I've played quite a few hidden object games, enjoying the puzzles and their casual nature. I've found that some are good, some are mediocre and some are bad, but Hidden Fears doesn't even qualify as the latter.
A recently married couple is lured to a hotel for their honeymoon, only for the wife to be abducted shortly after their arrival. The husband has to explore the eerie building, solve puzzles and battle ghosts in order to find and free her.
First off, I do like the ghostly atmosphere of the creepy hotel, as well as the horror-themed story. The artwork looks pretty good too and the music does add to the ambiance. But that's about where the enjoyability ended for me, though. What follows is only a selections of the problems I encountered while playing.
The game controls are clunky to say the least. For example, during a mini-game near the start of the game a metal ball has to be guided through a maze using the cursor keys. Occasionally a bomb goes of inside the maze (always near the ball) and if the ball is inside the blast radius it will return to its starting point. Due to the unresponsive controls it was nearly impossible to avoid the blast, as the ball would regularly stop moving or not even start moving when pressing a cursor key. After several failed and frustrating attempts I was forced to skip the mini-game (something I don't like doing and don't often do) in order to progress the story.
Some of descriptions of the mini-games state that there is a time limit to winning the game but no timer is shown, making it impossible to know how long you have left. Would it have hurt the developers to give the player an on-screen indication of the remaining time? Also, the description often only tell you the goal of mini-game without explaining anything about the controls or mechanics of the game.
During the tutorial a clock was visible in the top-left of the screen, for some inexplicable reason measuring how long I took. In itself not a big deal, but whenever it ticked (i.e. every second) the game, or at least the mouse cursor, would freeze, making it difficult to accurately point at anything. Fortunately the timer disappeared after the tutorial was over, along with the annoying freezing every second.
Voice acting in games like these is often not great, which I understand and accept, but in this one it is abysmal. Not only does it seem as if the actors are simply reading from a sheet of paper, they also sound as if they'd rather be doing something else. Things are only aggravated by the badly written dialogue.
At one point a few lines of subtitles during a cutscene didn't disappear from the screen, causing them to make the following lines unreadable. After the cutscene finished they still remained on top of the inventory bar. Quitting to the main menu and reloading the game fixed this, but it shouldn't have happened to begin with.
Loading times when switching rooms are much longer than such a relatively simple game justifies, which can get very annoying when backtracking is involved. I read other reviews which mentioned loading times between 10 and 30 seconds, but fortunately I was spared that.
As usual the game automatically pauses when alt-tabbing out of the game. However, upon returning the game wouldn't unpause, despite the on-screen message telling me to "Click the screen to resume the game". Also, during one of the mini-games the game crashed to desktop.
I think that Hidden Fears has the potential to be a pretty decent horror-themed hidden object game. However, the problems I encountered while playing just kept piling up, and after the game crashed on me somewhere during chapter 3 I decided that enough was enough. I may never find out if Tony will be able to save his wife from a bunch of ghosts and lunatics, or if he'll become one of them. But frankly I just don't care anymore.
My advice is to only buy this if you're a fan of hidden object games with a spooky atmosphere, don't mind the occasional crash and horrible voice acting and other issues mentioned above, [b]and[/b] it is offered at a major discount. Otherwise, stay away from this one.
