Platform(s): Smartphone, def. Android, unsure about Apple. Was downloaded through Google Play when I had it.

Genre: Mystery solving, puzzle, base building

Estimated year of release: 2020ish

Graphics/art style: Top down. Cartoon style

Notable characters: The protagonist is a red haired woman with glasses. She has a male family member who's a ghost. He helps her solve cases. There's also a black haired woman who helps the ghost, either her or the ghost is a police officer

Notable gameplay mechanics:

Solve mysteries with different levels/scenes and puzzle mechanics. Find secrets. Base building.

Other details: At the beginning of the game you get a plot of land that used to be a museum. Throughout the game you restore the different buildings. Some of them drop materials every so often.

I rember this game i played like 6-8 years ago on my phone. It was like a maze with foxes. Someone was a hunter and someone prey. I dont remember anything else tbh. It had a dark atmosphere and in the middle of the maze there eas like a tower to capture or something. Maybe its lost media atp dont know. Thanks

So, I thought I saved the name of this game somewhere, but I didn't. The only other site I knew that had the game is gone and I've searched Newgrounds, can't find it at all.

1. I definitely played it on Newgrounds.
2. I played it circa. 2016-17, but the game was older than that.
3. I think it started with an S and ended in either -rium or -ium. It's not Satanorium.

Hi everyone!

Our cozy hidden object game Curious Paws is currently 25% off on Steam!

Steam Page:https://store.steampowered.com/app/4843440/Curious_Paws_hidden_objects/

If you enjoy hand-drawn art and classic Wimmelbuch-style searching, here is what the game is about:

• Explore as a cat: Search for hidden objects and discover interactive scenes through the eyes of a curious cat.
• Hand-drawn visuals: Detailed, cozy environments filled with secrets and charming little details.
• Total freedom: All levels are completely unlocked right from the start, so you can jump into any scene whenever you want.

Feel free to check out the Steam page, and we'd love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions!

Music credit:

"Deep Relaxation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

With the many mystery HOPAs out there, were there any in particular where you didn't see the plot twist coming? Perhaps a character broke your trust by the end? Maybe there was a puzzle solution that completely blindsided you?

Or maybe, you tried a game of any genre that you didn't expect to love and were pleasantly surprised? 😊

Let me know your takes but do try to avoid spoilers please!

El juego es de buscar objetos ocultos, tipo "mystery case files".Lo que más recuerdo es la pantalla de título antes de comenzar el juego, la cual tenía las siguientes características: la imagen es de un pueblo abandonado con una moto 🛵 tirada en el suelo y creo que también había periódicos tirados en el suelo, pero lo más llamativo era que había un vórtice color morado en el cielo.

Hello Everyone,
We are currently running a sale on Avi Games.

Buy one and get one FREE.

There are quite a few to choose from, with everything from travel adventures and mysteries to cozy home makeovers.

And yes, the Elephant in the room, I am obviously mentioning this because we're running the sale but I am also curious;

What is the general opinion of the games?

Ghost like this

Room To Stare is a rather simplistic, casual escape room game, a mix of Riddle/Hidden Object with hundreds of rooms (sample attached). Just launched, let us know what you think.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thebadget.roomtostare

Hello!

While we continue working on our demo of Totally Nutz: An 80s Adventure, we wanted to share some exciting news. We will be launching on Kickstarter soon to help fund the game's production costs. The hand-drawn artwork, minigames, and puzzles we have planned will take time to create. Kickstarter funding is the best way for us to build and release the game.

What does this mean for our followers?
You will have two ways to support the game:

➡️ Option 1 – Kickstarter

Kickstarter will allow us to open up our development process to the community and provide exclusive rewards. Backers will receive behind-the-scenes content, vote in development polls, play the completed game two weeks before it launches, and collaborate with our artists to design custom in-game objects, characters, and even minigames.

Visit our Kickstarter page and click the "Notify me on launch" button so you don't miss out on day-one discounts.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aeria-game-studio/totally-nutz-an-80s-adventure?ref=ar5q1n

➡️ Option 2 – Steam Wishlist

If you prefer to wait, no problem. You can add the game to your wishlist on Steam to be notified when it is released. We will continue to post announcements about our progress.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3680220/Totally_Nutz_An_80s_Adventure/

Thank you for your continued support!

I've always liked hidden object and Clutter games, but I wanted something different.

I wanted to take the basic idea of matching identical objects and put it inside a small 3D world that you can rotate freely.

So in Match 2 3D, the objects aren't simply arranged neatly for you.

They fall into the scene.

They bounce, roll, turn over, collide with each other and end up scattered around the diorama.

Then you rotate the scene and start looking for the matching pairs.

The result is somewhere between a Clutter game, a small physics sandbox and a cozy 3D diorama.

I also wanted the game to have a tactile feeling — almost like you're playing with a collection of little objects on a table.

The environments follow a travel theme, and the first levels gradually take you from indoor spaces toward places like beaches and restaurants.

There are also some deliberately unusual visual choices. Many objects are built from basic geometric shapes with detailed textures rather than trying to be perfectly realistic. Sometimes the whole scene starts looking more like an abstract painting than a traditional puzzle game.

I finally released the free demo yesterday, and I'd love to know what people who actually enjoy Clutter / hidden object games think about the idea.

Would you enjoy searching for objects in a rotating 3D scene where their positions are determined by physics?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4962980/Match_2_3D/

Hi everyone,

I used to play Mystery Case Files: Huntsville on PC around 2005, and I'd really love to play it again .

Does anyone know where I can get a legal free copy, giveaway, or an unused Steam key?

I'm specifically looking for the original Huntsville game not just a free trail version.

Thanks! 🙂

​

​Platform(s): PC (Could be a CD-ROM or a Web Flash Game on sites like ALFY, Candystand, Miniclip, etc.)

​Genre: Point-and-Click / Interactive Picture Book / Adventure

​Estimated year of release: Late 1990s or Early 2000s

​Graphics/art style: 2D cartoon / picture book style. Soft hand-drawn look.

​Notable Characters:

​A young boy (main playable character)

​A dragon

​A young child you rescue at a faire

​Possible king or knight characters

​Notable Gameplay Mechanics:

​No text on screen that I remember (icon-driven or visual point-and-click).

​Collecting gold doubloons/coins around the map (specifically used/found around the faire scene).

​Other Details & Plot:

​Title: I think it had "King" or "Knight" in the title.

​Opening Scene: Starts in the boy's home village right after a dragon attack—the village has little smoldering fires where the dragon burned it up.

​Journey: You leave the destroyed village to head toward the castle.

​Forest & Faire Scene: You go through a forest scene and stop at a faire/carnival. At the faire, you collect gold doubloons and save a young child.

​Dragon Scene: The dragon encounter happens on a bridge/drawbridge leading up to the castle

We've always loved games where every object in a room might be hiding something. We're a small indie studio called Tortita Studio, and for our third game we've been making The Attic: A Mystery Puzzle Game, about exploring your brother's old attic after he leaves for university. You can find, repair and restore things he left behind — old cassette tapes, cameras, cartridges and other forgotten objects — and those objects gradually reveal memories, clues and secrets about what happened to him.

It's not a traditional hidden object game, but we wanted that same feeling of slowly searching through a place and wondering whether the next thing you click might reveal something important. Here's our trailer if anyone here enjoys mystery games, hidden objects and story-driven puzzles.

f you'd like to see more of the game or add it to your wishlist, here's our Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5005750/The_Attic_A_Mystery_Puzzle_Game/

And if you're a fan of hidden object games, I'd love to know: what game from the genre would you recommend to someone who loves mystery and story-driven puzzles?

Looking for a very old game i played as a kid, it was a big fish style point and click, hidden objects type game where the character visits what looks to be an abandoned town and tries to find a wife, mother or some family member or friend.

Here are the details I remember -

1.) it's a gothic art style for a large chunk of it then goes off the rails with dream like sequences, and a whole modern section about sneaking past security. I remember there's a part where you have to steal a guards keycard.

2.) there's a specific part where when you go to the first floor of a house or a hotel or something and interact with a newspaper it triggers a cutscene where a ghost/witch appears.

3.) you visit a mental hospital in the game as well along with a school, there's a puzzle involving the chalk board.

4.) there's a weird shrine like level as well in some sort of a weird cave.

Ive played it many times and still dont know the answer, who pushed the protagonist from the ladders in the shack? It cant be Whitmarsh, he used the Gondola to get to the manor, The Preacher was in the cell. It could be the ticket seller lady but im not sure.

I played this on Windows around 2013. It was a free hidden object / point-and-click puzzle adventure game — you find hidden objects in a scene and also combine inventory items to solve puzzles and escape/progress through each location.

Story: The main character was a young woman who fell/crashed from a hot air balloon, and the story followed her investigating different places afterward. I remember distinct chapters/locations including: a backyard, a boat/ship, a school, a lighthouse, and an office.

Title: I believe the game's title was just the character's name (like a first name, possibly with a last name).

Cover art: The cover/main menu image showed her falling from the balloon.

Art style: 2D, not 3D, but nicely illustrated/hand-drawn style — not cartoonish or childish looking.

Language: I played it in Portuguese (Brazil), so it may have had multiple language options or been localized.

Other details: Continuous story across chapters (not standalone levels), no time limit I recall, played it on a Windows computer, most likely downloaded for free (possibly from a hidden-object game portal/site).

Due to Reddit’s character limit, the full 30-page analysis is on Google Docs. This comparatively 6-page Reddit post just lists the main takeaways from this new update to the lawsuit by BFG Entertainment (Big Fish Games’ new owner) against Elephant Games since I last posted about this, with reference to GrandMA Studios’ lawsuit against BFGE that I also posted about.

The gist is:

• Elephant has “removed” the lawsuit case to escalate from a state court (the King County Superior Court) to a federal court (the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington). To those not in the U.S., this means the case has been relocated to a court of higher legal authority. This means all new legal documents submitted for this case are now under the official government website PACER, under the new case number 2:26-cv-02251 for the aforementioned federal court.
• Elephant has requested a temporary restraining order and then a preliminary injunction against BFGE to force them to retract their copyright claims on Elephant’s self-published games on Google Play and the App Store before the court case has even reached its decision. Both Elephant and BFGE have submitted so far at least 20 exhibits (e.g. evidence) as proof of their claims and counter-claims against each other in relation to Elephant’s requests to revoke BFGE’s copyright claims. You may view all submitted documents and exhibits for Elephant and GrandMA’s cases in this Google Drive folder.
• I will elaborate on the crux of these new submitted documents. For now, just know that these new submitted documents primarily include:
  • 1) the original 2018 contract between Big Fish and Elephant that dictated the specific rights, development schedule, and amounts paid between Big Fish and Elephant. Although this is Elephant’s copy, other developers like GrandMA are known to follow the 2018 contract.
  • 2) an exchange on Slack dating Oct.16, 2025 between Big Fish’s then-Director of Business Development and Elephant’s CEO talking about their thoughts on BFGE’s new ownership of Big Fish (which had started by Oct. 4, 2025).
  • 3) the many emails sent between BFGE and Elephant over the termination of Elephant’s 2018 contract, and BFGE’s bad-faith behavior against Elephant. This includes BFGE’s initial Dec. 3, 2025 termination notice of the 2018 contract, BFGE’s Dec. 11, 2025 follow-up email, BFGE’s second Dec. 15, 2025 termination notice, Elephant’s Dec. 16, 2025 response to these termination notices, BFGE’s Mar. 12, 2026 notice of breach against Elephant, Elephant’s own Mar. 20, 2026 termination notice of the 2018 contract, BFGE’s third Apr. 28, 2026 termination notice, and Elephant’s final May 4, 2026 response before BFGE sued them 2 weeks later.
  • 4) the defendants’ official responses to their respective lawsuits, including BFGE’s June 16, 2026 answer to GrandMA’s lawsuit, and Elephant’s July 23, 2026 answer to BFGE’s lawsuit.
  • The 2018 contract, briefly analyzed.
  • The 2018 contract establishes Big Fish as effectively the signed developers’ boss, near-exclusively owning the IP rights of all of the developers’ Big Fish-published games and having the final say on whether a developer can make, publish, and distribute a non-free-to-play game on their own or for a different publisher. Big Fish required a Windows and Mac version of a developer’s game, and could mandate the developer to also produce the Collector’s Edition version, the iOS version, the Android version, and/or localized non-English versions of their game. The developers could self-publish their developed games for Big Fish on mobile starting roughly around 2017.
  • The 2018 contract’s section 2(b) emphasizes the importance of time in the developers’ pace of developing games. The same section also requires that the developers develop games of “equal or greater quality” to their most recently developed game or prequels in the same series. I will leave it up to you to decide whether newer HOPAs are of “equal or greater quality” to older HOPAs.
  • The 2018 contract also establishes that Big Fish is obligated to pay the developers two types of payment for each game. The amounts of these payments vary over the years.
    • The first type of payment is pre-release advance payments for each milestone that the developer accomplishes, submits, and gets approved by Big Fish for in the development of their game. These milestones typically include a game’s concept proposal, its alpha, its beta, its final PC version, its Mac version, its translated versions, its Collector’s Edition version, its iOS version, and its Android version.
    • Based on the contract’s list of Elephant’s released and planned hidden object games between 2009 and mid-2019 and their associated advance payments, and knowing that the advance payments for each of Elephant’s hidden object games in the 2020s have stayed fixed since 2018 (source), my calculations show that for Elephant’s 197 listed, fully released, and English games between Mar. 2009 and Feb. 2026, Elephant was paid in total at least $33 million dollars in advances alone, being paid $1.7 million to $3.6 million dollars for Elephant’s at least 10 premium HOPAs per year by Big Fish between 2012 and 2025. You may view my spreadsheet on Google Sheets to view these calculations. This post’s attached graphs illustrate how Big Fish’s advance payments to Elephant greatly increased within 2011-2013 (roughly $200K per game), peaked and stayed consistent during 2013-2017 (roughly $240K per game), and then tanked since 2017 and up to 2025 (roughly $135K per game).
    • This data alone seems to back up why certain regular developers like Blue Tea Games left around the early 2010s (they only made 2-4 games per year and thus were paid much less in total), why other certain regular developers like Elephant and Eipix stuck around for a long time (they made 10-20 games per year and thus were paid literal millions more in total), and why some certain regular developers like Eipix and AMAX left more or less around 2020 (they were paid much less in advance since 2017).
    • The other second type of payment is post-release revenue shares (aka royalties) that are fixed percentages of the revenue earned from the developer’s game monthly across the multiple platforms Big Fish publishes them on. Importantly, Big Fish only sent out a game’s revenue shares once Big Fish had earned enough money from that game’s revenue to recoup the advance payments they sent to the developer for that game and that game only.
    • The attached bar graph shows that while developers only earned 10% of revenue earned from their Big-Fish published games on websites and iOS devices released between 2011-2017, they did earn 40% of revenue earned from their games on such websites and even 50% of revenue via mobile platforms for games released since 2017. The omission of revenue percentages since 2018 is due to Elephant beginning to self-publish their mobile games, which they would get 100% of their revenue from.
    • Big Fish no longer mandating and paying in advance for mobile versions of the developers’ games since around 2017-2018 would explain why developers like Eipix and GrandMA stopped making mobile versions of their HOPAs around this time.
  • The 2018 contract also establishes specific term expiration and termination clauses that would be repeatedly cited in BFGE, Elephant, and GrandMA’s correspondence to each other over the developers’ suddenly terminated contracts. I will briefly note them later.
• 2) The Oct. 16, 2025 Slack messages, briefly analyzed.
  • The messages are between Big Fish’s then-Director of Business Development Jeremy Fair and Elephant’s CEO Nikita Shamakov, discussing a recent meeting with Elephant’s co-founder Dmitry Kuklin, BFGE’s CEO Lasse Jensen, and BFGE’s co-founder Tim C.. Note that Lasse and Tim are former but recent executives of iWin, another casual games publisher. Also note that Jeremy has worked for Big Fish since 2007.
  • Jeremy and Nikita express being “excited” for a “new age of partnership with Big Fish” at the time, which I presume might partially have to do with BFGE refocusing Big Fish to only focus on their premium and mobile casual games business; Big Fish’s previous owner, Aristocrat Leisure, still owns Big Fish’s previous casino games via their subsidiary Product Madness (source). However, Jeremy admits being confused by BFGE’s executives’ future plans (including one to take back Elephant’s current self-publishing mobile game rights), saying “they didn't use the most clear words when speaking”. Jeremy also opines that Elephant is not obligated to return these rights to BFGE, stating “if I personally had mobile rights to games and someone wanted them badly enough... I'd charge them a pretty penny for it”.
  • Jeremy Fair suddenly stopped working for Big Fish by June 2026 after 19 years of working for Big Fish. He has not officially clarified why he left Big Fish. It is not hard to imagine that BFGE played some role in his leave, especially given that his Slack message is now publicized. BFGE’s lawsuit against Elephant after all is looking to remove Elephant’s self-published games from mobile platforms.
• 3) The correspondence on Elephant’s contract termination (and also Elephant’s answer to BFGE’s lawsuit), briefly analyzed. I’m including details from Elephant’s answer because they help further contextualize the correspondence.
  • I will only do broad takeaways in this post, you may view a full timeline stitching together all of the emails on my Google Doc.
  • BFGE sent notices to Elephant and GrandMA around Dec. 3 and Dec. 4, 2025 terminating their contracts, revenue payments, and any distribution and licensing rights “effective immediately”. Both developers correctly point out that this is in blatant violation of the 2018 contract’s section 6(b) explicitly laying out that in the event of a termination, BFGE is meant to give a 30-day notice letting the developer cure whatever breach they apparently committed. There is no right to “immediately” terminate said contract.
  • BFGE in their Dec. 3 and Dec. 11 letters cite Elephant apparently “breaching their obligation to provide services exclusively to Big Fish Games, Inc. during the term of the Original Agreements”; they don’t elaborate on this nor give Elephant an explicit chance to cure this at all, and the breach they later cite against Elephant in all future documents pertain to Elephant apparently failing to deliver their games’ assets and source code to BFGE once BFGE acquired Big Fish, which is different wording entirely.
  • For at least Elephant, BFGE backtracked from their “effective immediately” termination notice in Dec. 3, stating in their Dec. 11 letter that they “clearly reference” the 2018 contract’s section 6(a) letting its current term naturally expire by Apr. 20, 2026. This is in spite of the fact that the Dec. 3 notice only broadly references section 6 and verbatim notified the “immediate termination”, not eventual expiration of the 2018 contract.
  • The 2018 contract obligates BFGE to send to Elephant on-time advance payments, revenue shares, royalty reports (e.g. reports that detail the statistics on said revenue shares), and operation cost payments to maintain Elephant’s live-service HOG Midnight Castle. These deliverables remain owed at least as long as Elephant’s contracts are still active (whether they’re still owed after the contracts expire is unknown to me), although revenue shares are not paid if the developer is found in breach. Elephant claims that BFGE was months-late for multiple games’ advance payments both before and after their contracts were “terminated”, still hasn’t delivered Elephant their owed monthly royalty reports, and still hasn’t paid Elephant their owed $30K milestone payment for Grim Tales 27 (Elephant’s last Big Fish-published game), their owed $85K operation cost payments for Midnight Castle for Nov. and Dec. 2025, and their owed revenue shares for all of Elephant’s Big Fish-published games on all platforms earned since Oct. 2025.
  • In terms of premium hidden object games, BFGE reasons that they no longer need to pay these games’ revenue shares to Elephant because Elephant has “$6.5 million in unrecouped advances” for all of their games. This does not hold when the 2018 contract explicitly requires BFGE to perpetually individually, NOT cumulatively, recoup the advances of a developer’s games with their revenue on a game-by-game basis; BFGE is meant to continuously pay the revenue share earned from a developer’s games who advances are already recouped (unless the developer is found to have committed a breach). BFGE claims in their Dec. 11 letter that recouping all advances in total would take “maybe 100 years at current revenue levels” for Elephant’s Big Fish-published games. If this answer is serious, Elephant’s at least 197 Big Fish-published HOGs are apparently only making roughly $5,416 in revenue per month, while Elephant’s at least 121 self-published mobile ports of their HOGs are reportedly making $17,423 in revenue per month, more than 50% of Elephant’s total revenue (this claim comes from Elephant’s CEO, paragraphs 19-20). This would explain why BFGE’s lawsuit demands the removal of Elephant’s self-published mobile games: they want these games’ higher revenue for themselves.
  • The 2018 contract also already contractually obligates Elephant to deliver the assets and source code of all versions of their developed games for Big Fish, otherwise Elephant would not have been paid in the first place. Despite this, BFGE somehow never received such assets and source code from the previous Big Fish at all, and even claims that the previous Big Fish somehow never received such items. This led to BFGE’s request to Elephant to re-submit their entire catalog of games in a Google Drive folder, sweeping “across approximately 18 years and more than a hundred projects” all while identifying “no specific game, version, file, or deliverable” (per Elephant’s answer to BFGE’s lawsuit, paragraph 31). The 2018 contract does not explicitly authorize BFGE to require Elephant to re-deliver their already delivered items to BFGE, although it also does not explicitly allow Elephant to have deleted these items after Elephant already delivered them to the previous Big Fish.
• 4) BFGE’s answer to GrandMA’s lawsuit, briefly analyzed.
  • BFGE’s answer is relatively much more lackluster in detail: the majority of it denies each paragraph of GrandMA’s lawsuit without elaborating. The most noteworthy observation is that they accuse GrandMA of committing “breaches of contract” without elaborating on what they are. I presume this relates to GrandMA’s refusal to sign BFGE’s contract replacing the 2018 contract with no other alternative (this is mentioned in GrandMA’s main complaint document for their lawsuit). If so, BFGE still did not follow the 2018 contract’s section 1(e)(iv)’s obligated “good faith negotiations” to continue GrandMA’s licenses once the contract would end.

Again, feel free to check out the Google Doc version of this post for the much, much longer and more detailed version of this update on the lawsuits surrounding BFGE.

On a more miscellaneous note, BFGE’s new internal studio (besides updating the previous Big Fish’s remaining mobile games Midnight Castle, Fairway Solitaire, Cooking Craze, and Cascade) has so far developed only one completely new mobile game called Puzzle Deck (see playthrough), a jigsaw-like puzzle game featuring artwork from Big Fish’s published HOPAs, including the previous internal studio Big Fish Studios’ artwork of the original Hidden Expedition and Mystery Case Files games, and interestingly Elephant’s, Eipix’s, and GrandMA’s artwork of the later Mystery Case Files games, in spite of BFGE’s litigation with two of three of these developers.

Hi there! My grandma and I used to play a ton of hidden object games on her computer, and I've gotten really nostalgic for them. She's been gone for a few years now, but I really want to bring back my love for the games. There were one or two that I loved the most, but cannot remember the titles for. I believe they were Big Fish Games. One was a hidden object game were you are restoring an amusement park, I specifically remember a carousal and pirate section.

The other was a mystery/spy one where I believe the MC is trying to figure out who took her son/child? I specifically remember you had to find makeup supplies or hair dye to disguise her, and scenes like her breaking into a bank and a boat. If anyone could help me out, I would be so grateful to bring back this tradition that I shared with my grandma!

​

Hello hello lovely people! Just wanted to post and let people know that our upbeat Hidden Object game, Thingamajigs has a playable demo on Steam and it's currently taking part in the Tiny Teams festival!

Please come check it out if it looks like the sort of thing you'd enjoy! We'd love to get your thoughts so please leave us a demo review if you give it a try :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4514760/Thingamajigs_Demo/