

While in adventures, there are tons of objects and it can be difficult to find one specific object, so there are powerups in the game to help you. Gold can either be earned in the game naturally or you can buy it with real money. Your energy refills once every three hours, or you can buy more energy with gold. To play an adventure, you are drained 10 energy. The scenarios in the game are called "adventures". For example, the first area in the game is Egypt, and the areas are based around Egyptian pyramids and rivers.

The game takes the player through various scenarios in time with different period-specific characters. Part of it involves the player building their own garden, and part of it is playing games in which you have to find hidden objects, similar to the popular I Spy books for children. Hidden Chronicles is available in 15 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Turkish, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.There are two aspects to the gameplay. “I think the storyline is certainly a bit more sophisticated.” Hidden Chronicles is a departure from popular Zynga games like FarmVille and Words With Friends, which were played lots over the holiday break. “There’s this thread line of a mystery throughout,” she says. Zynga’s Creative Director Cara Ely, who has a strong background in hidden-object game development, told the blog that Hidden Chronicles is similar to the The Da Vinci Code. In both hidden-object games, should you complete your mission, the society will be at peace. In Gardens of Time, there’s a bigger task at hand: You must travel through time to find objects that have been misplaced. The only real difference is that Hidden Chronicles has more of a Beauty and the Beast feel to it – you end up in your deceased Uncle Geoffrey’s mysterious estate, and an assistant helps guide you through object-finding.

Both games begin in the same way: You arrive in another world and are asked to uncover hidden objects.

So it’s no wonder that Hidden Chronicles and Gardens of Time look and feel so similar. Zynga is trying to win the top five Facebook apps, especially the first one.
