Sometimes you want to stick a game on that offers layers upon layers of deep mechanics to dig into or some equally deep storytelling that'll keep you immersed for an unhealthy length of time. On other occasions, you probably just want some basic-ass Where's Waldo? game with a sci-fi/UFO theme because you're busy enough already. Looking for Aliens belongs to that most underappreciated of genres: the hidden object puzzle game or, as I call them, "squint 'em ups". The goal of each level is simple enough: scour a large diorama for the objects or people listed across the bottom of the screen, in addition to a card collectible and a set of identical targets, and then repeat the loop with the equally detailed images to follow. A premise so simple I've now painted myself into a corner trying to expatiate on it for another four paragraphs.

Looking for Aliens takes a leaf from Hidden Folks in particular—and a few other I've seen pop up on Steam over the years, so I'm going to recuse myself of mentioning a likely precursor and getting it wrong—by having its large, detail-oriented tableaux be to some extent both interactive and animated: two advantages not afforded to the Where's Waldo? book franchise. You can click dumpsters, doors, windows, crates, and other portals to have them reveal their contents, which may or may not include something you're searching for. There's also buttons and levers that might cause some other part of the level to change, which in turn could also be either a means to summon one of your targets or itself be a target. The game is built in a way where many levels will have a specific goal in mind to further the story it's telling (though said story is fairly loose and prone to tangents), and one of those could be to press a series of buttons semi-hidden across the level to, say, launch a space rocket or cook a giant egg. Other times you're just looking for the specific NPCs related to the story, or simply enough of the targets for the game to accept you've done sufficiently well and can proceed: hunting absolutely everything is never a requirement, though there are achievements and game progress attached to doing so.

Speaking of story, Looking for Aliens has a shaggy dog of a narrative where aliens are shown to be real and hiding among us. They tend to be tourists, scientists, and pranksters for the most part: they hide in plain sight at UFO conventions, for example, or are using hologram technology to conceal all their moon habitats to the humans that just built a base nearby. The framing device follows three celebrity aliens in particular: a stern rock-like anchorman called Blorp, the energetic amorphous blob reporter Bubble Gu, and the reckless survival reality TV show host Grey Brills. They chronicle their time on Earth, with Brills in particular attempting to survive the most dangerous scenarios Earth has to offer (the morning commute and the Black Friday sales). We learn two things from these various reports and the levels that follow: the aliens are very dumb, but the humans are even dumber so the aliens have remained undiscovered despite a significant lack of discretion. Throughout the game's twenty-five scenarios, which generally stick to either the "aliens hiding on Earth" Men in Black theme (speaking of which, the music is very reminiscent of Danny Elfman's MiB tracks) or provide a glimpse of a densely populated outer space, a series of events occur that might have Earth threatened by a kaiju one moment or a tenacious tinfoil-hat wearer causing the aliens some trouble by endlessly cloning himself the next. It lacks the thematic variety of many of its peers, but conversely offers something of a narrative thread to tie itself together as compensation. The humor's hit and miss, of course, but this structure offers the game some freedom in its approach to its puzzles.

For an example of what I mean, the game will occasionally have these huge vistas to pore over, with number of targets well up into the several dozen. However, it won't keep throwing these massive images at you: it'll decide the next moment in the story requires a much more compact puzzle to solve, giving the player a bit of a breather before the next enormous canvas to intently examine. It recognizes that this genre isn't necessarily one that benefits from a traditional difficulty curve—as a casual game, "difficulty" isn't really a factor regardless—so instead chooses to present its content as a series of peaks and valleys, giving you time to recover before the next big wave and using its narrative thread as a laudable explanation for this approach. It's probably my favorite aspect about it, though it might be worth keeping in mind that only half its puzzles will take any amount of time to complete: the smaller ones might well take less than five minutes, so factor that into the completion time. With twenty-five puzzles total though, you can't argue you don't get your money's worth.

In some ways, Looking for Aliens is an improvement over its predecessors in the "Where's Waldo? but shit moves" sub-genre of the hidden object world, but in other ways it feels a little lacking. It's pretty glitchy, for example, though I'll admit that I've yet to run into any game-breaking issues; it's more like sprites going behind background items instead of in front of them or found items suddenly reappearing and disappearing again, just minor graphical imperfections of the type that give the game a slightly sloppy feel. There's also the focus on the whole aliens/sci-fi business that makes many of the levels feel same-y after a while, frequently reusing most of the same assets and characters. On the whole, though, there's plenty of imagination to be found in how the game sets up its individual levels, sometimes giving you a different approach to "just look around for stuff" where you might have to follow a series of clues or complete multiple stages of a single puzzle to proceed. And, that said, it's not like the game isn't lacking for garbage to find and does the Where's Waldo? thing of setting up little jokes for you to discover everywhere you look. I appreciated the game's silliness and charm, in combination with its unhurried pace as a casual game meant to be somewhat relaxing. Well, until you've spent thirty minutes looking for one particularly elusive little alien blob and are starting to get just a tad antsy about it, at least.

Rating: 4 out of 5.