Pixel Hunt: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''I mean, there's a reason the expression "needle in a haystack" is used for a hopeless task no one in their right minds would undertake unless they had hours to while away in mindless drudgery. An excellent adventure game has no haystacks. A good adventure game probably gives you a magnet. A bad one makes you look at straw for seven hours. This game is nothing but haystacks, and sometimes the needles are made of straw.''|[http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=9051914&postcount=223 Wields-Rulebooks-Heavily] on ''[[Limbo of the Lost]]''}}

 

 

Greg Costikyan discusses this in his article on game design "I Have No Words and I Must Design":

Yeah, I missed it. In an adventure, [[Guide Dang It|it shouldn't be ridiculously difficult to find what you need]], [[Unwinnable by Design|nor should victory be impossible just because you made a wrong decision three hours and thirty-eight decision points ago]]. [[Moon Logic Puzzle|Nor should the solutions to puzzles be arbitrary or absurd.]] }}

 

 

== Action Adventure ==

* Mr. Little from ''[[Cave Story]]'' is exactly what his name implies, at only five pixels tall. What's worse is that he's wearing green, and standing in grass that's about the same shade and height. At least he walks around. If not for his family, located elsewhere in more conspicuous surroundings, you would never know he was around. Fortunately, he is not needed to advance in the game. You need never even realize he exists.

* ''[[Parasite Eve]]'' suffers from some incredibly obnoxious moments where the player simply has to "search the area for clues" or some such. Often the player can search the same object three or four times without triggering a necessary cutscene because Aya has to be facing just so and interacting with the exact right pixels. Worse was the fact that you couldn't run and search at the same time, so button-mashing a search ended up with Aya's running animation going on and off like a strobe light.

* ''[[The World Ends With You]]'' kinda uses this during the battle with Tigris Cantus. At one point, she deactivates all of Neku's pins, turns invisible on a white screen while she summons illusions of herself, and {{spoiler|equips the player with only the Rhyme pin}}. You need to find a ''tiny'' little yellow glint to attack so that you do damage. Luckily, you can track said glint by examining the direction of the player character's shadow.

* While not necessary for completion, finding the Daredevil and Black Panther action figures in ''[[Marvel Ultimate Alliance]]'' (which are required for unlocking the respective characters) can turn into this. Both are fairly dark and can end up being near-invisible in levels like Mephisto's Realm.

 

== Adventure Game ==

** The cheese doesn't really count, since the game shows a mouse running a cross the screen and into the mouse hole. It's easy to ignore, thinking it irrelevant, but not hard to see.

* ''[[King's Quest VI]]'' contains a one-pixel coin you have to find. This is actually easy because it has an animated sparkle every few seconds. It turns out the harder pixel hunt on the panel was a board that managed to blend perfectly into the scenery; after the coin fiasco, who would look at it?

** Even worse is right near the beginning of the game, where you need to find a piece of "sticky tape" stuck to a fallen bookshelf, as said object is only a few pixels wide.

** There's a puzzle towards the end that, initially, can seem even worse. Just like in the movie, the buzzsaws in the Grail temple have to be passed by kneeling...however, there is no "kneel" command. The actual solution is to click the walking cursor on a small, specific patch of ground when trying to pass through the trap's trigger zone; while this ''seems'' like unfair pixel hunting at first, it's actually a meta-puzzle. The game comes packaged with its own Grail diary, a booklet containing veiled hints on a number of game puzzles; one of the drawings in the diary is an illustration of the tunnel floor, with an X mark clearly indicating where to stand to avoid being decapitated. This is meant to be a parallel to the movie; just as Indy uses his father's diary to solve puzzles throughout the movie, the player is meant to use the diary booklet to assist in their own puzzle-solving. That doubled as a brutal piece of [[Copy Protection]], if you gave up too quickly.

** ''Fate of Atlantis'' has one scene that Subverts this. When Indy searches an underground dig site in the Egyptian desert, it's pitch black and everything is labeled "round thing," etc. If the player waits, Indy's eyes will adjust to the darkness and the puzzle becomes much easier to solve.

* Pretty much anything in ''Fascination''.

** The game also had another example of a pixel hunt; at another point there is a moss-covered slope that is extremely slick (and yes the game does use the associated pun), and if you attempt to climb it you fall off and die. You can enlist the help of the nearby grass to tell you places that are safe to go to, but grass only tells you where a safe spot is while your cursor is on it, and the safe spots are ludicrously small as well as visually indistinguishable from the rest of the slope. Add this to the fact that you had to find six or seven spots to cross the slope, constantly assaulted by the grass's high-pitched cries of "not there" and "no", hoping for the occasional "yes", it made for an extremely frustrating experience. Al Lowe has ''no idea'' how to play Hot and Cold, apparently.

** A review showed a screenshot of this game captioned, "See that wrench? Neither did we. For ''three hours.''"

* In ''[[Maniac Mansion]]'', if your character is captured, the cell door can be opened by pushing a particular brick - one in a wall of hundreds. This one's pretty easy though, considering the (primitive) engine makes every hotspot at least 8x8 pixels in size.

** In the first game, you're required to get a rubber chicken to go somewhere. The problem? It blends in with "cursed" chickens the player character says something to the effect of "I'm not going near those" if clicked on the wrong one. Thankfully, this was fixed in the special edition.

** In the second game you are, at one point, completely in the dark. It turns out there's a light switch on the wall. The problem is, both the room and the switch are ''completely'' black, and thus invisible.

** There's a lucky penny hidden on Lucre Island in the fourth game. You have to run to an area of the city that you've got no business being in and carefully walk around until Guybrush is standing right next to it, facing in exactly the right direction. {{spoiler|It's been glued to the ground.}}

* Towards the end of ''[[Full Throttle]]'', not only do you need to find a tiny little spot on a gigantic rock wall to kick so you can open a secret passage, you have to kick it at just the right time. So you'll be kicking the wall all over the place and still not knowing if you're kicking the wrong spot or if you just haven't gotten the timing down.

* The ''[[The X-Files|X-Files]]'' game had a required clue in the form of a bullet that was ''2x2 pixels big'' (in a game that ran at 640x480), making it probably the most egregious example of (quite literal) pixel hunting on this list.

* ''[[Clock Tower (series)|Clock Tower aka Clock Tower: The First Fear]]'' had the cursor change from an arrow to a target box whenever it was moved onto anything that could be interacted with.

* The Polish game ''Kajko i Kokosz'' has many occurrences where you need to pick up a very small item which doesn't at all stand out against the background. For instance, you have to pick up a stone hid among a stack of identical stones. Or you need to pick up a black rock... which is ''1 by 1 pixels big''.

** It should be also noted that skipping one of those very small items makes it impossible to finish the game, as you cannot get back to the location it was on, leading to [[Guide Dang It]]. Even worse - it was on the background of almost the same color.

* ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' adventure games tend to fall into this trope, as they try to recreate Holmes' ability to make deductions from tiny clues. In one example, you can't move on until you click a specific footprint to take a closer look, then hold your magnifying glass over just the right spot on just the right clump of grass near the footprint, to find a nearly invisible fish scale.

* ''Circle of Blood'', AKA ''[[Broken Sword]]'', a game based on legends of the Knights Templar, had so many tiny and impossible to find things in it that it's better known as 'Circle of Mouse'. You (almost literally) had to move the mouse over every pixel in a picture to find something you had to have to continue.

* This is commonplace in free online games of the "escape the room" variety.

* The Lovecraft-inspired PC adventure ''Shadow of the Comet'' had an interface that worked by showing a visible line of sight to any item that could be picked up. Problem is, it only worked if you were facing the item in the right way, and was incredibly frustrating if you didn't know what you were looking for, and you usually didn't.

** ''Shannara'', by the same company, has a strange variation: at one point, you end up in a room that is pitch black, and you have to move the mouse pointer around until the text at the bottom of the screen indicates that you're pointing at something that can be used as a light source. (And the room is filled with ''lots'' of completely irrelevant junk.)

* ''[[Trace Memory]]'' had this occur twice. Once you had to examine a specific window in a cabinet to find a glass with the key to the next room, but there were no clues as to which one to pick. Thankfully, once you found the right, you got a big old close-up for the key you were looking for. Later in the game, you had to pick one book out of a huge bookshelf spanning a wall hiding yet another key and if you hadn't solved the puzzle on the nearby table, you could be at it for a while. Once again, picking the right area gave you a nice close-up on the book you were looking for.

* The ''[[Discworld]]'' games sometimes had this. Yes, the usable items were captioned, but only once you had the mouse on them, and the Josh-Kirby-lite insanely detailed backgrounds didn't help. ''[[Discworld Noir]]'', as in many things, was an improvement ... except when you were locked in jail, and had to find the right brick in a ''pitch-black room'' to escape.

* ''[[Innocent Until Caught]]'' has obtainable objects that are literally two (VGA-)pixels small (such as a tiny chewing gum under a table). ''[[Dreamweb]]'', however, ups the ante by not only having 3x3 pixel objects, but also cluttering the screen with a zillion pieces of random junk that can all be picked up... Of course, your character Ryan only has so much space in his inventory. Finding the right objects that are actually needed later can be real fun when your apartment looks like a family of bums lived there for a year... Talk about searching the proverbial needle in a haystack. And yes, you can even pick up ''peas from a leftover TV dinner'' lying on the carpet. To be fair, in some cases, Ryan utters something like "I think I left something important here" when you want to exit a room.

== Eastern RPG ==

* Koudelka (first game in the ''[[Shadow Hearts]]'' series) is built around a number of what some would call obtuse puzzles. Objects that can be picked up usually give some kind of visual cue such as being shiny or a different color, but other times, they're completely nondescript and look exactly like the pre-rendered background they're placed on. This devolves into the player mashing X constantly to find things that can be picked up to solve the current puzzle, sometimes rooms away with no indication of where to look. [[Guide Dang It]]!

** In ''[[Mother 3]]'', {{spoiler|[[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming|they are reunited in the]] [[Nostalgia Level|Hall of Memories]]}}.

* In ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'', there is an interesting case near the end of the first disc, in which you are required to go to an ancient ruin to recover the sword of the previous person to enter the ruin. Problem? The sword is lying on the ground in the first room you enter, and could easily be mistaken for a patch of light.

** Disc 2 of ''Final Fantasy VIII'' is more or less a continuous series of pixel hunts. And there's also [[That One Sidequest|that one Chocobo forest]] where you need to stand in ''precisely'' the right spot if you want to catch the chocobo.

* In the game ''[[Legend of Legaia]]'' there is a very well hidden item called the "Platinum Card" which can only be found after reviving the second Genesis tree and then returning to Drake Castle and checking a specific section of a wall.

** Many items are found this way. Another example is the "Mettle Goblet", which grants a character infinite AP.

== Massively Multiplayer Online Game ==

* An early version of ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' played this straight. A valuable herb known as Sungrass is a golden color, and, not surprisingly, looks like tall grass. Unfortunately, it's often surrounded by slightly shorter tufts of similarly-colored grass. Blizzard patched that one up in a hurry. Now all herbs (and quest items, and a few other things) give off bright sparkles, turning a full 180 degrees into [[Notice This]].

 

== Misc Game ==

 

== Platformer ==

* ''[[Super Mario Sunshine]]'' has the infamous Blue Coins causing you to have to spray ''very'' precise areas in order to obtain 100% completion. Hitting the "Z" button would allow you to see how many blue coins you'd collected in every area. Of course, you would still have to know that {{spoiler|there are 30 apiece in the normal courses, 20 in Delfino Square, and 10 in Corona Mountain.}} And even that doesn't help you figure out which of the area's episodes you should be looking in.

 

 

== Survival Horror ==

* The SP items in ''[[Resident Evil Outbreak]]'' are hidden in the scenery this way with no visual indicator. Finding them is [[Guide Dang It|a real chore]], especially since what items are loaded up can change between instances.

* ''[[Silent Hill 1]]'' doesn't have the [[Notice This|"protagonist's head turns to look at interesting stuff"]] mechanic of the later games, and the items are as low-poly as the whole scenery. Health items and ammo boxes are quite distinctive color-wise, but key items (like keys themselves) are usually a small nondescript mass of pixels you will most likely glaze over.

** [[Planescape: Torment]], which also used the same engine, did this, too, but outlined clickable objects if your mouse strayed over them.

* The early ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' video game ''Shadow of the Horned Rat'' featured magic items lying around some of the battle maps that you could pick up and use. The problem? These items were represented by a single pixel that occasionally turned white. Pretty much the only way to discover them was by chance (and some of them were hidden well out of the way), and once a unit had picked one up, it was stuck with it, thus usually rendering the item useless anyway. Frustrating? Oh my yes.

** ''[[Ultima VII]]'' had a few pixel hunts as well, in particular a very well hidden switch in a dungeon and the key to the shack holding the Hoe of Destruction. It's inside a {{spoiler|dead fish}} in an area ''covered'' with identical-looking {{spoiler|dead fishes}}. And the right one is hidden under some debris that you need to move out of the way first.

* For the most part, significant objects in ''[[Morrowind]]'' are easy to find. However, one of the early Fighters' Guild quests has you looking for a [[MacGuffin|Dwemer Cube]] in a nearby ruin, and you aren't told what it looks like. It's a three-inch cube in muted colors, sitting on a shelf in an easily-overlooked alcove of a very large room.

** And ''Hellfire'' added the Search skill/spell. Also, since you could pick up something as soon as the cursor was in the same square, you had to search much less than you'd think at first.

* ''[[Nethack]]'', sort of. Instead of Pixel Hunt, there's Vibrating Square Hunt. In order to get to the final dungeon below [[Fire and Brimstone Hell|Gehennom]], you need to find and stand on a certain square on the bottom level. This wouldn't be so annoying as it is, however, the level (and around the twenty previous levels before that) is a randomly-generated maze.

 

 

== Wide Open Sandbox Game ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fake Difficulty]]

[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]