Hidden Folks

What the game is

Hidden Folks is a seek-and-find game drawn entirely in black-and-white ink. Each area is a miniature landscape, a campsite or a construction site or a jungle, packed with tiny people and animals going about their business. Along the edge sits a strip of targets showing who or what to look for; tap a target for a hint, find enough of them, and the next area opens.

What makes it more than a picture book is that the landscape reacts. You unfurl tent flaps, cut through bushes, slam doors and poke crocodiles, and the things you are hunting for are hidden underneath, behind or inside them. The App Store listing counts 32 hand-drawn areas, more than 300 targets and over 500 unique interactions. Every sound in the game was made with a human mouth, more than two thousand of them, which children find very funny. It arrived in February 2017, costs about five dollars with nothing to buy inside, is rated 4 and up, and runs in 22 languages on phone, PC and Switch.

What you actually do

You pan and zoom around a drawing and touch everything in it. Most of what you touch does something small and pointless, and that is the design: the fun is in the poking, and the targets turn up along the way. When you are stuck, tapping a target gives a written hint, which is often a joke and occasionally the actual clue. You do not have to find everything to move on, only enough. There is no timer, no score, no failure and no penalty for wandering. Getting better mostly means learning to scan an area systematically instead of staring at it, and remembering that anything which can be opened probably should be.

What it exercises

• Scans a dense image systematically rather than staring at one spot.
• Matches a small silhouette to a figure inside a crowded scene.
• Reads a short written hint and works out what it points at.
• Tests interactive parts of a scene to reveal what is underneath.
• Keeps looking with no timer or score to push them along.

Why we rate it Minimal Worksheet score 23 / 100

1. FitHow much real knowledge or skill does the play itself make you use?22weight 45%

   Fit sits at 22. Careful visual searching is the only thing the game asks for, and the interactive scenery makes searching active rather than passive. But there is no subject matter underneath it, no domain of knowledge or skill being worked with, only clutter to sift through, which places it close to entertainment without a body of content behind it.

2. TransferWill what you practise here work outside the game?15weight 30%

   Transfer is the lowest score, at 15. Visual search practice here is real, but nothing suggests it makes anyone better at spotting things in a book or on a busy street, and the searching is exercised on invented drawings with no content of its own. The safer claim is about patience rather than any transferable skill: this rewards not rushing, and nothing more.

3. PracticeDoes the game make you use that skill again and again, as it gets harder?35weight 25%

   Practice reaches 35. There are 32 areas and more than 300 targets, so the search loop repeats a great deal within a single playthrough. After that the game is essentially finished: a repeat visit is a search for things whose location is already remembered, so the practice does not extend much beyond one careful pass through the whole game.

What the evidence says

Editorial onlyNobody outside our desk has checked this. It is our reading of how the game plays.

The evidence level is Editorial only and the claim is deliberately small. There is no research on Hidden Folks, and the literature on visual search training concerns laboratory tasks rather than children playing a seek-and-find game, so we will not lean on it. What we assert is what the design plainly requires: sustained scanning of a dense image, matching a target to a figure, and interacting with scenery to uncover what is hidden. The App Store listing supports the February 2017 release, the price, the absence of in-app purchases, the 4-and-up rating, the 32 areas, the 300 targets and the 22 languages.

• Official site ↗
• App Store ↗