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My Hidden Epee Review (August 7, 2023)

I don’t know how many people reading this (if anyone) waste their time with free-to-play games, but I do.

Over the years, I have played a bunch of G5 games, and Hidden City is my favorite. It was the first G5 game I had installed on the computer I purchased in 2018, and I’ve played it everyday since. The game isn’t perfect, but it updates regularly, the in-game costs are generally low, and it’s easy for low-level players to advance. I’ve quit most of the G5 games I installed the past five years, but Hidden City is one of the few games I still play.

Recently, I started playing Hidden Epee, too. And it has become part of my daily rotation. I only started playing this game because a G5 “friend” incessantly sent me invites despite me declining them every time. So, I relented. At first, I was pleasantly surprised by the early gameplay and the interesting storyline(s). But the game’s issues have compelled me to make this writeup.

I’ve decided to leave this review on Tumblr because I don’t believe I can leave a long review on the game page in the app store. Also, Hidden Epee doesn’t have a wiki or a Facebook page.

What Do I Like About Hidden Epee?

I’ve been playing Hidden Epee for close to a month (since July 2023), so there must be a few things that brought me back to it day after day. Here are the things I like about this game:

1. I like the dialogue.

For now, the dialogue is clean, and the game has clearly defined characters. Of course, I like some characters more than others, but that’s to be expected.

2. I like the general story.

Hidden Epee takes place in 17th century France. The player needs to find the Silver Epee and solve the mystery of the eclipses that have caused several residents to disappear. There are also many interesting side stories involving characters you meet along the way.

3. I like the game’s music.

I don’t think I have a problem with any tracks, but some are more relaxing than others.

4. Many of the graphics are beautiful.

The daytime scenes look the best, and the faces of characters are realistic.

5. It’s easy to earn special items to enter the event scene or Other World.

Most locations reward me about 7 items to enter the special event scenes, while faction locations reward me about 10 items to enter the special event. I can earn candles to explore Other World locations by helping villagers, exploring some regular locations, completing contracts, or meeting other objectives.

6. Some actions in the game yield generous rewards.

Opening chests can give you important tools, keys to enter faction locations, and gems to fight monsters. Fighting monsters and successfully searching locations in the Other World can reward energy.

7. You can choose a faction.

The game has six factions: King, City Guard, Aristocracy, Cardinal, Citizens, and Sea Brotherhood.

In Hidden City, you can’t decide which profession you have, but you can choose your alignment in Hidden Epee.

8. It’s easier to replenish your energy with time.

In most games that have energy limits, it will take 3 minutes to gain back one unit of energy or power (you need the former to search a location and the latter to charge a friend’s location). In Hidden Epee, it takes 2 minutes.

What Don’t I Like About Hidden Epee?

Here’s everything that’s wrong with Hidden Epee:

1. The game crashes or freezes at least once a day, especially if you play it for more than 30 minutes at a time.

For example, if you click “Play” on a location or minigame and experience a crash before entering the scene, the game takes your energy and any special items you use to enter the location without giving you anything back. Other times, the game might freeze after certain ads appear. For me, I often see problems when an ad for the Sherlock Holmes hidden items game appears. One ad just won’t start, nor will it let me click out of it. I’ll have to close the game and start it up again.

The game crashing is perhaps its biggest issue. And it’s especially infuriating when that happens after I successfully search a location or defeat a monster but before I can click “OK” to collect my prizes.

2. You might not be able to visit all your G5 friends who have the game installed.

I can only visit a few friends (and perhaps only two are still playing this game). When I try to visit the rest, I get a message that those friends have a different update of the game installed.

How is that possible? With other games with a visiting feature, it doesn’t matter which update they have because I can still visit them. I contacted the support team about this issue, and they’ve done nothing about it.

3. The music is too quiet.

Above, I said I like the music. However, I can barely hear it unless I turn up my volume to an uncomfortable level. This isn’t a problem with other G5 games.

4. The game scenes are too large.

Searching a location can be harder and take more time because of how large each scene is. And the game doesn’t zoom in that much. If you were to take screenshots of a location, you would need to take three at a time to capture the whole scene.

And you can forget about using screenshots for Past and Reflection modes (that would require 9 screen captures at a time).

5. Some items are too small or otherwise hard to see.

This problem also makes it easier to waste time during a search.

Some items might be nearly transparent, so you will need to use tools to find those items initially. Other times, some parts of the scenery can completely obscure items. Listed items should be possible to find without the use of tools.

6. During special events, the game asks you to find (too) many extra items.

You can see the extra items (by silhouette) in the upper right corner of the scene, and they appear one at a time. At most, you can get five tickets that you can use to earn up to 50 items during the designated period (40 or so days), but to earn a ticket, you need to find 2-3 items. Why not just require players to find five extra items?

7. The game’s responsiveness is unbalanced.

It can be harder to move about the scenes in a timely manner, especially with Night mode. You must hold down your left mouse button to move down in Hidden Epee, whereas in most hidden object games, just moving your mouse is enough to move your area of vision.

Also, it takes more than a second to charge friends’ locations or flags or to get rewards from your flags. For example, if you click on a flag, you need to wait for any items you receive to reach your inventory before you can click on another flag. A quick double click might speed up the process, but I don’t have this issue with most G5 games.

On the other hand, Hidden Epee is too sensitive to the input from my mouse when I’m searching for items on the list. That’s a double-edged sword, no pun intended. While the game’s sensitivity helps during a search (when I can’t find specific items), it can lead to inadvertent double-clicking and time penalties.

8. I don’t like the match-3 game mechanics.

Specifically, it’s hard to create bombs, fireworks, and scepters for the Market (where you play the main match-3 game), and the scepter will only take away pieces of the same color or merge with bombs and fireworks. In other match-3 games I’ve played, boosters that function like the scepter will only take away pieces of a color based on which piece I select. Ultimately, it can be extremely difficult to create boosters and cascades in Hidden Epee that make it more likely to win the game. Often, it requires a few plays just to beat one level of the Market.

9. Leveling up isn’t that rewarding.

Since it’s easier to replenish your energy, you’re unlikely to use it all up before you reach the next level. Also, you’ll only get 3-4 extra points of energy with each level up. I think 5 extra points is better than that.

10. Not all assemblers are free.

In a game like Hidden City, you can give any assembler (except the newly introduced one for the current event) to each of your friends once per day. In Hidden Epee, some important assemblers will come out of your inventory if you want to give them to friends.

11. The game’s items are too expensive, even if you don’t pay actual money.

The game doesn’t drop enough of the tools you need to progress during some searches, and you can’t purchase some important tools with coins. Even coin purchases can be too steep. I believe all the basic tools should have a coin purchase option (1, 5, and 10), and buying 10 of those items should cost no more than 45,000-90,000 coins.

Making matters worse, some tools are only available at the end of a search. I wasted tens of crystals buying extra moves while trying to defeat monsters (I know, I know), but now I will avoid those monsters until I have enough gems to fight them. Speaking of the monsters …

12. Fighting monsters is more difficult than it needs to be.

And it requires you to play match-3 games, and the top-level monster needs you to create boosters to take amulets off the board. That can be next to impossible without boosters or losing a few times. I prefer fights that only require you to use a few items to repel the threat. Why should you need 2-3 amulets to fight a monster, only to lose the fight because you ran out of moves?

13. Some of the contracts are too punishing.

Some days, the daily contracts (there are five a day) require me to do 10 or more searches in the Other World or receive 10 or more Amulets of Courage. That can be impossible for players who don’t have enough Babylonian Candles. I also hate it when the contract calls for me to use tools or activate bonuses from my inventory. I want to stockpile those items for emergencies.

14. The game doesn’t allow you to keep more than 100 gifts at a time.

It only allows 60, and it’s easier for gifts to quickly accumulate on the map. Ideally, only 2 or 3 gifts should appear after each successful search of the event location.

15. The game doesn’t have a full screen option.

When I play a PC game, I want to see the clock and my app taskbar. With Hidden Epee, I need to set the screen ratio before the game loads, or the display will be messed up. This doesn’t happen with other G5 games.

Why Am I Still Playing Hidden Epee?

For now, I’m playing the game to finish the current event. Unfortunately, I believe that the problems with Hidden Epee are more numerous than the positive aspects. Ultimately, I might quit the game because of its negative aspects. Let’s see if the development team fixes these issues in the future — or decides to stop updating the game altogether. The latter problem has happened in some games I’m still playing, and I might just quit those, too.

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It’s too bad I can’t like this twice. Banger post.

Short-term goal

Long-term goal

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The imperialist nations' wars of aggression *are* in fact defensive in nature, and that is precisely why they must be destroyed.

The fact of the matter is that, when imperialist politicians claim that the existence of socialist states, or the holding of imperial territory by competing imperialists, or insufficient exploitation of held imperial territory, are existential threats to their nation, they are not lying. Imperialist states rely on exploitation - and constantly expanding exploitation at that - to survive. Should the open veins dry up, or be taken by another, then their profits will falter, their bribery at home will be squashed, and they will enter into a death-battle with all their might. The bourgeoisie doesn't particularly like fascism, or they'd be doing it all the time - they engage in it when their position is existentially threatened. If they don't, then they face either subordination to a foreign imperialist power - the loss of their territories - or, worse, socialist revolution. The bourgeoisie are hostile brothers, they have no peaceful coexistence among each other - if they do not crush and repress everything they can, they *will* be crushed and repressed themselves. This tendency is only ever supressed, slightly, when there's a great wealth of (usually postwar) untapped markets to share in.

Now, they aren't lying when they say that they *need* to invade impoverished socialist states to avoid their own destruction, or when they say they *need* to start horrific inter-imperialist wars between blocs to do the same. Does this justify them? No - because 'justice' is an ideological thing. It's an element of litigation within a class. What this fact *does* mean, however, is that their wars are *inevitable*. That, no matter the ideology, no matter the leaders, nothing will stop them. They are not simply wanton, willful violence. They are not errors in policy. They are necessary for these states to continue to exist, and will be the inevitable, rational choice of those states regardless of their stewards. There is no reforming them away, no sheparding these states, no carrots and no sticks. There is only the complete and utter removal of them.

This is the clear, material position, if viewed from a lens other than that of bourgeois ideology and bourgeois politics. We cannot let ourselves be concerned with the litigation of blame and justice within the bourgeoisie - we can only look in from the outside, and we can only fight against them as a whole.

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Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) is a stochastic terrorist

(Copied from this outstanding post)

Libs of TikTok, the nom de plume of the extreme-right social media personality Chaya Raichik is a stochastic terrorist.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-stochastic-terrorism-uses-disgust-to-incite-violence/

Her hatespeech and relentless attacks on vulnerable minorities are directly responsible for such crimes as bomb threats on children’s hospitals, because they provide medically and psychiatrically appropriate, recognised and helpful aid to transgender children.

Because the stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik openly shares the names and addresses of for example teachers who display a pride flag, perpetuating and boosting the hateful and revolting lie that LGBTQ+ people visibly existing and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is “grooming”, she is actively contributing to hate, threats and attacks against people.

With that the extreme-right and the stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik are enflaming a moral panic

against a minority by normalising the counterfactual narrative that the simple existence of this minority means children are under attack and are being sexually abused.

The extreme-right claims that the stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik is just “repeating information already publically shared”. This is a lie. Instead she heavily editorialises the content she posts and she is a major vector of hatespeech, propaganda, dehumanisation and efforts to illegalise the public existence of LGBTQ+ people.

The stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik and others of her kind such as but not limited to Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson are directly responsible for the cowardly attack in Colorado Springs and other (attempted) attacks of a similar nature.

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Holy shit, look at the absolute entitlement and arrogance of this oligarch dirtbag. Mr Stop-and-Frisk Harasser-of-Women Trump-2.0 Billionaire-Neoconservative over here thinks he's the force of deliverance against climate change. I don't know whether to laugh at the fact that satire is dead at this point or to be furious that he's taking credit for the fight that indigenous people and the global working class have been engaged in for decades.

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Israel is celebrating all 248 civilians it killed - including 67 children - as "neutralized terrorists"

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when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet

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Hope I got the whole thing. Here you go. A lesson on how language effects perception of slavery.

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I’m not telling you the name of the film if you don’t already know.

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Apparently, this blog turned 9 two days ago! How did I miss that? Better late than never.

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As I began to read this post, I knew the top concern was how this negatively affects the poor. This whole pandemic has hit the poor and homeless the hardest and it has shown how, specifically in the United States, how little the government cares about most citizens. However, there is a civil liberties concern, as well, in regards to going cashless.

If all or most of our money transactions are done electronically, all our purchases can be traced and monitored. I don't want the government knowing about everything I buy and when I bought it or for private companies to take that information and sell it.

Things people should worry about and should probably fight against in a post-Covid world: the phasing out of physical money.

Even before all of this started a lot of restaurants in my area were already going ‘paperless’ aka: refusing to take anything but cards in order to buy food.

I hope that people understand just how terrible this is. How the movement to doing this was specifically a move against poor and homeless people. Against people who could not open a bank account. Who could not get a credit card. How it was a move by restaurants to not-so-subtlety ensure that the only people coming in through their doors were ‘desirable’ clients.

In a post-COVID world this is only going to get worse because now companies will have has a ‘societally acceptabile’ reason for refusing paper money. They will create an environment that is hostile towards the poor and homeless under the guise of public health.

I do not have all the answers for how to address this. I do not have answers for how to fix this or combat it. I do not know how to keep both workers safe in a public health aspect and also keep businesses accessible to people without bank accounts. I don’t have the answers but We need to be aware of this. We need to understand how terrible it is. We need to see it for what it is and how disproportionately such a move will hurt those around us.

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OK So with the shit with the USPS going on:

1. Check your Voter registration to make sure everything is up to date.  If you can, request a Mail-In Ballot.  I live in CO, where all elections are Mail-In only now, so I get one anyway.

2. Fill out your ballot per the instructions on your Ballot.  Some Notes:

Read Instructions thoroughly, and fill out your Ballot in private.

Do NOT post pictures of your Ballot as this may invalidate it.  DO Post pictures of your “I Voted” sticker.

Make sure to vote for all the offices up for election- as important as the presidential election is, your mayor, governer, local school board and sherrif have a MUCH bigger impact on your immediate safety and quality of life.  Google your candidates, look up the Leauge of Women Voter’s Guides for a reliably Impartial rundown of your local candidates. 

Remember also that it is better to have someone in office that is only moderately incompotent, than it is to have someone that actively wants you dead.  It is the first step to having someone worthwhile next time.

If you wanted a third party option, your local elections are the best place to do this- my own city council has several Green Party members and it got me city-sponsored single-stream recycling! Its also moving the state legislature significantly farther left.

3. INSTEAD OF MAILING IT- LOOK UP WHERE YOUR BALLOT DROP-OFF LOCATIONS ARE. 

They’re boxes you drive or walk or bus or bike or whatever up to and drop your ballot in, and the elections officials will have it that evening. Pros of Ballot Drop-Off:

Can be turned in the same day you reccive your ballot, if you want to get this over with ASAP

Open 24/7, so you can drop it off whenever

Absolutely guaranteed to get your vote counted, regardless of what Donald does with the Post Office.

No waiting in line

No exposing yourself to the coronavirus

Most cities will have several ballot Drop-Off locations, at places like the grocery store, the county courthouse, city hall, at high schools etc.  Google your town or county name and “Ballot Drop Off Locations” and it’ll give you directions even.

Absolutely Save the USPS, but this is the BEST way to make sure your vote gets counted this

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It is not the question “how do I access the same structures of power as my oppressor” that needs to be answered, on the contrary. The force that drives us is “how do I destroy these cruel and unjust structures?” Anything else seeks to obtain advantages that only exist because others suffer.

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So, NYT Reviews Vibrators?

You can read the thread here.

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