Like any good experiment, Rainy Days and Mundis went as far as it could go before it suddenly mutated and killed a bunch of people [citation needed], so it's probably time to draw it to an end. My original intent was to go ten episodes, if only because I picked up ten Aritfex Mundi games in the same bundle, but I've been repeating myself a lot more than I anticipated. It's not just that these hidden object puzzle adventure games - "H.O.P.A.", which really sounds more like the acronym of a charity that helps sick kids - are in a rut stylistically and mechanically, but they seem to reuse the same story beats and source material too. Specifically, every other HOPA has been about mythology and folklore, dragging in phoenixes, dragons, gods from ancient pantheons, astrology (especially this week), fairy folk, alchemy, and villains who invariably need to be stopped by sealing their souls in artifacts or banishing them to the proverbial land of wind and ghosts.

In retrospect, I wonder if I could've swallowed my timely The Carpenters joke title and expanded this feature to include more than just Artifex Mundi games. As we've clearly seen, the publisher and occasional developer of these games appears to have an iron grip on the direction they take: it's no coincidence that a group of disparate game developers from all over the world seem to put out functionally identical games under their banner. Yet, I can't also help but feel while browsing the other HOPA games on Steam that this is perhaps a more universal issue, and Artifex Mundi just happens to be a big name because they're better at producing this particular model than most. If I could just find a HOPA that does the traditional third-person adventure game thing with an avatar you move around (say, like Monkey Island or King's Quest), or maybe one with pixel graphics, or even one with FMV - none of these ideas are particularly radical in the universe of Indie adventure games, but in the context of hidden object puzzle adventure games? I dare say they would be considered dangerously bold. (Man, would I unironically love some kind of Hidden Object/Where's Waldo thing with huge montages of pixel sprites. Maybe "Where's Wario" can be that guy's next off-beat adventure?)

Anyway, back to depressing reality and to another HOPA that looks and plays like all the other ones. Before we begin, a reminder of our journey so far:

• Episode 1: Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride
• Episode 2: The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulcan
• Episode 3: Tiny Tales: Heart of the Forest
• Episode 4: Grim Legends 2: Song of the Dark Swan
• Episode 5: Fairy Tale Mysteries: The Puppet Thief

Episode 6: Mythic Wonders: The Philosopher's Stone

No elaborate choosing process this time; I simply went with the remaining Mundi game in my collection with the best review scores. Mythic Wonders: The Philosopher's Stone (developed by the San Francisco/Belgrade-based Organic 2 Digital Studios, which also made the Vampire Legends games) once again deals with mysticism and alchemy, sending its heroine Emma Wood through a series of elemental worlds as she chases after her missing scholar uncle through the alchemical portal they built together. You know, typical uncle-niece hanging out stuff. The game is handily compartmentalized by these elemental worlds - which cycle through earth, water, fire, air and eventually aether - keeping areas manageable for the sake of backtracking, but still large enough to fit a wide number of environmental puzzles. The goal of each world is to find its elemental stone, which usually requires some sort of puzzle at the world's throne room, and to assemble the instructions that will lead you to the next portal destination. To exacerbate matters is a floating green guardian character who is determined to halt your progress, often creating additional barriers to overcome such as a raging waterfall or a broken bridge.

I liked this week's HOPA in part because it reminded me a lot of Legend Entertainment's Death Gate. I've spoken before about how the classic HOPA interface - first-person, with your inventory bar scrolling across the bottom and other UI items of note tucked away in the bottom corners - seems to have been inspired by the one Legend Entertainment used for most of their games, which included the likes of Shannara, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, and Mission Critical. Death Gate, like many Legend games, was based on fantasy literature - in this case, the Death Gate Cycle by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss, who are perhaps better known for their Dragonlance novels. In Death Gate, the hero travels across various elemental planes in a dimension-hopping galleon, solving problems in each realm before moving onto the next in pursuit of his people's archenemies and any clues as to their whereabouts. In addition, both the Death Gate game and Mythic Wonders have a spell system that you slowly add to, and they tend to be factors in puzzles more often than not; when you have a system like that, you have to keep in mind how you have more options than just whatever's in your pockets. Mythic Wonders isn't subtle about when a spell is needed rather than an object - the icon changes into the egg-like Philosopher's Stone item, which you continue to enhance with new gemstones for additional spell effects - but I appreciated the extra layer of puzzle-solving all the same. Mythic Wonders is also perhaps the best-looking game I've played for this feature, with the elemental planes offering a great deal of visual variety both with its backgrounds and with its hidden object tableaux.

However, it's not artistic diversity we're interested in here, but puzzle diversity. How does Mythic Wonders fare in that department?

Exceptionally well, in fact. Of the sixty-two unique puzzles I encountered, only twenty-one were hidden object screens, around a third of the total. Of those, there was some significant variety: an almost perfect three-way split between what I call the "Words" variety, the "Shapes" variety, and the "Mono" variety (the last of which tasks you with finding a single type of object that has around ten or twelve instances in the picture). We also saw several cases where the list of words included some items with yellow text: this indicated that you needed to perform an extra action to make those objects appear, say by smashing a vase with a hammer or by opening an oyster with a knife. The item described by the clue usually made it clear where it was hiding (e.g. a pearl in the oyster's case). The "Shapes" puzzles meanwhile had things like flowers and bugs, but also symbols and runes which tended to be better hidden.

But it's the non-hidden puzzle variety in which we see the most variation. Here's a quick recap of all the puzzle types I found in the game, almost all of which were only invoked once or twice:

• A jigsaw puzzle where you had to fit Tetris-like shapes in a grid.
• Two sliding panel puzzles in which changing one panel would affect another.
• A maze puzzle in which you had to mentally follow a group of tangled wires to find their correct terminal points.
• Two "Simon Says" puzzles in which you have to repeat a pattern that grows in length. One of them was the game's final boss fight.
• A sliding block puzzle with a web-like structure.
• A sliding block puzzle in which you had to get all the colored gems to the right spot by spinning dials.
• A painting puzzle in which you had to ensure no two adjacent panels were the same color.
• A simple Picross puzzle, of all things.
• A puzzle where you had to guide a frog around a maze of lilypads, touching each one once but never twice. This puzzle had three "levels" to complete.
• A puzzle where you had a group of knots and strings where the strings couldn't cross. Three levels to this one too.
• The dreaded sliding block puzzle where you have to get a specific "key" block to a "lock" area. Fortunately, there was only one of these.
• Two sliding block puzzles that let you switch the places of any two panels, considered the "lite" version of the usual grid with a gap to navigate around.
• A simple matching puzzle where you remove pairs of items by matching their symbols. Unlike most memory match games, the symbols are visible at all times.
• There was also one instance of the usual kind of memory match puzzles, where the icons are hidden until you tap them.
• A light reflection/refraction puzzle. Bonus points for requiring you to use multiple filters to produce different colored beams.
• A chess "knights" puzzle, reaching a specific space in a fixed number of moves. This one also had three levels of difficulty.
• A sliding block puzzle in which you had to switch sides of a stack of cubes so that each type was facing a specific way. I.e. the blue sides were always facing up, the red sides were always facing left, and the yellow sides were always facing right.
• A "narrative" order puzzle, wherein you had to change the order of a set of pictures so they told a story. So, for example, an egg becomes a caterpillar becomes a chrysalid becomes a butterfly.
• A QTE puzzle where you had to press left and right to avoid crashing a flying vehicle.
• A math puzzle in which you had to balance two sets of fruits with numbers: both sides had to equal the same total.
• A "spot the difference" puzzle.
• A pattern matching puzzle in which you had to pair each horoscope symbol with its image. This one was odd because the game assumed you knew what the horoscope symbols were - lending more credence to the idea that these games are aimed at a very specific audience.
• An algebra question in which you had to order a set of Greek letters by a set of "less than/greater than" hints.
• A matching game where you had to put potions in their right alcoves, based on names and colors.
• A safecracker puzzle where you had to move a specific number of spaces left or right to complete a series, but were limited in how far you could move in one turn.
• A puzzle where you had to connect wires between two shapes in order to recreate a composite image. So, a circle and a cross to make an image that looked like, well, a circle with a cross in it.
• Another math puzzle, in this case there is a web of objects with numbers between them, and you had to move the objects so that the number in between them was their sum.
• A Sokoban puzzle, with three levels of ascending difficulty.
• And each time you activated the portal to head to the next elemental plane, you needed to solve a logic puzzle where you received hints to an order of runes to activate, like "this is not the second or third rune" or "this rune is one of the final three to be activated". There were five of these.

As you can see, Mythic Wonders does an admirable job of presenting a wide variety of puzzle types, even if we've seen most of these before (the Picross and Sokoban ones were new though). It's still a far cry from the Layton games, which manages to find a huge amount of variety in its 120+ puzzles per entry and doesn't need to bulk up its numbers with a large amount of hidden object business, but as far as this genre goes it's an impressive effort.

So what have we gleaned from this experiment? Well...

I've learned that HOPA games are far too rigid in their presentations and mechanics, sticking very firmly to a specific blueprint. This extends to every facet of the game's development: from its interface, to the types of puzzles you're likely to find, to the variation in how the list of hidden objects is presented, to even how the graphics are assembled and animated and the topics and settings they tend to feature. I'm not sure why it's always so necessary to hit the mythology/folklore button so often, beyond perhaps the fact that a lot of fairy tales are public domain and don't require a whole lot of imagination to pull off. You could also argue that the developers are going with relatively safe source material that would be globally recognized: it might be a harder sell if they based their games specifically on local Eastern European folklore (though this has also been the case for a few of them). Even from the perspective of a game design dilettante like myself, there's definitely room for more interpretations and avenues for the same formula - the combination of inventory puzzles, classic "Mensa" puzzles, and hidden object puzzles - if this cottage industry were brave enough to explore them. Not that I'm volunteering, mind.

I've also learned that, try as I might, I actually enjoy playing these games. They're mindless in a way that many games admittedly are, giving you busywork or relatively easy challenges to complete at a pace that continually keeps your brain engaged, just about. I can't say I'll break one out for a new Indie Game of the Week unless I get really desperate, nor am I likely to play one during a weekend with nothing better to do, but I can't say they're a waste of time either (well, if you don't consider video games a waste of time in the strictest sense). They ultimately belong in the same part of my brain that Musou games do, or those LEGO platformers from TT Games.

And that's Rainy Days and Mundis. Thanks to anyone who joined me on this expedition into a weirdly populous and popular portion of the Steam marketplace, including @bobafettjm who warned me several times what I was getting myself into. I think I've learned all I need to about these maligned casual games, and I'll probably keep an eye on new games of this format if only to see if their developers bother attempting anything new. I can't see how many more times they can draw from the "a courageous and spiritual young woman solves problems through magic, alchemy and her own perspicacity" well before even their hardcore proponents throw in the towel.