Hidden Through Time is back, looking to test our eyesight, logic, and patience once more. Across 32 levels, we need to carefully scour not only one area for small, well hidden objects, but two, with each stage offering up alternate time periods to explore. That might sound like it’d be more of a chore than a challenge, but Rogueside look after us, and the difficulty feels brilliantly pitched throughout.
If you’re not familiar with Hidden Through Time, it is for all intents and purposes a hidden object game; we’re presented an isometric view of an area teeming with life, fauna, buildings and more, and are tasked with looking for a handful of well hidden items to clear the stage. Think Where’s Wally?, but on a bigger scale.
The items we’re looking for are along a bar at the bottom and thankfully appear exactly as they do in the world (there’s no vagueness here). And so we scroll around the area and attempt to find them all, along the way clicking on buildings to open them, or dirt mounds to see if anything is hidden underneath, as well as on everything else to see what cute animation plays out whether they are something we’re looking for or not.
Hovering over the item bar will give us a clue as to the wherabouts of said item, though there’s a good amount of ambiguity so as to not make it too easy. The game uses plenty of pop culture references as well as fantastical historical imagery for it’s layouts, and some of the scenarios got a little chuckle from me.
Of course, scouring one area is easy (ish), but for this sequel things have been notched up with the inclusion of a second version of each area, switched between at a button press. The effectively doubles to search area as not only does the weather/time of day change, but the layout of most of the area. Cleverly, there is some continuity between them (in one, someone may be getting ready for a party, and in the next they are at said party) so these clues can sometime be factored into item locations.
As mentioned though, Rogueside look after us and ease the challenge somewhat by indicating which time period an item can be found in. This is a very welcome addition indeed, and at least saves us from having to scour completely blind.
I’ve had a great time the last few evenings unwinding with a bit of object hunting after work, but Hidden Through Time 2 has also proven to be a hit with my two young kids. It’s the first game that’s not called Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite that’s captured their attention in a while, and my youngest (at eight years old) has been especially enamoured with it, asking to play it with me when I got in from work. While some of the context clues given were a bit too tricky for them to understand just yet, as a team we’ve really enjoyed finding as many of the items in each area as possible.
As you might imagine, one slight dampener on things are the controls – specifically the need to use a controller. While Rogueside have kept things simple and in use panning around with a controller is actually quite well implemented, there’s no denying the game really calls for a touch screen or mouse. Some of the items can be really well hidden, and using the analogue stick to line it up and register the hit can be a tad awkward at times. Again though, we can increase the size of the registerable area, and in my time with the game I’ve only really found a handful of things that were quite tight to select. Zooming in and out and panning around the map is smooth and easy though, and even fully zoomed out the clear, crisp visuals are easy to see.
If the dozens of levels included aren’t enough, Rogueside have also included a custom map maker alongside the ability to upload and share them with other players, as well as download their creations. Obviously pre-launch there isn’t a wide selection, though there were a few, but this could be where the game really shines. We can follow the same rules as the main game, so two time periods, levels packed full of detail, and up to 20 hidden items to find. It’s here though that the lack of a mouse really shows; selecting and placing objects is too fiddly for our liking, and while we can get granular with placements, orientation, and even layer items in a certain order, doing it with the slowly moving cursor is just too laborious here. We also found it to be quite buggy, with objects spawning off screen and then being unable to be moved, or the UI just not responding at all at times. Hopefully this is remedied in a patch soon, but we’d love to see mouse support as well to make creating our own maps far more enjoyable.
Conclusion
Overall, Hidden Through Time 2 has been a joy to play. Finding all the little hidden items is a fun time, especially so with the kids helping out, and there are plenty of humorous moments layered in too. Mouse support would have been great – especially for the custom map editor – but for the most part the controller functions well indeed.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
