Find & Climb review

Find & Climb is a new Facebook game from Brazilian social games developer Vostu. It showed up as the No. 2 emerging Facebook game last week. Find & Climb is an observation-based puzzle game in which players must work their way through a number of different "epochs" representing periods of history, solving a variety of different challenges along the way. The "epochs" begin with the Garden of Eden Bible story, then continue through prehistory and beyond, acknowledging both sacred and secular views of how the world has developed over time. Players take on the role of a monkey who works as the assistant for a renowned archeologist. The monkey climbs up the games "Tower of Time" a floor at a time, and must stop whenever he encounters a closed door or a character standing on a floor. Upon entering a door, a form of "hidden object" challenge begins; upon encountering a character, the player is usually challenged with a "spot the difference" challenge. The "hidden object" challenges show the player a scattering of objects and task them with finding something either from a vague textual clue ("things that you might find in the sky") or more specific textual or pictorial clues. More often than not, the player will have to find several sets of objects in the time limit, and they will be rated with between one and three bananas according to how quickly they accomplish the level's goals. These challenges are simple but fun and mostly well-implemented, but occasional translation issues rear their head, making it unclear what the player is supposed to be looking for. "Animals or insects with paws" was a particularly obvious offender, allowing the player to click on not only squirrels and rabbits, but also butterflies -- who obviously do not have paws! The "spot the difference" challenges, meanwhile, are much more straightforward, and simply task the player with clicking on the things that they notice as being different between two depictions of the same character. Upon successfully completing this challenge, the player is usually rewarded with an item from the epoch to put in their "museum", and the collection of all these items is the eventual aim of the game. The game monetizes in a few different ways. Firstly and most obviously, there is an energy system that depletes every time the player takes on a new puzzle, but this regenerates every few minutes and there are also collectible energy-restoring items scattered at irregular intervals throughout the tower. Secondly, players occasionally encounter treasure chests on their journey up the tower, and these may only be unlocked with hard currency. Thirdly, the player may also use hard currency to purchase "bomb" items -- these are used to eliminate incorrect objects from the hidden object scenes and make it easier to attain high scores. In terms of social play, each level has its own leaderboard and may be returned to at any time to better one's score. Completing an epoch or collecting an item also prompts the player to share their accomplishment on their Timeline, though there is no obligation for them to do this, and the option not to is always clear and readily apparent. Find & Climb is a good, fun, simple game that presents a nice twist on the conventions of the hidden object genre and successfully distinguishes itself as an original title rather than one that bears an uncanny resemblance to numerous other games. That said, the translation to English needs a significant amount of work before the game is truly ready for widespread popularity -- the occasional grammatical error when translated from Portuguese is perhaps understandable, but to see Egypt misspelled as "Egipt" simply makes it look as if the game hasn't been proofread. At times, the shaky translation actively gets in the way of the gameplay as it becomes unclear what the player is supposed to be clicking on -- it doesn't happen all the time, but often enough for it to be a noticeable issue. Find & Climb is one to keep an eye on for now, then, but Vostu needs to put some significant work into its English translation before it can be recommended without hesitation. Find & Climb currently has 50,000 monthly active users, 40,000 weekly active users and 10,000 daily active users. Follow its progress with AppData, our tracking service for social games and developers. Wait A good game noticeably spoiled by significant translation issues.

Social Pro Daily

Find & Climb review

Pete Davison

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Pete Davison