All the fun of The Hidden Object Show is back and this time the circus is in town! Play the fairground rides; see the circus acts and spendAll the fun of The Hidden Object Show is back and this time the circus is in town! Play the fairground rides; see the circus acts and spend your collected tickets on useless junk, now all on TV! But wait a second folks: roll up roll up; play enough games and you might win the grand prize of five million dollars! I think you’ll agree that’s one joke you can’t afford to pass up!
With the original game Gogii Games had taken the HOG genre and put it to logical use by constructing a TV game show around it. It was one of the most unique and clever takes on the genre. Unfortunately the game was let down by poor visibility and a lack of different environments, two rather big problems which made the game mediocre. Now just some mere months after the original Gogii decided to adapt the adventure genre episodic model used by companies like Telltale Games by releasing The Hidden Object Show: Season 2. Was it too soon?
The sequel ditches the plain, crumbling rooms of the original and moves the game show to a carnival. Imagine being paid to play carnival and circus games… Your host from the first game returns and seems more out of his depth as before. Surprisingly you still have a studio audience who accordingly boos or cheers. You also have an announcer who keeps track of your progress and reads out the prizes in hilarious fashion. Every game from the original returns as well such as Find 10, Spot the Difference, Letter Getter, etc except this time you can pick up tickets along with hints scattered in the games. The tickets can be exchanged for prizes within the carnival and there are a number of carnival games you can play between rounds to accumulate more tickets although getting more than a paltry ten from these games is a victory in itself so those mini-games end up being pointless. Season 2 in a sense pretty much is an improvement in visual variety with more colours and life on screen. The fun of the carnival is perfectly recreated all thanks to Gogii. However some problems still remain. Objects are a little clearer to see this time but you still most of the time have to strain your eyes to distinguish between the cluttered objects in the foreground and background. The other problem goes back to what I was saying before about the increase of variety; it comes at a price. In the original you could happily go through the main game, collect the main prize and then go back to collect 100% if you desired. Gogii make the mistake of forcing the player to get 100% on their first play through which would be fine if the game offered more screens than the first game but it doesn’t. So the game essentially forces you into the boredom of completing the same screens again and again, thereby artificially extending the game’s length when it’s not necessary. I mean the carnival is fun but who wants to play the same games a hundred times over?
Gogii Games almost fix the issues of the original but end up creating new ones. Season 2 is a slight improvement over the first but it’s still far from reaching its potential. It begs a question: didn’t anyone at Gogii realise you can sometimes have too much of a good thing?… Expand
