#hidden folks

[olievah]

Parrot waxcap shroomlings are unusual amount the shroomlings, bird like and easily startled. Parrot waxcaps best known for mimicking noises and words.

[videogamepolls]

Have you played Hidden Folks (2017)?

Yes

No

I watched someone play it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onAug 11, 2025

Requested by anon

[bloodofelves]

► lovely indie games I played in 2021

[legitimatesatanspawn]

I'm kind of surprised there isn't a Where's Waldo game given how popular stuff like Hidden Folks and Hidden Through Time are.

There's clearly a bunch of people willing and eager for a Where's Waldo game. But the only games I remember are like 90s PC games of varying quality and a couple games on the iOS.

"Hidden Object" genre games don't really scratch the same itch for some reason.

[marshvlovestv]

There’s a weird jump here from 1-5 being “Yes good I like it” and 6-10 being “Some weird bullshit.” I didn’t hate anything here (except Sai) but at the same time no, this was not the strongest showing. Excuse me if anything sounds overly bitter - life circumstances and all that.

1.Signs of the Sojourner - Steam keeps recommending this game to me; usually when I already own a game on itch.io I tell Steam to stop recommending it to me, but I’m scared to do that with Signs of the Sojourner because the algorithm might interpret that as “Don’t recommend me anything else like this” and I really do want to be shown things like it because I absolutely adored it.

2.Speed Dating for Ghosts - Simultaneously very adorable and very profound, plus it’s very quick to get through every route so you can get to know all the characters without much hassle.

3.Darkest Dungeon - Oh boy. Well, I have over 50 hours logged but I did not finish it, because I party wiped twice in a row against that stupid cannon and I was like “Nah, sunk-cost fallacy be damned, I’m done with this.” And that’s okay, because the journey over the destination and all that. My journey with Darkest Dungeon mostly involved trying to drown out post-breakup feelings, but hey, it worked.

4.Hidden Folks - Nicely made. I enjoyed it a lot. I was never an aficionado of I Spy or Where’s Waldo (I would just stare at the pictures without really looking for anything) so I doubted my own ability to successfully play a hidden object game, but it was pretty perfect, difficulty-wise.

5.Backbone - Most criticism is warranted but I still found things to like about this game. Like, if you just want to see some beautifully rendered pixel art, absolutely check out a Let’s Play, or even get it on sale. People pay money just to look at things all the time.

6.Dungeons and Lesbians - I found this inoffensive when I played it but you will understand if since then my feelings about mixing Dungeons and Dragons with your dating life have gotten more complicated.

7.if not us - I have very little to say about 7, 8, or 9.

8.Wakamarina Valley, New Zealand - If you’re into artsier stuff they’re all decent ways to spend an hour.

9.The Space Between - But I can’t bring myself to say anything emphatic about any of them.

10.Sai - Look, for all I know this is very good for a third-person shooter (albeit with a bow and arrow, I must add), but in my eye, all 3D shooters are Some Bullshit and the very first combat encounter made me throw my mouse and went unbeaten.

[fischyplier]

Who killed Markiplier? Himself.

@markiplier

[candypower702]

Kristanna kiss, Fixer Upper and Kristoff’ Lullaby.

Courtesy of @tenshichan1013 for the video.

[listoriented]

2017 wrap-up

like xmas in july

It's July! 2018! Traditionally July is about when games websites publish their best-of-the-year-so-far lists. I'm bucking the trend by posting my very belated personal wrap-up of the last calendar year. Betcha didn't see this one coming. Fuck I'm just astoundingly clever.

(and/or I wrote this months ago but never posted it and now I’m stalling on finishing Broken Sword so consider this filler, or whatever)

List Oriented for 2017 was bookended by Bioshock 2 at one end, and A Boy and His Blob at the other. I managed to get through (just) twenty games. No primary letters were finished. We moved but one vowel or six standard letters along the second slot. 

There were a few noticeable phases. The two big shooty franchises, the Bioshocks and the  Borderlands, both threw their own wrenches into the gears. In between these I had a good run of breezing through (and largely discarding) a bunch of indie games in March through June, which made up maybe half of the years total. Botanicula was probably my favourite list-game of the year, although I'd already played it so that probably shouldn't count. I enjoyed Bioshock 2's DLC, Minerva's Den, and playing through the Borderlands Pre-Sequel with Lauren had some redeeming points. Black Mirror caused me to write the most words in frustration. But all in all I didn't get much reward from the list, so I'd like to spend the bulk of this post acknowledging the (non-list) games that kept up my love for the medium in the background of this and everything else.

2017 spat out a lot of quality games. Owing to budgetary reasons (we all know I'd rather just funnel all my money into Humble Bundles and ergo, hundreds of games I don't actually want to play rather than just outright buying the few games I really do) and holding off on getting a Switch til very late in the year, I think I barely scratched the surface of what came out.

I really enjoyed Tacoma, the well-realised space station setting, the quiet exploratory moments it afforded, its compelling method of storytelling, its considered examination of labour and technology. It's one of the most immersive, transportative experiences I've had in games in recent memory - nearly a year on I still feel like I can taste the sense of being in it. Night in the Woods similarly (although technically I didn't actually finish it 'til early this year) I thought really delivered in narrative and art - it has some really great, poignant writing, very believable dialogue and friendships and problems. Even though coal-town America is geographically and psychologically pretty far away and the characters are a good decade younger than me, its concerns felt very close and real.

Hidden Folks afforded late-night respite for a good few weeks. I found working my way through its quirky, Where's Wally scenes an incredibly calming way to clear my head before bed, even if the incessant mouse-clicking the game urges was repeatedly infuriating for Lauren (probably unrelated: we've since parted ways). In a broader sense Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles - a pacifist trading/crafting adventure - also went a long way to settling my nerves right when I needed it (as did we all need it for the entirety of last year). Despite early misgivings, I really enjoyed my time with it, particularly the subtle ways it encouraged exploration and its (unexpectedly) soft environmental beauty. I think about it fondly now even while knowing I'll probably never go back to it.

Dead Cells, despite being in early access, was probably my 2017 Game of the Year. I found its roguelike driven gameplay loop, slow unlocks and cute exploration mechanics to be fantastically addictive, though these were all just dressing for the meaty, twitchy platforming biffo at its core. I'd read about it first over at RPS where literally all of their writers seemed to be talking about it for a couple of weeks; perhaps unsurprisingly it ended up being their GOTY too. Let us never say I am above sheepdom. I'm looking forward to going back to it when it hits full release next month, and tbh I'll probably end up grabbing it on Switch too because that sounds just conceptually perfect.

In other "early access" accolades, my friend James bought me Player Unknown Battlegrounds aka PUBG aka PLUNKBAT aka Plunky B, out of friendship and kindness, and then again out of friendship and kindness he suffered having me disappoint him by getting killed and getting him killed over and over again. At other times I played with old-mate Roy, who gleefully but fairly nicknamed me "Backpack" (which stuck), and a casual, sprawling discord group we'd entered into through our good-at-all-kinds-of-networks pal AJ. My first chicken dinner happened on an otherwise genuinely awful-in-life weekend: my squad of four saw and fired on literally no-one except for one lonesome straggler to close out the game, in what felt at the time like some sort of transcendent miracle. I got fifty hours out of Plunky and enjoyed a good amount of that, even while being terrible. I really liked the rain and fog variants, but the developers have apparently ditched those for now, sadly. Or not? I don't know. I think I'm done with it.

Starcraft was remastered and relaunched. I played it for a little bit, enjoyed the nostalgia/feeling like I was 13 again, and then stopped playing but continued to enjoy watching Korean pros duke it out as they have done for twenty years, only now with more visually acceptable textures.  

Characteristically late to the parties, I also enjoyed catching up on a few great titles of 2016. All are fairly familiar to the canon at this point, I guess, but here's the honour role: I celebrated the purchase of this laptop by playing Firewatch, which gave me a lot of ideas about mystery and narrative for an essay that I never got around to writing. I also quite liked playing with sharp and interesting dialogue in the surprisingly nervy supernatural realms of Oxenfree, although my memories of it have cooled a bit since. I thought Hyper Light Drifter was superb: really wonderful pixel colours and an excellent glitch-synth soundtrack, twitchy, difficult but rewarding top-down action gameplay, a beautifully ambiguous adventure narrative. Kathy Rain closes out this group - a fun and thoughtful suspense point and clicker that really nailed its 90's setting/themes/aesthetic, where despite getting needlessly stuck a bunch of times I found myself really invested in it.

It would probably also be dishonest not to mention to these records that I continued to play Rocket League throughout. Or not? Who really cares <3

So that's that, hey. Games are cool. 2017 was a cool year for new games, and for checking out games from the year before, if not really all that much else.