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Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove Hints
How do the "hidden object" scenes work?
1 of 8: Whenever you see an area with little sparklies on it, clicking on it will bring you into a "hidden object" scene. Here, you'll have a list of objects you need to find in that scene. One of them (and it's often a surprising one) will be something you need to solve a puzzle elsewhere, but you won't get the object in your inventory until you find alllllll the objects listed.
2 of 8: This is often quite difficult, but the game doesn't go out of its way to make it impossible. The objects are never completely out of sight, blurred, or transparent. They're also correctly sized for what they are, so you'll never see a three-inch hat or a fourteen-foot coin. And the names are mostly accurate, so you'll never see a tuba labeled as a trumpet, as I've seen in other hidden object games.
3 of 8: That being said, they do try to make it hard enough to be interesting. Here are some tricks they'll often play:
4 of 8: -- Some names can have multiple meanings. A king might be a playing card, a chess piece, or a painting of a king. A flute can be a tin whistle, a recorder, a pan pipe, or a silver instrument with lots of keys. A horn might be a shofar (a ram's horn), an old-fashioned aa-OOgah horn, or a brass trumpet. A bat can be a flying mammal, a baseball bat, or a cricket bat. And so on. (The game was made in Seattle, Washington, so expect American definitions.)
5 of 8: -- Things are mostly their correct size in this game, but they can be very close to the camera (thus making them look large) or far away (so they look small). They can also be toys, and a toy elephant is naturally a very tiny thing compared to a real live elephant. And sometimes they're just drawings, as in a sunflower on a can label or in a painting.
6 of 8: -- Items are never completely and utterly invisible, however much you might think, but they can be camouflaged. For example, a silver sword might be in a pile of white sticks or a green frog among the green leaves of a tree. Sometimes you'll only be able to see part of an object, like the handle of a lawn mower behind a dresser, but there will always be enough of it exposed that you can tell what it is.
7 of 8: -- If you're about to lose your mind, back away to get out of the scene and go do something else for a while. (The game will remember which objects you've found, so you don't have to start over again.) Coming at it with a fresh eye often makes the one thing you couldn't find really obvious.
8 of 8: -- If all else fails, use the game's hint button (at the lower right) to find an object. It takes three minutes to reset so you can use it for another item, so it's not really practical to use it to find every object you need, but it's handing for finding the last object in a scene, which always seems to be invisible.
