Review: Go Seek

In a very loose take on the real life game, Go Seek is the quick reaction game to test your speed at squishing fruit. All you have to do is find the specific fruit as quick as you can, spread across over two hundred levels with varying difficulty and themes.

The two hundred levels are spread across seven episodes – some having a common theme, like fruit found in different scenes. The numbered episodes all have a variety of the themes available. The fruit are also extremely diverse, not only in the different types, but also in the design. Some levels will have you squish just a standard red apple, but others will then have you looking for the one specific red apple that has a leaf attached to the stem.

If you play through the mission chapters in order, the first thing you’ll notice is how quickly the game deceives you. After completing the first episode, you might mistake Go Seek for a game aimed entirely at a young generation of casual players. But once you look into later episodes, and specifically the themed ones, you’ll see just how challenging this game becomes. Not only are you scored on your reaction speed, you’re given a limited amount of time to complete the episode, with additional time being given to you per mission based on your performance.

Other challenges the game presents involve hiding fruit almost entirely behind other pieces, tricking you with a pattern that may be different in only one iteration, showing only the silhouette of the fruit as well as the aforementioned instances where the same fruit will have multiple designs.

While the overall design and layout of Go Seek is aesthetically pleasing, playing on the iPhone felt like the wrong device to get the best results from the game. The small screen made determining a lot of the finer details of the fruit on screen difficult at times, especially with all of the different fruit variations. This wouldn’t likely be a problem on iPads and other tablets, or even on the PC and Mac when that version of the game is released.

With some repetition of episodes, players could likely increase their overall reaction speed, which begs the question why a simpler version wasn’t developed and aimed at young children. A trial version is available, while the full game is currently priced at £1.99 on the App Store. Even though there’s over two hundred levels included, it’s cheerful, but definitely not cheap for the game that it is.