Most of us have played a basic hidden object game at least once in our lives. It could have been on the newspaper’s weekend puzzle page or in a book like ‘Where is Waldo?’ or even a Big Fish title. But I doubt you have seen one quite like Crime O’Clock.
Now imagine that you have to find Waldo on a gigantic detailed image, showcasing multiple neighborhoods of a city. This time, however, Waldo has been involved in a crime that is an anomaly in the true timeline. To catch him and prevent this crime, you have to track him through ‘time’ to establish his motivations. This will require you to spot differences through 10 different points in time (Ticks), where the image changes as the people in this black and while the world go about their day.
That is the basic premise of Crime O’Clock, a clever and highly entertaining hidden object mystery game where you play as a ‘Time detective.’ The game requires its players to use a great deal of observation, some quick deduction and prediction, and the efficient resolution of forensic minigames to catch your suspect and stop crimes that shouldn’t happen. To learn more about it and the work that went into developing it, our team got in touch with Bad Seed Studios’ Creative Director, Matteo Sciutteri.
Developer responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
To us, Crime O’Clock seems to be a mix of different pattern recognition game types to create the ultimate detective/hidden object game. What was the team’s goal in creating this game? And what were the inspirations?
Matteo: While crafting Crime O’Clock, we wanted to create an innovative take for the investigation game. We didn’t want to create an adventure game where the player played a story with investigation vibes. We wanted to allow the player to use their own deductive skill to solve the mysteries.
The idea to use the hidden object mechanic is based on one old paper magazine we have here in Italy (the Settimana Enigmistica) and their investigative puzzles (called “the Corvo Parlante,” literally the speaking raven). When we were young, we were huge fans of this kind of puzzle, so when we started talking about an investigation game, that was a recurring theme.
These giant maps are not only beautiful, but they are also incredibly detailed with multiple crimes active at once. This must have been an incredibly challenging design task. Can you walk us through your process of designing the cases to create a coherent narrative and image?
Matteo: I agree. The artists that made the maps and the characters are very talented, and they did an incredible job.
Talking about the game design perspective, the pipeline was structured to allow me to create the cases, work on a rough draft of the city and the characters involved in the important spots, and then discuss with the artists about the details. Sometimes the art department was ahead of design, so I had some constraints creating the mysteries, but generally, I had a lot of creative freedom.
The locations in the maps were discussed between the other team members and me to have the best balance between a good looking map, with interesting spots, and the right locations for the gameplay.
What were the challenges of creating a good balance between detail and visibility/recognizability?
Matteo: In Crime O’Clock, every character is different – it’s not like other hidden object games where you have a lot of similar characters, just with some small different details. The game’s goal is not to find characters but to understand their behavior and discover if they are involved in the crime you’re investigating. So, the major challenge was to hide some clues to keep the player involved in the mystery.
We used a lot of solutions: luckily, our characters are moving through time, changing poses and positions. So, sometimes, we drew the character from the back to hide the face. Other times we changed their clothes. Another solution was to move the characters into and out of buildings or transportation systems such as the subway.
How did you plan for this ‘moving through time’?
Matteo: Each map is divided into ten different moments (called time ticks). I have a HUGE spreadsheet with all characters in the game and all positions and poses for each one, per tick (and sometimes, because the player’s actions will change the story, a character has 15 or more poses and positions). I count more than 5000 cells in this spreadsheet.
How did you go about crafting E.V.E.? It is a really fun companion and hint system with a fun sense of humor and an insane vocabulary. What were the challenges to ensure you were helping the player without giving too much away/handholding?
Matteo: Reading the texts written by our story writer was so fun. As a designer, I wrote the “meaning” of these dialogues (i.e., E.V.E. must explain this or that), but it was from the story writer’s pen that E.V.E. was really born, with her sarcasm and sense of humor.
Of course, we tried to find a good balance to keep the mystery alive until the end. To achieve this goal, we created a document with all secrets in the game, deciding when we could talk about something. For example, in this document, the true identity of a character you will meet in Case 8, is marked as “this cannot be revelated before Case 35”. This guideline helps a lot when you need to create the plot months before the story writer can work on the dialogues.
Is E.V.E going to change from the demo to the final game? The demo ended with E.V.E. stating it was ‘changing the language pack and there was no time for jokes.’ Can the player adjust the kind of help they get?
Matteo: E.V.E. has a deep storyline, and like every deep character, she will evolve a lot during the game. She is one of the key elements of the plot. But don’t worry: her sense of humor will stay with you for the whole game!
There is a lot of text within the game. Considering this is a visually driven game and it’s in black and white, how did you balance for the widest range of players? Are there any accessibility concerns?
Matteo: Yes, of course: we put some options and features in the game thinking about accessibility. For example, you can skip all texts during a case if you feel overwhelmed by them and read them from the Case Journal whenever you want.
What do you think is the most innovative element of the game? What is the one thing players should look forward to?
Matteo: To me, the idea is to create a mystery game around the hidden object mechanic – when I played Hidden Folks (a masterpiece in this genre), I thought, “ok, so that’s how you can do something innovative with the hidden object formula. Interesting”. Crime O’Clock is a different take, a new way to use this mechanic to create an investigation game.
How many eras/maps will the players get to interact with, in the final game?
Matteo: Five different eras, with more than 40 criminal cases and 5000 characters! But there is a lot more in the game.
What kind of time shenanigans and impact can the player have across time eras?
Matteo: Every time you solve a crime, the events on that map will change. Returning to the map to solve another crime, you will see different situations your actions create. And sometimes this “butterfly effect” links more than one case (maybe a crime is committed because you solved a previous one, saving a character that becomes a criminal) and maps (some characters can move through eras with some…expedient).
What is the plan regarding the future of the game? Can players expect new content periodically?
Matteo: It depends on how Crime O’Clock will be accepted by the players – we have a lot of ideas to keep the game alive with more content, so… we’re keeping our fingers crossed!
Crime O’Clock is now available to play on the Nintendo Switch, Steam, Microsoft Store, and MacOS.
