Bigfoot: Hidden Giant puts you in control of Linda, a magazine employee, who is sent off to a nearby nature preserve where there are reports of Sasquatch sightings. While looking for the elusive missing link, Linda starts to uncover what appears to be a chemical spill that seems to be connected to a local plant.
As Linda continues her investigation, it becomes clear that someone thinks she is getting too close, and when she approaches her boss with the chemical spill information, he insists that she stay on task with the Bigfoot sightings. Could her boss somehow be involved in the spill and cover up, or does he simply think the Bigfoot story will have a bigger payoff at the magazine stands?
As I said, Bigfoot: Hidden Giant is a hidden object/adventure game, but it tries to handle the combination of the genres in a different way than most fans of these games are used to. Where most titles with this setup will have you find inventory items in hidden object screens and use them in standard adventure-style puzzles, Bigfoot blurs the lines by not confining you to a single screen when looking for objects, and making it so that several inventory items can come out of a single search.
What results is a game that tells you what inventory items you need to find, as well as throwing in a good number of other items to look for that you don't actually need. I will say that this feels very odd and different from any hidden object or adventure game that I've played before. Most adventure titles simply don't tell you what inventory items you are looking for. You are supposed to figure that out based on what puzzles the game throws at you. Most full-blown hidden object games keep you on a screen and give you a list of items to find, and after that, you simply move to a new screen.
Usually, when these genres are blended, you pull out an inventory item from a hidden object screen and go find where to use it outside of those screens. Here though, you simply have a list of items to find. You have free reign to explore the areas available to you in order to find everything on the list. Some of those items appear on the inventory list and one of the items you need to "find" can be an action like "cut the bag down" or "make coffee" or even "load the boat."
