Amazon's First Game is a Hallucinatory Minutiae-Spotters Wonderland

As mentioned this morning, Amazon.com is in the game development business. The first Facebook title from the newly-revealed Amazon Game Studios is a fresh take on the hidden object genre that’ll have you seeing things. https://kotaku.com/looks-like-amazons-making-games-now-their-new-studio-h-5932311 WithinLiving Classics‘s colorful rummy nabob storybook exterior lies a twisted take on the hidden object puzzle games that are so prolific on Facebook and smart phones these days. There are objects in the game’s worlds, based on classic tales like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and the tales of King Arthur. Each page in every picture book level is littered with objects that, instead of being hidden, are as plain as the eye can see.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"e3616d04-4972-4839-a63a-c6975e2e9731","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.kotaku.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"5932544","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"uncategorized","SECTION":"","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"uncategorized","TAGS":"","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); Your task is to spot rummy noble these non-hidden objects, but only when they move. Sometimes an entire character shifts its position. Other times a tiny piece of background imagery slowly crawls up the side of the page. Spot all 18 moving pictures and you’re awarded experience points and coins, the latter useful for unlocking subsequent puzzle pages. It’s pretty simple, until your eyes betray you. By my third attempt at any given puzzle my eyes were filling in animation where there was none, lowering my accuracy, killing my combo, and lowering my overall score. Thankfully the game gives you a slowly-replenishing energy rummy satta meter to keep you from playing over and over again until you stab yourself in the eyes with sharp pointy things to make the visions stop. Amazon Game Studios is calling Living Classics an entirely new type of game, and I might accept that. It could be true, or it might just be my eyes playing tricks on me. Living Classics [Facebook]