Casual Review

Full Review

I really wanted to like this game. Since the explosion of the casual game genre in 2005, there has been a sort of deeply held belief that the only people playing casual games are soccer moms and grandmothers. But statistics show quite clearly that a good solid third to half of the casual game audience is male, predominantly older males. What are these guys playing? Does Diner Dash and Pet Shop Hop really speak to a fifty year old man that watches a lot of the History channel? Likely not.

That’s where Hidden Mysteries of the Civil War comes in. This is a theme that has just been waiting to be exploited. A casual review of the interests of this under-exploited demographic shows that there are a whole raft of great themes that have been virtually ignored by the casual developers, and obviously the Civil War tops that list. I am very much hoping that this game will be successful, and herald in the beginning of a number of games that deal with this.

The trick is, does the game explore that theme in a way that is interesting, tasteful, and respectful to this theme? Happily, the answer to that is yes. The game has biographies of various figures from the war, expressing their reasons for siding with the North or the South, has brief histories of major battles and moments in the war, and is overall very much the kind of thing people like my history-buff uncle would enjoy. I actually have very little personal interest in the war, but found myself sucked into the biographies of the soldiers, ane the interesting stories they told about the battles.

Of course, does it make an interesting hidden object game? Actually, yes and no. The idea is solid, the locales are interesting, and there was a wealth of little surprises, like letters and mail you can find that advance the story and share history. This is all to the good. On the not-so-good side, this game errs on the “lets make the object more or less transparent and stick it in the wood grain” school of hiding objects, which makes finding many of them an exercise in luck and frustration instead of an exercise in skillful searching. Going back and comparing this against the fun, whimsical places things were hidden in Mystery Case Files, I tend to think that the developers of these games have gotten a bit lazy about how they are hiding objects. In fact, some of the objects in Hidden Mysteries of the Civil War were so blurry and distorted that I just clicked on them randomly, hoping they were what I was looking for. That’s not a good sign.

In all, I respect the developers for trying something new and interesting for a topic, and hope that the trend continues. The game is still just another hidden object game, but the demand for those seems to be unflagging, so I guess in that sense, it’s a solid and playable design, if a little bit graphically inferior to some of the more stylized contributions. It’s definitely worth checking out, and for the Civil War buffs out there, likely worth buying. Go take a look and see what you think.

Review by Nick Kojima