Reflective, beautiful hidden object-puzzle game for all ages

This game is a combination of hand drawn art and lovely peaceful music as a background for a find the hidden object game with dozens of mini-puzzles and a few mini-games to solve. The game tells you how many of each object you need to locate in order to progress and you need to explore the world to find them. Sometimes you have to assemble machines from parts, sometimes solve a puzzle from a large variety of puzzles to move forward. Little by little, you help the gnome-like inhabitants by reassembling the world of Tiny Bang. This is a quiet, contemplative puzzle game. No shooting, no explosions (other than the Tiny Bang which starts the whole game.), no deaths.

The world is broken into 5 discrete areas with different themes, music and art. As you solve each area you are presented with a jigsaw-like puzzle to put that area back together. Compulsive sorts might bull right through in a day or two, but I found the game to take about a week and a half of short sessions to solve. Still, not an incredible amount of content, but the game was bright and pretty, the music soothing, and the puzzles were challenging and rewarding throughout. I’ve played this on Macintosh, iPad and iPhone and I recommend the Mac version as best and the iPad as second best. The interface is best on the Mac, and having a large screen lets you appreciate the art and gives you a fighting chance to find the hidden objects. Looking for the hidden objects and managing the interface on a smaller iPhone or iPod touch screen is sub-optimal and often frustrating.

There is a built-in hint system where, if you get stuck finding objects, you can tap on little flying bugs to collect them in the question mark in the upper right, slowly filling it completely blue and then you can release a homing-bug from the blue question-mark which flies a path across the screen and circles any objects on the current screen that you’ve missed. This keeps the game from getting too frustrating when you have looked past a particularly cleverly hidden object.

sbj-in-az about The Tiny Bang Story