Create your very own perfect garden in Gardenscapes, a delightful bouquet of hidden object and time management fun!
Your luck comes calling when you inherit a beautiful mansion. Beautiful, except for the garden. But with help from your butler Austin and some fancy merchandising with a rummage sale, you will restore a once-stunning garden to its former glory in no time!
As a hidden object game, gameplay primarily involves searching in the various mansion rooms for items that visitors would like to buy. Decorative plates, pillows, miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, bagpipes, teddy bears, samurai swords, candlestick holders, etc. Visitors arrive at the left side of the screen offering to pay a certain amount for a particular item that’s hidden somewhere in the current room. Find it and click on it to sell it, then click on the resulting coins from the sale to collect them and make room for the next customer, and so on.
A dash of time management game is thrown in, as each customer has three hearts representing their satisfaction with your jumble sale. If you take too long finding that set of bagpipes, the little girl offering to buy them may lose a heart and lower her asking price from $20 to $15. Take even longer, and she may offer $10. And so on. An untimed, “relaxed mode” is available if the pressure gets to you.
When you finish the room, added to whatever profits you made from selling hidden objects are bonuses depending on how many hints you have left and how much time is left on the clock.
The hints are question marks, and there are a few in every room in the mansion. These hints don’t tell you the location of an object – instead they show you pictures of the actual objects you’re looking for. When you click on the hint button the names of the objects your customers are asking for are replaced with their images. This makes finding most of them quite easy.
Hidden in every room are other kinds of hints, as well. Thermometers give you a temporary “hot or cold” effect when mousing about the room. Get close to an object and the background behind its name will glow red. If you’re far from its location, on the other hand, the background will ice over. Brrr. Thus you can zero in on its whereabouts. But by far the most useful hints are the cameras! Click on a camera and the screen will flare white, as before the flash of a camera, and for a second only the objects currently on your list will be shown. If you can click on all five of them in succession, you’ll even get a bonus $50 for being that awesome.
Also hidden about the premises are quite a few stacks of coins! Click on these for a quick and simple money boost. Often you’ll find them behind some of the objects you sell.
The hidden object scenes in Gardenscapes are quite interactive. Many, many objects – perhaps as many as twenty or thirty per room – are affected by the movement of the mouse. Hanging objects sway when you mouse past them. Lights turn on when you hover over them. Animals squirm and move about. Just one of the many things Playrix has done right with Gardenscapes is going above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to attention to detail. This isn’t a forgettable hidden object game.
Of course, the game is all about restoring your grandfather’s garden, so between hidden object levels you get a chance to spend your profits on your landscaping makeover. Each possible upgrade/improvement has three different options, so in a sense you get to design your own custom garden… You don’t get to decide where these improvements go, just which style to buy. However, most of the improvements can be clicked on. Austin the butler is always wondering around, handing you mail or answering the telephone, and you can click on features of the garden to make him interact with them. Playing fetch with the dog, for example, or feeding the swan.
Gardenscapes is a simple hidden object game sans puzzles or logic problems, but its high resolution graphics make hunting for hidden objects very enjoyable.