True story: It was just the other day that I saw the entire Where’s Wally (I know it’s called “Where’s Waldo” elsewhere, but it’s Wally here) collection on sale. They must have done a reprint. I bought the lot of them. I have fond memories of spending hour upon hour scouring through those books. Not just to play the “can I find Wally” game, but because each artwork teems with energy and humour. Martin Handford had a rare gift to be able to pack so many tiny details and personality into such expansive artworks. Anyhow, I’ve always been a fan of these kinds of hidden object games, and so I enthusiastically jumped into Sniper Dan.
Sniper Dan is Where’s Wally through the sight of a gun. That’s all it is. With each level, you’re given a list of things to find. The only difference between this and other Where’s Wally-likes is that, rather than pointing your finger at the thing when you spot it, here you need to line the item up within the crosshairs of your sniper rifle and shoot it. Visually, it’s a different way to play. Mechanically, other than the ability to zoom in with the scope, it’s the exact same game.
To be clear, Sniper Dan is non-violent. You’re penalised it you shoot any of the humans or animals around the levels, and your shots won’t harm them if you do (or hit them by accident). All the things that you need to shoot are either random items hidden around the place, or objects that will help solve issues in each diorama. For example, you might need to shoot a fish bowl so a fish can escape back into the ocean. Or help a chicken cross the road. I couldn’t help but laugh at that one. Dad joke: The Game.
There’s no real fail state, and while there’s a timer that keeps track of how long you take (with a rating at the other end for completing it fast enough), there’s no push to get things done fast. About the only pressure that will ever be placed on you is the occasional “emergency” that comes through a phone that you have with you. For example, the first one of these required that you shoot some obstacles out of the way for a biplane that needs to make an emergency landing. I failed that at the plane crashed, but even then, all that meant was that I failed to get some in-game currency.
That in-game currency is the single most pointless thing in the whole game. You can use it to purchase upgrades to your sniper rifle, but since the game isn’t really about being good at using a sniper rifle, upgrading it seems superfluous. We’re not playing Sniper Elite here. There are also some small trinkets that you can purchase that help you earn more cash or decorate an office, but while these things are fun, the assumption that the office is worth decorating is a strange assumption to make. There’s no real narrative, no reason to have downtime between the various hidden object maps and in the end all this upgrade stuff feels like an arbitrary inclusion because modern game design always, apparently, requires upgrade systems. I hate arbitrary best-practice game design. If there was a reason for it, then go to town, but Sniper Dan struggles to justify almost all the scaffolding around its core system.
Thankfully that core system really is fun. Each of the diorama maps that you need to find things is full of amusing little things to notice. Most of those amusing things never have a purpose for existing that’s linked to the game, other than filling the screen to make the hidden things harder to find. The artist behind them is a clear student of Martin Handford and has produced an excellent homage here.
Meanwhile, the hidden things are hidden well enough to take some scouring to find the first time. More than a few times I had to catch myself and really slow down the rate at which I was scrolling around the screen because I realised that I wasn’t fully digesting what I was looking at, and many of the clues for what you need to spot are just cryptic enough that you need to be paying attention without wracking your brain.
Ultimately, Sniper Dan is a time-filler rather than something you’ll dwell on after you put it down, but then again that’s true of the Where’s Wally books too. I never felt the urge to track those down and play them again… until they just happened to be staring me in the face during my weekly shop. With a similar sense of humour and similar quality to the hidden object “action”, perhaps Sniper Dan is something that you’ll also find yourself returning to for a quick laugh at random moments in the years ahead.
