collect them.

Some objects such as lamps or campfires require activation and only after will the corresponding creature appear. Once you realise snowballs can be used to destroy doors, rocks and trees, your progress will significantly be faster.

Spring is around the corner but if you don't mind the Christmas atmosphere, feel free to pick this one up. It takes no more than 20-30 minutes to complete.

Skystead Christmas is a free-to-play hidden object game with a unique mechanic. Collect snow to make snowballs and throw snowballs to collect hidden objects.

Gameplay & Features

Settings include; there are no settings in this game.

If you wish to put your game into windowed mode, put -screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080 (or a resolution of your choice) under properties in the games Steam library page under launch options and relaunch the game. Then after relaunch just hit alt+enter for it to resize.

Highlights

* Neat mechanic of collecting snow to make snowballs. Chuck snowballs at hidden objects to collect them.
* Just mouse over the snow to make snowballs. You can make a few at a time.
* Break barrels, rocks and trees to see items hidden behind them.

Overall Experience

A fun, free game with lots of interactive elements and easy to earn achievements. The game also introduces you to cute characters that will be featured in their upcoming game called Skystead Ranch coming out later this month. Wholesome and cozy, a game for everyone to enjoy. ❄️

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Hmmm.

The mechanic of having to accumulate clicks by collecting snowflakes isn't necessarily a bad idea. The idea of having a world with lots of things to destroy, and some of the objects you're meant to find hidden behind destructible items, isn't necessarily a bad idea.

Doing both of those thing at once? Not a fan.

OK, look at the start of the trailer vid, up above. See those little green "bushes"? Those are all (well, not quite all, I'll get into that) destructible, and some hide things you need, so you have to destroy all of them. And there are loads of them, dozens around the level, which means you need to accumulate dozens of snowballs just for these. It doesn't take a long time to get enough snow for one snowballs, but it does to get enough snow for lots of snowballs.

It's also never really clear how many snowballs you have, because once you have more than can be displayed onscreen that isn't handled in any way, you can just only see the bottom 10. Would be smart to swop that out with a snowball x # indicator once the player has more than can be seen.

But anyway, so you're spending an awful lot of time in this hidden object game just mousing back and forth over the snowflakes as they spawn in, so you can throw loads of snowballs at bushes and trees and rocks, most of which don't actually have anything useful behind, and... For a short game, it feels like a lot of your time is being wasted.

OK, I alluded to you not being able to destroy all the bushes, and this is the most annoying thing in the game IMO. There are plenty of bushes, trees etc., mostly around the edges of the island, that are identical to the ones you can destroy, but are just static scenery. But you don't know this, of course; you have to snowball them. And because the hit detection isn't quite perfect, when you throw a ball at a green bush and it remains solid... well, maybe it just didn't hit, so you throw 2 or 3 before realising that, oh, you've just wasted a bunch of ammo that you spent time waggling your mouse cursor around to get. Best get to more snowflake chasing, I guess?

That's why, while neither of those mechanics is inherently bad... I think the combination is. You're forcing the player to go through busy work to obtain clicks, but also forcing the player to waste clicks clicking on everything instead of just the things you actually need to find. It doesn't feel good, it isn't clever, it's just disrespectful to the player's time.

Look, this isn't terrible. I'm giving it a thumbs-up, even! But you need to know that this is as much a mindless game about moving your cursor over floating objects as it is trying to find hidden objects. Keep that in mind and it's a perfectly fine free little title.

(Also; why does it have the "idler" tag? This isn't an idle game. It may actually have been much better if it was, mind; if snowballs accumulated passively when you weren't playing, so you could dip in and out rather than having to give it full focus the whole time, the player could spend their time in-game purely on looking for hidden objects.)