Showing Tonight: Mindhunters Incident

[h1]Short version: 37%[/h1] Showing Tonight is a hidden object game without hidden object scenes and an adventure game without a coherent plot. At least it has some really nice puzzles. [h1]Long version:[/h1] Showing Tonight: Mindhunters Incident is the first attempt of a small Serbian group called Phime to broaden their portfolio beyond simplistic children’s puzzle games made for smartphones. Although advertised as a hidden object game, it has three hidden object scenes in total, the rest being a series of 3D rotation minigames, glued together with the usual point ‘n’ click style item gathering and a few conventional puzzles. These puzzles are the only real enjoyable part– except for two, which are less of a puzzle and more of a trial and error minigame. The story… I hope it made sense in the writer’s head, because otherwise it is a mess that doesn’t explain anything, just goes wherever it pleases. It is supposed to be about our protagonist being stuck in a movie, trying to break the mind control of some evil washed-up actor, who in the end gets arrested for reasons, so we can follow him into space… I really have no idea what the heck was going on in this game.

NB: I rarely write reviews under frustration. I'm often indulgent. Here, the frustration took over. I yelled at my computer each time the Do you want to skip message appeared after a few seconds in the puzzle. I was kinda distraught at the though that I couldn't find the right perspective. I was so close sometimes, but the fact that I have a little problem with spatial stuff was making stuff harder. So, yeah, you can go ahead for the challenge - the game is worthy. However, I'm still not in the mood to change my thumb down to a thumb up. For me, the experience was a disaster. ---- You're at a cinema, watching a movie.... your eyes are closing and suddenly, you're thrown in the film. It's up to you to help the heroin find the last word of the story. The game has a good plot, full of twists and the voice acting isn't bad. What is bothering me is the silhouette matching, which is a recurring feature. And when I say recurring...., EVEN FOR USING OBJECTS! I can understand for the hidden objects, but seriously.... I'm tired of these matching stuff... It's not at all friendly for people having problems with perspective or spatial orientation. I happen to have a problem to judge distances, which is annoying when I must park. I've also a problem with geometry. So, in other words, you bet that I had a huge problem to find correctly the right match. And when it wasn't the matching silhouettes, it was the DO YOU WANT TO SKIP? that appears in the middle of the game. Seriously, I'm trying to match, there is a SKIP button on the side AND you're interrupting me with a red circle and a question? Imagine I'm clicking on yes by accident. Do you realise that you've just thrown my chances for an achievement? And sometimes, I was left to wonder what to do. I mean, I'm playing on Easy, active areas are usually marked. Why do I needed to use hints to find those which weren't marked? How to play that mini-game? I mean, I have to click on the ? icon to have instructions, which sometimes didn't really helped me. And the popcorn.... sometimes, they're clear, sometimes, you don't see them and you're kinda surprised to find one despite your eyes not really catching them. Apart that, the graphics are good as the soundtrack. But given the fact that I got very frustrated with the matching feature that is everywhere, with that freaking "do you want to skip" appearing FOR NOTHING, I'm kinda NOT really in the mood to recommend the game. I just hope that in Expert mode, you don't have that message appearing. It was a nice try though.

Showing Tonight: Mindhunters Incident is a Point and Click game with some Hidden Object scenes and undertones, created by Phime Studio. I say this is more a P&C game because really, there’s only about 3ish HoG scenes, the rest I wouldn’t consider to be exactly hidden object per se. In this game you take the role of a man who falls asleep watching the movie “They Ate My Clapper”, and thus wakes up in this movie world, tasked with finding the missing crew. To be honest, while the story on paper sounds good, in game it was rather confusing. Alien artifacts, mind powers and mind control, horror? I’m not sure if it’s going for paranormal (which was my original assumption) or something else, and by the end of the game I’m still unsure of it. The game has various chapters, all interconnected in locations (you’re not locked out of any of the areas), and a final bonus chapter which you can only access by completing the entire game. It’d be nice if they’d put an option to play the bonus chapter separately from the main story, and if they had asked/warned you about playing it instead of tossing you into it right after the main story’s finale, leaving you even more confused. That said, and despite the occasional item appearing out of what I felt was thin air, the game was fairly logical. Meaning for most things you needed actual tools (a shovel for digging something up) rather than finding an oblique way to go about it. The puzzles varied in complexity, some really easy, some much harder, some seemed to be more trial and error than anything, which was a bit disappointing. The main ‘thing’ of the game seemed to be the silhouette puzzles, in which you were to match an item with its silhouette via turning it around with arrows. It wasn’t too difficult, but after the first two or three times it lost its novelty and having to do them in nearly all the important puzzles got quite bothersome, to the point where some I just skipped to move along the story faster. On the puzzles that require some note to complete, while you can’t hold the note up at the same time of the puzzle, accessing it is still easy and not as bothersome as in other HoG games. You also don’t have to wait to collect every piece of a puzzle before you put it in its place, which is quite nice. My only real complaint was the jukebox puzzle, in which either I was missing something obvious or you weren’t really given a hint on when you were sort of heading in the right direction with it, which ended up making it quite frustrating for me. It was probably user error, but there you have it. On the other hand, Mindhunters also had a couple mini-games which were fun to play. The sound effects and music can get a tad repetitive, but they’re relatively nice and seem to fit the game okay. The voice acting, however, left a lot to be desired, even if they aren’t precisely the worst I’ve heard. The graphics are quite nice, particularly the detailed backgrounds; the animations aren’t too bad, even if they could be a bit more fluid. Some of the scenes could benefit from a bit more research on how things look – for instance the driving scenes in which you saw the people from the front inside the car. I rather liked the quick travel map, even if I wished each section would have had its sub-sections as quick travel as well. All in all, I quite enjoyed my playthrough and would certainly recommend it to HoG and adventure fans, even with the small downsides. I’ll be looking forward to see what else Phime comes up with in the future. * Key provided by the developer in exchange for an honest review Follow Completing the Backlog's [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/completingthebacklog#curation]Curator page[/url] for more reviews.

I've played a lot of HOGs and I have to say I can't recommend this one. First of all there aren't that many actual hidden object scenes, there are far more of the silhouette matching games. I personally was not that big a fan of these silhouette games and felt there were too many of them, but even if you do enjoy them the fact that a message pops up asking if you want to skip a few moves into each of them gets annoying quickly. The puzzles are also disappointing with many of them barely being puzzles at all. Some of these "puzzles" include finding the combo to a safe elsewhere and then simply turning the dial to open the safe, another is a spinning globe that you just have to move a lens over the listed cities. I found the story confusing to follow and poorly translated with a lot of awkwardly worded dialogue. I enjoyed a lot of the artwork for the various areas in the game, but on multiple occasions even though I knew the correct object to use to solve a problem I couldn't figure out where I needed to click to get it to actually work without using the hint button. Overall while this certainly isn't the worst HOG I've played I can't really recommend it, especially at full price. It might be worth picking up at a discount if you are a big enough fan of the genre.

Disclaimer: I received a free game key from the developer. I was looking forward to a new hidden object game, but only got about 20 minutes into this before giving up and idling for cards. The story is incoherent and poorly translated, but what was really offputting enough to make me quit was the silhouette matching game. It's a neat mechanic, but if you make, like, one click more than the minimum necessary to complete the puzzle, you get a pop-up asking if you want to skip it. Even in the casual adventure game genre, where frequent hints and skippable puzzles are the norm, I've never had a game be so eager to have me NOT play it.

It functions terribly, just going from 1 area to another takes a million ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years of loading. Not to mention the stupid silhoutte function that occurs for no reason when you use an item Not to mention that the logic makes no sense sometimes when it comes to puzzles, I have to make a funnel to use a fuel cannister that has a literal nozzle for that purpose The voices could be fine if it didn't sound like it was recorded from inside a tin can, through a straw, in a blizzard, over a radio

Showing Tonight: Mindhunter’s Incident, developed by Phime Studio, is a point-and-click, adventure puzzle game with a hint of Hidden Object scenarios. After first viewing the trailer, screen shots and the store page summary, I came in with some high expectations. I was hoping for a fun, creepy adventure in my very own B-Horror film. Instead, what I got was a gimmicky puzzle system, horribly rendered cut scenes, an unexplained, unfulfilled and poorly-told story, and a complete lack of Hidden Object sections. You play as Nate, an avid movie-goer who’s become somewhat obsessed with a new film, “Someone Ate My Clapper.” In fact, he’s seen it so many times that the clerk knows his name, and hands him the ticket without needing to ask. Once in the theatre, Nate falls asleep. He awakes just moments later, but not in his local cinema. Rather, he finds himself inside the movie. With the help of Gabriella, a character in the film, Nate must… actually; I can’t really explain the rest of this story. Because everything from here on out makes no sense. Nothing is explained, nothing is clarified, and nothing is elaborated upon. You’re either running about, completing random objectives without rhyme or reason, or you’re struggling to fathom how some of these puzzles made any sense. But first, I want to start with some positive notes regarding Mindhunter’s Incident. The art work is fairly well done. It’s got the detail, depth and color to really shine. The game’s concept is also great. It may lose its charm a few minutes in, but I really like the idea of getting sucked into a movie and solving its mysteries. Also, some of the puzzles are decent and fun. Not all of them, but some. Sadly, that’s all I found enjoyable about Mindhunter’s incident. And it’s a real shame, too, since I had such high expectations. But as far as cons go, there are plenty. Something I really must address is the Hidden Object sections. There are only three of them in this game. Three Hidden Object sections. That’s it. I thought I had missed some along the way, but that wasn’t the case. The game was so lazy that it repeated all three of them in the final stage. Did they not have the time to make more than three? Seriously? Instead, you get a multitude of these “silhouette puzzles.” They’re simple, rotate certain objects to fit a certain position, and that’s it. These were a nice surprise at first, but it isn’t long before they start cropping up everywhere. There must be at least twenty of these, and they all follow the same formula. Why would the devs devote so much time to these repetitive puzzles, rather than implement more Hidden Object sections? It just baffles me. Voice acting is awful, but I can’t necessarily call that a con. The game does take place in a B-Horror movie, after all. Honestly, I thought the bad acting was a welcomed addition. What I didn’t find welcoming, however, were the cutscenes. They’re all horribly rendered and look like crap compared to everything else. Not only that, but they’re accompanied by some of the worst animation I’ve seen in a long time. Characters heads bounce around in a laughable manner, everyone’s movement is awkward and stilted, and don’t get me started on the lip syncing. It just looks bad, end of story. Some of these puzzles are alright, but most boil down to finding an item, walking to a certain location, using that item, and then venturing out to do it all over again. They aren’t rewarding, nor are they fun. And that’s the key word, here. “Fun.” Mindhunter’s Incident just wasn’t fun. Instead, it was frustrating, tear-jerking-ly boring, and confusing. There are so many great point and click adventure games on Steam, and this most certainly is not one of them.

good atmosphere with some really nice settings! The puzzles are not hard and pretty common in most hidden object games

The plot is not understandble near the end, so you have no idea where to go or why you are going there. You just want to finish the game at that point. Much better HOGs available. Get this in a bundle or from a giveaway, but otherwise save your money.

一部良好的寻物解密游戏。 游戏里面的剪影模式比较新颖，如果不看攻略的话根本不可能在1分钟里解出来。 专家模式里没有提示，建议还是先玩一遍普通模式。 50个爆米花还是看攻略找吧，否则很容易漏掉。 游戏的画面和配乐搭个7/10分吧。