Pickers

Download Size: 600 MB

Time Played: 8 hrs.

Day I Became Top Seller on Normal: 14th day out of 30

Suggested Difficulty: Advanced

What I'd Pay: $7

Steam Price (2/26/12): $10

I was not expecting a picture hunt game to be this engaging. When I think of picture hunts, I think of being stuck on a single screen, trying to find the last item of a list of 20, until I crack and click the Hint button in shame. Kudos to MumboJumbo for completely blowing my expectations out of the water by making the requirements merely suggestions and adding an open world to explore.

Your goal is simple: scavenge a dozen different locations for interesting items, buy them from their owners, then sell them for enough profit to be the Top Seller for the month. Finding said objects is just the first step. Each owner has a different disposition towards you which affects how much you can ask off during your haggling. You're encouraged to pay extra on a few cheap items to get him friendly enough to discount a big ticket item. The owners are just quirky enough to be occasionally interesting. (My favorite was the creepy pale-faced recluse that constantly hinted at being a centuries-old cultist and/or vampire hunter.)

The biggest payments come from Incomplete items, which can be combined with another item to make a more valuable one. For example, a seatless motorcycle and a motorcycle seat will cost you ~$2000 total; when combined, its value jumps to $5000. Sometimes both parts can be found in the same location; other times, you need to make a mental note of one part and find its partner in a different location.

There's also a minigame in each location where you can complete a typical picture hunt, finding a dozen objects in a scene for $50-90 an item, but it just doesn't have the appeal of the main game. They also made an unlockable Time Trial version of these minigames, where you can be graded on how long it takes you to complete a scene, but it just felt like something to pass the time rather than an actual game.

Once you pick up 7 items, you head back to the shop to Restore, Appraise, and Sell them. You can just skip straight to selling everything you've found, but Restoring often adds a lot of value to an old item for little cost, while Appraisals can tell you just how much a rare item is. (You only get 3 of them a day, and they cost $75 apiece, so save them for the big-ticket items.) Once you're done preparing your goods, you can either set their sale price or put them up for auction. Auction off a hot, rare item and you can get several times its appraised value; auction off something common or out-of-favor, and you'll probably lose money on the deal.

The suggestions I mentioned earlier is the Hot Category of the Day; every day, you get a new category of items that'll sell like crazy. You gain cash bonuses if you buy items in that category, and you can sell those items for high prices later. This encourages you to hold off on buying rare items until they're a Hot Category, rather than snatching up anything valuable the moment you spot it. Notetaking is encouraged; I must've forgotten where a valuable item was a half-dozen times over the game.

The combination of open-world picture hunting and shopkeeping was really engaging to start. I loved the thrill of uncovering the missing half of an valuable pair, or putting something up for auction and seeing how much it sold for, and watching my ranking slowly climb from 10th to 1st as I opened up new locations to scavenge. However, by the 14th day I sold an obscenely pricey suit of armor for $50k, blasted into 1st place, and never looked back. That's when the game got boring. You never really found a great (or a crappy) deal on the single items, so buying them usually wasn't worth the effort, and auctioning off combined rare items never backfired on me. (I only auctioned off 1 item for less than its appraisal, and it was off by only a few hundred dollars out of several thousand.) The game got too easy halfway through, and I ended up just phoning in the last week and still winning with over twice the money of 2nd place. Maybe it would've been more fun if I had played on Advanced instead of Normal, but it felt like the game should've ended in 15 or 20 days instead of 30.

When I started up a new game after winning, I had the same initial locations unlocked, items in the same places, and almost the exact same Hot Categories. That immediately killed what little interest remained in replaying it; a different cycle of Hot Categories and initial locations would've kept things fresher. (I would've tested it out more, but the game has no option to end an existing game; I would have to make a completely new profile to restart before finishing my current game.)

Although my interest rapidly dropped after I figured out how to win the game with ease, it was still much more engaging than I expected and makes a perfect game to play on the side while you watch TV or Quick Looks. However, they don't quite go the extra mile to ensure you could play this game over & over and enjoy yourself. That's a shame, as I can't imagine a more entertaining picture hunt game than this.