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":

 

 

 

== Action Adventure ==

* The ''[[Kirby]]'' series does this ever so occasionally. ''Nightmare in Dream Land'' had numerous hidden doors which you had to find to finish the game 100%. One of them was a little red star, no more than 5x5 pixels, which looked like just another star in the outer space backdrop. It helps slightly that the checkerboard pattern of the blocks is missing a block for that spot, and that it moves with the camera.

** That this is a remake of ''Kirby's Adventure'' doesn't help. The above example was the same, but some of the other secrets were actually changed so they couldn't just be remembered.

** Also, there is a secret entrance into the level 7-2 [[Boss Rush]] tower that starts you several floors up. [[Violation of Common Sense|You'd never know you could go through it because it's barred.]]

** Other enjoyable hunts include spotting brown grubs against a brown background, spotting one moving leaf among a whole forest of leaves, and spotting a bridge that is ABOUT to be burned down.

** There's also a fun one at the end of the game, which, while obvious in hindsight, can be counter-intuitive the first time around because it averts one of the usual conventions of gaming, to wit: {{spoiler|You have to target MB rather than trying to dispose of her minions first}}. Made all the more confusing by the fact that said convention was in full force for the previous boss fight, where {{spoiler|you have to kill all the small metroids before you can damage the big one}}. Considering her massive minions are right in your face the whole time (and do take damage, but never seem to die) and she's way in the background), and attack you viciously, it's a particularly mendacious example, as the game uses intentional trickery to misdirect you from thinking it's even a Pixel Hunt at all.

== Action RPG ==

* ''[[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.

* 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 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.

* The creative team at ''[[Neopets]]'' ''loves'' this trope. Their plots (site events) often feature adventure games in which you have to find and click on a very small and almost unnoticeable feature of a picture in order to advance the plot. [http://www.jellyneo.net/images/guides/df_map_quarry.png Here's] an example, from [http://www.jellyneo.net/content/plot/index.php this walkthrough.] It's not always as bad as it may seem. The ''tab'' key in some web browsers allows you to toggle through every clickable object, which usually thwarts any web-based Pixel Hunts. This technique was listed on a fansite as a "secret" for one of Neopets' [[Mini Games]]. It can also be used in other places, such as [[Homestar Runner|Strong Bad Emails]].

* Just as well as it displays many, many other common design flaws of adventure games, ''[[Limbo of the Lost]]'' fails to disappoint in achieving this one too. Have fun looking for flasks and bottles in the shadows, hunting sheets of wool mere footsteps away from normal view, and picking up pieces of wood with one-pixel-tall hot spots! To be fair, if you're making your graphics by taking screenshots of other games, there's a limit to what you can do in the way of object placement.

* 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 ''[[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.

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

* In [[Super Mario RPG]] there are 39 chests distributed all over the whole world. They are completely invisible. You don't have to find them to beat the game, but it's still a huge [[Guide Dang It]] quest.

 

 

== Interactive Novel ==

* Some of the ''[[Phoenix Wright]]'' games use this trope during the investigation scenes. Particularly in the last case of the third game where it's necessary to find {{spoiler|A tiny, tiny note slipped almost completely under a chair/cushion/basket thing}} in order to break a psyche-lock and advance the plot. For the most part, clues in the Ace Attorney games are quite obvious, with only a few hidden. The point of the game isn't to hide the clues, but hide their meanings, after all.

 

== 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 ==

 

== Puzzle Game ==

* The home page of the ''[[Archie Comics]]'' website has such a puzzle, changed often to reflect the season or an upcoming holiday.

* This trope is the whole point of [[Hidden Object Game|Hidden Object games]], but many still manage to take this to a frustrating, potentially rage-inducing level, because the games themselves are built on the very lazy mistake that these are prevalent in adventure games because people enjoy them.

 

 

== Simulation Game ==

* ''[[Ace Combat]] X: Skies of Deception'' has the mission In Pursuit II, where the way to unlock a custom part for your planes involves destroying certain Special Vehicles. The problem was that thanks to radar jamming that only flickered off every now and then, you mostly had to go hunt them by eyeballing. Even during the lull phases in the jamming, if you were in the wrong place to lock on you would only be able to get a rough idea of where to go. These vehicles were also quite tiny and hard to see, especially given that you couldn't stop and slowly sweep the ground since you were in, y'know, a plane? It also has the mission Joint Operation, where you need to hunt down transport planes with the same radar jamming. So if you weren't in a position to take advantage of the lull in jamming, you had to squint to see the targets and get them before they got away. That's before you even factor in taking down the optional ace.

** ''04: Shattered Skies'' has the [[Thirteen Is Unlucky|13th mission]] "Safe Return" where you need to kill radar-jamming blimps.

 

== 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.

 

== Western RPG ==

** One of these contains a Ring of Wizardry, possibly the most powerful item in the game. The size of the hidden area is exactly one pixel. Good luck finding it without a [[Guide Dang It]] moment.

** ''Baldur's Gate 2'', thank God, averted this trope by allowing you to hold down ''alt'' to light up all such tiny treasure chests in impossible-to-miss luminous turquoise.

** ''[[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.

* Absolutely every single object in ''[[Summoner]]'' that can be picked up is in the form of a generic brown sack about the size of a football, and is always on traversable ground. Now, imagine that you have to stumble on some objects in order to get critical quest items, often in generic-looking random encounters, in some of the biggest maps in an RPG. That, and you have to be practically on top of the bag before its graphics work. It doesn't matter how eagle-eyed you are, you can't see what it won't show you.

* The developers of ''Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships'' had the bright idea to make this this an actual ''quest'' where you go into the jungle and look for a marble-sized gem in the grass. Or a tiny brown key somewhere on the brown decks of a dozen ships.

* In ''[[Diablo]]'', you could hear the sound of a ring drop from a monster, and spend the next 10 minutes carefully searching the ground around you.

** Thankfully, in the sequel you can hold Alt-key to show all items on the ground.

** 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]]