Hidden Paws

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Hidden Paws Bundle, along with Hidden Paws Mystery and Summer Paws.)

Hidden Paws is a hidden object-style Puzzle game released on PC in 2018, Nintendo Switch in 2022, PlayStation 4 in 2023, and Xbox One in 2025. As the title implies, this game has players looking for cats hidden throughout various scenes, with this game’s theme being snowy 3D scenes.

The 3D visuals used here are low-poly, but still quite nice in a simple sort of way, with some nice lighting, and the calmness of these scenes is accentuated by the game’s relaxed synthesized soundtrack, joined by occasional meows of the cats in the scene.

When it comes to the gameplay, there are 20 levels here with over 120 cats to find within them, and players must use a cursor to find all of the cats and optionally all balls of yarn. Cats and yarn can both be hidden inside of objects that you must interact with to reveal what you’re looking for, but there’s no indication which objects on-screen can be interacted with.

However, the biggest problem with Hidden Paws is the atrocious control scheme, which eschews a more sensible two-stick first-person control scheme in favor for an odd control layout that has players holding ZL and using the left stick to rotate the camera, something that’s highly counter-intuitive, and that I believe younger players who may otherwise enjoy this sort of game will find prohibitively difficult to use, and older players will find so frustrating that it will turn them off of playing the game.

It’s a shame that the controls in Hidden Paws are so absolutely terrible, because otherwise this would be a lovely hidden object-style Puzzle game, and a rare example of a 3D game within the genre. But the unintuitive controls and the lack of indication what you can interact with both make this a game that even fans of this sort of game will want to skip.

tl;dr – Hidden Paws is a hidden object-style Puzzle game where players try to uncover the 120+ hidden cats within a snowy 3D setting. The presentation is lovely, but this game is absolutely ruined by terrible controls that make this game a real pain to play. You have plenty of other better options in this genre.

Grade: D+

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