Art Detective: Hidden Through Ancient China

Art Detective: Hidden Through Ancient China is a short hidden object game that requires you to find certain items based on their images, in levels styled as famous ancient Chinese ink paintings.

The highlight of the game is certainly the beautiful art style (although it’s a Unity asset), with these levels extending on multiple screens and enriched with small details. Each level will have you search for 70 different items, with the downside of being able to see only 7 of them at a time (once you find an object, a new one to find replaces it in the list). I would prefer having a scrollable list of all items to find instead of it being so limited because it often happens that while searching for a specific item you notice several others, but you can’t click them yet as they’re not included in the current list of items to find. This is a standard mechanic for HOGs, but usually, the ratio between the total number of items to find and the counter for the current list (2:1 or 3:1) is much more forgiving than here (10:1).

There’s a pretty good mix of items that stand out from the rest of the painting due to their vivid colors contrasting with the dull brown backgrounds, and other items that are well hidden and thus very hard to find. Luckily the game has a hint feature that you can use indefinitely, with only 30 seconds of recharge time. Most of the objects are quite small-sized, but you can zoom in to see them better. Another good feature is that the game remembers your progress for each level, so you can resume it at a later point in time.

Completing the 10 levels of Art Detective: Hidden Through Ancient China takes around 3 hours, and achievements are awarded for finding all the objects in all levels.