Adventure games can be broadly divided into two different categories, namely, guess the verb, and pixel hunt. A large number of The Secret World’s investigation missions fall into the latter.

That’s not to say they’re all bad. I’ve a few favorites, like decoding a radio transmission in morse code, and placing a subset of objects in a certain order to open vaults, but some of them, or some parts of the quest, unfortunately, degrade into a painful and retina traumatizing pixel hunt. It’s not that bad in the old days when you only had somewhere in the area of 300,000 pixels (640*480) to work with (okay, it is bad), but now there’s 2 million (1920*1080) of them, and these wonderful Direct X 11 effects don’t make things any easier.

Some items are helpfully outlined, some are not. Despite, the outline, some are woefully small enough only to be obvious when zoomed into first person view and hugging any objects in your vicinity. The ones which aren’t outlined require a combination of mouse dexterity and fortitude as you make a scan of the entire area until you notice your cursor change into that of a gear, meaning you found something that you can interact with.

I’ve played a fair share of adventure games in the past, including those from CD-ROMs that came tucked in cereal boxes. Despite the huge nostalgia I have for the many tropes of the genre, pixel hunting is definitely not one of them.