I don't generally go for cute games. I mean, I don't take steps to avoid them either if they look like they have potential either. All the same, Hidden Folks might be one of the cutest games I've played so far for this feature. Taking the Where's Waldo/Wally (delete as appropriate for your region) books as a template, Hidden Folks creates these enormous, highly-detailed and densely-populated dioramas, fills them with lots of incidental humor, and then tasks the player with finding a checklist of specific "folks" - the generic term the game uses for every sentient being - and objects in the environment, scanning the enormous image from top to bottom and left to right to locate them.

However, unlike a lot of Where's Waldo/Wally games that don't quite capitalize on the strengths of the video game medium, each image is fully animated. The folks will wander around in loops, dance, wave their arms around, and other little actions that not only make each of the game's tableaux that much more dynamic, but adds a few extra wrinkles in trying to hunt them down. Another feature is that the image is packed with hotspots that the player can interact with - these can range from simply eliciting noises to pulling doors open or curtains apart. Even tiny little drawers and lockers can sometimes reveal crucial items, as do various holes that the player can dig into until their buried treasures pop out. That said, the game does toss a bone the player's way with their hint system: each of the targets, arranged along the bottom, has a description about their personality or current predicament, and you can often use this to narrow down where in the image that target might be hiding. A character said to be "lost in the clouds" could be high up, or could have actual clouds blocking your view of them that would need to be clicked away before the target becomes visible. In those respects, Hidden Folks elevates itself above its traditional hidden object brethren both due to its wit and the way it plays around with interactivity as an X-factor.

But when I say this game is cute, I'm specifically talking about its aesthetic. A big image full of tiny people sounds adorable enough, but the game goes a step further by making every sound - and don't be mistaken; this is a very noisy game, by design - be an acapella foley. That is to say, that one or more human beings made every sound in the game, from the generic "hello"s and "woohoo"s from the folks, to the humming of electricity or engine revving noises from vehicles. There's a definite "sound design by Michael Winslow" (ask your parents) vibe to the game, which can be both endearing and irritating in a ratio that cancels each other out. Still, it's not a particularly common direction for sound design and I can appreciate the distinctive atmosphere it brings to the game; it reminded me a lot of Amanita's own sweetly eccentric world construction. Another unusual element, but one that makes more sense given the game's difficulty balance, is that the game is purely monochrome: presumably this was to make it impossible to track a target based on its colors.

It should be stated that the game's difficulty curve is all over the place. In addition to finding a selection of hidden folks, there are little puzzle stages to break things up; most of these involve clearing a path for a moving NPC, ensuring that obstacles are removed and that the road ahead is structurally sound, but these are considerably easier than the core game. The hardest stages are those where the playing field is truly massive, and it's difficult to find anything or anyone specific simply because of how much there is to see. The last desert level, the last snow level and the fourth factory level greatly expands on the amount of real estate you could peruse in the other levels, with a number of targets in excess of twenty or more. Mercifully, the game will at least let you move onto the next stage after a certain milestone is hit, usually around 60% of the targets on the stage (though this minimum requirement approaches 100% the smaller the level happens to be, but with those stages you shouldn't have too many problems finding everything). It can get a little enervating trying to scan an enormous 3000 x 4000 image trying to parse an ambiguous hint, even with the considerable degree that the game lets you zoom in and out of the picture, but then a lot of that is my own darn fault for being obsessive enough to find everything. The only advice I can offer is to click everything, because there's no telling what hotspot might be crucial to progress.

Overall, though, Hidden Folks was an unexpected delight, and it seems the game's developers aren't yet finished putting together their busy vistas. A set of beach levels is under construction, according to the in-game map selection screen, and the developers have offered an email notification service for whenever new stages become available. If this becomes the kind of game I can hop into for a few hours whenever a free new update rolls around, like Terraria or Shovel Knight, then that added value is just peachy. Even if this is the last I play of Hidden Folks however, it was certainly time well spent. (Even if it took forever to find a certain crashed skier...)

Rating: 4 out of 5.