Melissa K. and the Heart of Gold has made the transition from the iPad to the PC and Mac, and is available now on Steam.
Play through the game’s stunning combat and parkour based– wait, what? It’s a hidden object game? Oh. Never mind, then. Umm… Puzzles!
Despite the bad rap they get from a lot of mainstream games media and “hardcore” players, hidden object games account for a relevant portion of the modern games market. What once were nothing more than the cheapest of cheap budget titles now provide the industry with a unique market demographic due to their widespread appeal to lots of age groups and levels of play skill, meaning that companies are investing more and more effort into making hidden object games that, despite the stigma attached to the genre, are actually — dare I say it? — good.
Melissa K. and the Heart of Gold strives to be one of these, and according to reviews of the original iPad version, managed to do so with only small quibbles, mostly related to difficulty in finding small objects on the iPad’s diminutive screen. Now that the game is being ported over to PC and Mac, however, it will be worthwhile to see if the larger screen real estate made available by doing so fixes those issues at hand and makes for an even more enjoyable experience despite the loss of certain features that made the mobile version unique, such as motion-based screen scrolling.
For a point and click/hidden object game Melissa K. and the Heart of Gold looks to have a very nice visual presentation (as is to be expected of a game designed to take advantage of Apple’s retina display,) and if the voice clips and music from the trailer are any indication, better than average audio presentation, especially for the genre. Reviews laud the game for these features, while most also seem to agree that the puzzles and HOG elements themselves are well presented and even, on occasion, feature creative design in the way some of the puzzles work. In an industry as saturated with shovelware as the hidden object game market, this can be seen as high praise indeed.
Melissa K. and the Heart of Gold is out now on Steam, and will work on both PC and Mac platforms, with the added advantage of running on just about any system released in the last 10 years or so thanks to surprisingly low system requirements. If you have any interest in hidden object games, then it definitely looks like a release worth checking out.