Hilariously Camp but Imprecise Hidden-Object Puzzler
Fans of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days will probably take exception to how it’s adapted here, but I’ve got a soft spot for how ridiculous it is. Phileas and Passepartout aren’t really bothered about the time-limit imposed on them, or how to navigate each city. There are no princesses that need saving, railways that are out of action, or incoming storms. The main obstacles on their journey are inadequate packing (Phileas’s stuff keeps tumbling out in inopportune locations) and messy locations. The main thing stopping the two explorers is untidiness.
There are just so many quirks that they all became endearing to me. I like to think that Jules Verne would be tickled by it too. I love how the time period is tossed out of the window for the sake of the odd item: Rubik’s Cubes, laptops and football pumps appear in the scenes, even though the story and backdrops are all clearly Victorian. I love the very stereotypical (but not necessarily offensive) understanding of each location, with Kenya being a stampede of lions and rhinos with a few tribal masks in the background. I love how Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects is faithful to the book in the oddest places. All of the locations are presented in a book-correct order.
Around the World in 80 Presses of the Hint Button
This is not, as you can probably guess, a serious adaptation of the novel. This is the book seen through a hidden-object lens. Each location is a scree of items, and your job is to find a shopping list of them, running across the bottom of the screen.
While I have a love for the adaptation, I’m less of a fan of the hidden object scenes. A colour-wash has been applied across each puzzle, which means that everything is reduced to the same palette. The London scene is all grey; an Australia scene is all brown. It means that nothing ‘pops’, and you’re rifling in a soup of similarly coloured items. I’d often be looking for things like ‘lemons’ and ‘oranges’, subconsciously looking for their colours in the scene. But of course their colours have been distorted. You’re not looking for yellows or oranges: you’re looking for brown with a hint of yellow, or brown with a hint of orange.
It feels like cheap tricks are being used. Items are barely poking out of backdrops that are aiming to conceal them. Others are tiny, or deliberately camouflaged in similarly coloured settings which – thanks to the colour-wash – could be pretty much anywhere. All too often, I would use a hint, the prompt would tell me where an item is, and I still wouldn’t be able to see it.
Everything is a bit Phileas Foggy
Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects fumbles the one thing that no hidden object game should fumble: the satisfaction of finding stuff in a mess. Even the scenes themselves – collages and mixed media – don’t make a whole lot of sense. I couldn’t tell you what on Earth is happening in the Australia scene, for example. It seems to be a jumble of steampunk laboratory, vaudeville theatre and a genie-woman popping out of a dimensional rift. I mean, part of me likes the weirdness of it, but I’m guessing I should at least comprehend what’s going on?
Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects wants you to play each level once in a standard format (finding items based on a shopping list of words), which completes the story of Phileas and Passepartout. This doesn’t take long: probably no more than a couple of hours. Then there’s a subsequent story with an investigator following the two. This story also makes no sense: the policeman loses interest in the case and mostly just has a good time with the locals.
More importantly, the investigation allows you more freedom in the hidden object scenes. You’re not limited to finding words anymore. You can play Spot the Difference, isolating two or three items that aren’t present between two images. You can look for silhouetted items rather than text (which is oddly easier: because everything up to this point was the same colour, you’re now directed by shape, and that’s not homogenised). Or you can opt for a ‘Puzzle’, which converts the scene into jumbled squares, or ‘Jigsaw’, where the scene becomes a relatively simple jigsaw puzzle.
It’s Probably Worth Giving this a Pass-epartout
This is where Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects steps up its game. It takes a couple of hours to get there, but suddenly you can play how you want – and that includes completionism, as you try to reach five-stars in each level. I enjoyed Spot the Difference and Silhouettes most, so gravitated towards those.
It should be noted that even this broadening out into other hidden object variants isn’t perfect. I hit a number of bugs where Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects got its variants mixed up. I would be presented with a single silhouette, but I couldn’t click on the item it referred to. Instead, I was expected to find lots of origami items, which had no relation to the silhouetted item at all. This happened three times.
So Bad, it’s Good
Much of Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects is so bad it’s good. The story, the lack of any reverence to the source material, and the modern-day items in Victorian scenes all get enthusiastic thumbs up from me. I put them all under an umbrella with ‘camp’ emblazoned across it.
But much of Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects is so bad, it’s plain bad. The colour-graded scenes make it hard to spot, well, anything, and reasonably frequent bugs mean that certain levels became guessing games. Even with a perverse affection for all of its oddnesses, I have to acknowledge that Around the World in 80 Days: Hidden Objects isn’t particularly polished, nor is it rewarding.
Important Links
Around The World In 80 Days: Hidden Objects Invites You On The Greatest Global Puzzle Hunt – https://www.thexboxhub.com/around-the-world-in-80-days-hidden-objects-invites-you-on-the-greatest-global-puzzle-hunt/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/around-the-world-in-80-days-hidden-objects/9NPM19L9FVH9/0010
