Hidden Object Time Travel

Hidden Object Time Travel is a search game built around densely illustrated scenes, each set in a different period — dinosaur jungles, ancient civilisations, laboratories and future cities. You are given a list of items and the scene contains all of them, usually in plain sight and usually invisible anyway. That is the trick the genre runs on: things are not hidden behind other things so much as camouflaged by context. A key lying on a workbench full of tools is harder to find than a key lying on grass, and the artists know it. What separates this from a purely relaxing version of the genre is the timer. There is one, and it turns a leisurely hunt into something you have to be systematic about.

Each scene gives you a list of objects to find. Look at the scene, find an item, and click or tap it to mark it off. Find everything on the list before the clock runs out to complete the scene and move on to the next era. Hints are available when you are stuck, but they are limited, so spending one early on something you would have found anyway is a real cost later.

Search in a fixed pattern rather than wherever your eye goes. Sweep left to right, top to bottom, and you will cover the scene once properly instead of covering the middle five times. Read the whole item list before you start looking; knowing you need something small and metal changes what registers as you scan. Objects are frequently rotated or partly occluded, so hold the shape in mind rather than the picture. Save hints for the last two or three items, which is where the genuinely nasty placements always are. And when you are stuck, look at the edges and the corners — that is where things get tucked, because players instinctively search the middle.