Hidden Through Time 2: Myths & Magic

Hidden Through Time 2: Myths & Magic  is the second instalment in the series brought to us by Rougeside. The game is very much an interactive gameplay version of a Where’s Wally? book and one that we looked to review from the viewpoint of my daughter who was aged 5 at the time of playing. Thinking it’d be interesting to get a take on the game through her eyes, seeing what she enjoyed and what struggles she encountered along the way. The game is rated PEGI 3 so was the perfect age rating for her to play.

It’s probably best to start off by explaining that my daughter is a huge fan of the Where’s Wally? series. She regularly goes round to grandad’s house and they get the old books down from when I was a kid, and she’s also started to watch the 90’s cartoon that used to stop the show in the middle so you could all have a go at finding Wally and maybe even his evil counterpart, Odlaw. She very much enjoys the Where’s Wally? experience. So when I saw this game come up for review I thought “Perfect! This will be a great father-daughter experience; she’ll love to play with me helping her find the different items on the screen as we go through the various worlds that the game has to offer.”

Having said all that, it was not the experience I was expecting.

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At A Glance

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The game is a very simple ‘find the item’ puzzle game. You have to search round the screen, looking for the items listed in the menu bar below, and the game will give you clues to help you if you’re struggling. The animation style is very simple and quite cutesy, with short animation cycles for all the creatures and characters creating a moving environment with short musical cycles. This gives it a very casual feel, fitting for whiling away time on a train ride or plane journey, playing in order to hold the boredom at bay.

It could be perfect for the casual gamer who enjoys these types of games and is looking to just switch off the noise of the outside world and just have a pleasant experience interacting with all the little objects and finding the different characters hiding in various locations.  But when playing the game with my daughter, she hit me with the following phrases and I’ll do my best to explain what she was experiencing.

“Daddy, why is it so slow?”

The gameplay was, for want of a better phrase, painfully frustrating. Things ran incredibly slowly, with long loading screens and very jerky, slow transitions between the different weather conditions. The weather conditions are meant to enhance the gameplay by creating a slightly changed environment on the same level for you to find more items. Unfortunately we found it just added to the frustration by further slowing down the gameplay. For such a simplistic game and very basic design, it was hard to understand why the loading screens were so long and why it seemed to be struggling with even the simplest of tasks. It honestly made me think back to the early-2000s Flash animation games, and truly, there is nothing offered here than what you could find in those days.

“Daddy, what do I do?”

A small thing, but the design choice in the menus was a little strange. The colour palette change when selecting and deselecting buttons is very minimal, and very hard to navigate for a child. Obviously this would be no issue for most adults, but my 5 year old was struggling and my 3 year old son had no success whatsoever with trying to navigate the menu.

“Daddy, I’m bored”

Sadly, this game is just not entertaining. The very repetitive music cycle and gameplay mechanics made it quite simply unengaging. Once you’d found one item and then the next, eventually completing the level, the next one was so very similar that it just wasn’t worth the wait for the loading screens to carry on.. 

I think Hidden Through Time 2: Myths & Magic struggles trying to turn what is essentially a 5-minute activity book into a fully fledged game, and it just isn’t fleshed out enough to make it engaging. Once you’ve played for 10-minutes, you have experienced all there is, and if you’re looking for something a little more enticing then this isn’t the game for you. I do still think that if you’re the type of person who enjoys games where you don’t have to engage your brain and just like to pass the time with a harmless task then this could be worth playing (as long as you’re ok with long loading screens).

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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