Find the Fault review

I’ve played many games like these. You get an image with many things in it and you try to find what is wrong in the image. It’s like a take on the “Where’s Waldo” books. Here, Find the Fault presents us hand-drawn style graphics and one mission: Find the Fault. Released by ZM Software, Find the Fault is available on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for for $0.99.

Firstly, I really appreciate the work put into the game. The overall look has its own charm in the hand-sketched style. The level selection screen is really surreal and the puzzles have a certain charm to them. There are currently 6 Chapters, each with 6 stages. Amazingly, according to the AppStore description, the next update will give us 72 more levels. Wow!

As varied as the stages are, I found a fault in Find The Fault fairly quickly. It’s art, being hand-painted, do not portray a scene as accurately as I wished. Logically, some images are just filled with ‘faults’ though they don’t count unless I choose the one pre-chosen fault. My best example is in one of the levels where it portrays the inside of a car with a guy driving on what looks like a way or highway. In this one image, I could list off a slew of faults. Why is the car’s proportions so skewed? Why is he driving diagonally down this highway? Why is the passenger seat so close to the drivers seat? Why doesn’t the driver side sun-blocker not have a mirror? Why are the street lines on the road black? But oh, the real fault is that the rear view mirror is missing. Of course!

I found this all over the game. A ballerina’s one hand is black, the sun is red, the shadows aren’t being made from the sun because they aim in the wrong direction… most of these are just distractions since the real faults are usually the last things you see. This isn’t how this works, especially for a game where there is always only one correct answer. I don’t like to nit-pick art, but man it’s frustrating when the ‘real’ answer is so illogical when compared to so many other ones I could point at.

Another issue comes from the technical standpoints. On each stage, the ‘back’ arrow, the layout, and the timer/score numbers will change positions all over the place. It gets worse as you progress through the stages and it’s strange since it’s so inconsistent. Once you finish a stage you literally have no way to play them again unless you reset the game. I don’t know if you would ever want to play a stage again after the first time, but not letting us make that decision for ourselves seems like a fault to me. Actually marking the fault is difficult at times too since the hot-spots are usually ‘missing’ parts of an image so actually touching them with your finger can prove to be frustrating on some images. Where exactly should I touch when I don’t know if the fault is really there or not since so many of the images have skewed perspectives and distorted proportions? I believe this is why most games like these use real photographs to prevent issues like this. It’s a really brave attempt but it just falls short.

There isn’t a whole lot of challenge, the art is sketchy in both good and bad ways, and the game ends in a few minutes. With the next giant update however, I can honestly say that the faults that I found aren’t that serious. Try this one out for yourself because despite the bad, this app can give you something to play for a few minutes.

Here is a video demo of the Find the Fault app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 3/5

AppSafari review of Find the Fault was written by Joseph Ho on December 17th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Art, Games, Photos. Page viewed 5126 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.