Here’s the thing: the best "hidden object" game on the App Store was created by two artists who don’t like hidden object games. Hidden Folks is a Where’s Waldo–type game with a kooky monochrome aesthetic, an eccentric playfulness, and was one of the most refreshing games of 2017.
Game developer Adriaan De Jongh bumped into artist Sylvain Tegroeg at the latter’s graduation exhibition, and they got talking.
“I jokingly told Sylvain we should make a game together,” De Jongh tells us. Inspired by their encounter, De Jongh grabbed some art from Tegroeg’s website, threw together a prototype of how he might make a game with it, and showed it to Tegroeg later that week. He loved it, and the pair started experimenting further.
I jokingly told Sylvain we should make a game together.
Adriaan De Jongh, Hidden Folks creator
De Jongh’s aim was simple—to make Tegroeg’s black-and-white worlds feel “even more alive.” This meant adding little patches of interactivity and objectives that pushed it further into the familiar hidden object game territory.
“Our starting point wasn’t making a genre game,” says De Jongh. “Here’s a secret: both Sylvain and I strongly dislike the hidden object genre. We never aimed to make a game that fit the genre and never even did proper research into it.”
Let’s call Hidden Folks an interactive picturebook, then. After all, there’s no countdown timer to worry about and no way to fail—the game’s core philosophy is just to make it fun to poke and prod. It’s packed with fun little secrets and weird vignettes, and those are your reward.
“We intended to make a world in which people stumble upon things that aren’t part of the game’s requirements,” says De Jongh. “We don’t even reward players for finding all the Easter eggs.”
Sylvain Tegroeg’s playful art appears simple, but it’s dense with ideas. How it's constructed in the game is surprisingly complex, too. Tegroeg created more than 6,000 pieces of individual art for Hidden Folks—the people, places, and things you see on screen are actually constructed like building blocks. So a car is not simply drawn whole, it's a multitude of components layered on top of each other. This allows De Jongh to create several versions of the same item when he brings these pieces together.
“Our most recent addition to Hidden Folks, the Factory area, consists of 19,475 sprites, 3,400 interactive objects, 921 characters, 540 sounds, and 28 targets,” he tells us. “You can imagine how much work that is for only a few people!”
The game’s oddball sound effects were more easy to construct.
“Every sound you hear in Hidden Folks was made by Sylvain and I yelling into a microphone,” says De Jongh, who had originally added the homemade sounds as placeholders. “To our surprise, we discovered that the quirky vibe fitted very well with Sylvain's art style, and so we stuck with it!”
De Jongh is right—of all the things that linger in the memory about this game, it’s the bizarre and unexpected sounds triggered by your interactions. They bring the game’s aesthetic to life in a way that layers even more character and charm onto the experience. Playful, handmade, packed with little quirky jokes—in every Hidden Folks scene, you can almost feel its creators having fun.
Every sound you hear in Hidden Folks was made by Sylvain and I yelling into a microphone.
Adriaan De Jongh, Hidden Folks creator
De Jongh says his collaboration with Tegroeg on Hidden Folks has made him reconsider how to approach his next project, too.
“This was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, so I have a feeling collaboration will continue to play a big role in my future projects,” he adds.
Alongside his previous work (the ballet game Bounden and the multiplayer party title Fingle), Hidden Folks cements De Jongh as one of the most original creators on the App Store. We can’t wait to see who he partners with next.