This game was fun for several hours, but then it became increasingly infuriating and, eventually, impossibly difficult.
It should be noted that people who are colorblind, people who cannot see minute differences in color shade or contrast, people who do not have excellent eyesight, and people who do not have instantaneous pattern matching ability will not be able to play this game.
This game has 20 "episodes" (sections), with each episode having 7 matching "puzzles" (hidden object style) and one non-matching "puzzle". All matching puzzles use the same set of objects and are time-limited; the differences in the puzzles are the rule set by which you must find matches, the starting location of the objects, and the time limit. The non-matching puzzles vary by episode, but are either sliding puzzles or tile-matching memory puzzles, and do not have a time limit.
The 7 matching puzzles in each episode have a time limit, using one of two methods. The first, most common, method is a fixed time limit by which you must find the required number of matches. The second method is to start the time remaining at 39 seconds and increase the time remaining by 5 seconds every time you find a match.
The placement of items on the screen varies by puzzle. In most puzzles, items are randomly placed on the screen and stay where they are initially placed unless you move them. In some puzzles, items are randomly placed on the screen, but bubbles randomly pick objects up and move them around the screen. Some puzzles group all items into two circles, requiring you to move items in order to find matches. To move items, click-and-drag it (I don't recall seeing this explained anywhere).
The objects to be matched come in two color formats -- the objects can be colored normally or they can be a single color (a colored silhouette, basically), with most of these single colors being pastel-like, with many of them extremely similar to each other, often times only a shade or two apart.
The rules for the matching objects vary by puzzle, but here are some examples:
- Find matching pairs
- Find matching triples (3 identical objects)
- Find matches pairs (all items are single-color)
- Find both halves of split objects
- Find all three parts of split objects
- Find both halves of split objects (all objects are single-color)
- Find all three parts of split objects (all objects are single color)
- Find matching pairs, but items must be different sizes
- Find matches triples, but items must be different sizes
- Find matching pairs, but one item must be normal-color and one item must be single-color
- Find both halves of split objects, but one half must be normal-color and the other half must be single-color
- Find matching pairs, according to a list of 5 items in target list (list changes as matches are found)
- Find matching pairs of normal-color items, according to a list of 5 single-color items in target list (list changes as matches are found)
There are other rules as well, but that's a good sample set of the rules.
Additionally, there are stars you must collect in order to charge the hint button. These stars (I believe there are about 40 of them in each puzzle) are randomly scattered on the screen, intermixed with the objects you need to match. The result is that you need to spend a fair amount of time collecting these stars, even if you won't use the hint button, simply to remove them from cluttering the screen and obscuring the objects you need to match.
The biggest problems I had when playing this game were the coloration of the objects and the hit detection (detecting when an object was clicked/selected). The single-color objects make the puzzles artificially more difficult by making it more confusing end reducing your ability to pattern-match, resorting to shape-matching instead, where many objects are very similar shapes. The hit detection was truly horrible. In a game where the player has limited time, input response and hit detection needs to be 100% accurate, and that was nowhere near the case. Many times, I had to click an item 6-10 times before it was selected. Usually, but not always, these were items with open interiors, such as bicycles and hacksaws.
If you are a fan of hidden object puzzles, you will probably enjoy this game for several hours, like I did. Eventually, however, you will probably get sick of the near-impossible (and, eventually, impossible) time limits, the poor hit detection when fighting against the clock, and the artificial difficulty caused by using single-color items.
