NOCLIP Pocket E73 - Soft Ear Sacs - Hidden Folks

Beep beep! Welcome back to another, uh, sneaky episode of NOCLIP Pocket! Today we’re talking about Hidden Folks, which is a hidden object game and the first game in the genre we’ve talked about. Spurred by a conversation from an earlier episode, we tried finding what a majority of people would consider the “best” game in this genre, as it’s one we have functionally zero experience with, and Hidden Folks was suggested by a pretty large number of sources. And honestly, I can see why. If you have an image in your mind of what a hidden object game is, it likely looks like single screen levels in games developed sort of in the way books of crossword puzzles are, created relatively cheaply for an audience that typically approaches games in a different way and with different expectations than most of the enthusiast market you typically see talking about games. This isn’t a particularly charitable view of the genre, but it’s one I think a lot of people have, if they have a view on hidden object games as a genre at all. This isn’t Hidden Folks, though. This game takes full advantage of the medium, doing things that wouldn’t be possible in a printed book like having hundreds of interactable objects in each level, puzzles to solve before being able to find some items, and absolutely sprawling stages that take a very long time to comb over. Does this mean we ended up enjoying this? Well, not really, but there are parts that we can all appreciate and see why this appeals to the audience it’s built for. We’re going to talk about the daunting nature of the immense levels in this game, how this differs (and doesn’t) from the I Spy books of our youth, and we imagine a version of this game as a Car Town mat. Thank you for joining us for the first and only Pocket episode of January! Unfortunately, we discovered we aren’t much of hidden object players and likely won’t be playing anything further in the genre unless something really jumps out at us, but I for one am at least glad to have tried one out. Are you a fan of the genre? Did Hidden Folks actually rise above the crop or is our outsider perspective skewed on what most of these games look like? Let us know in the comments or over on discord! We’re going to be taking the rest of the month off (our first actually scheduled break since the podcast started, unbelievably), but we’re coming back with the fiery passion of thousand exploding stars in February with Fanbruary where we play the games suggested by our community! So let us know what you want to see us play by leaving a comment or messaging us on Discord!