Is This Yours? review - "A seemingly cosy hidden object puzzler where patience isn't a virtue"

• Adorable visuals and funny customers
• Interesting premise and simple gameplay
• Stressful timer, but with an option for a more chill Zen mode

With its minimalist visuals and seemingly cosy vibes, Is This Yours? might look like the perfect pick-me-up to help you unwind after a long and tiring day. But while the mechanics seem deceptively simple, it could also unleash a lot of your pent-up rage bubbling underneath the surface.

And because you play as a hapless lost-and-found employee at the mercy of impatient people's whims, it might just make you lose faith in humanity at the end of every session.

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Table of contents:

• Is This Yours? gameplay
• Levels and mechanics
• Is This Yours? verdict

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Is This Yours? gameplay

It certainly did for me each time I picked up this odd little contradiction. While Is This Yours? offers an interesting kind of puzzler in that it's part hidden object, part time trial; it left me with an elevated heart rate and even higher stress levels than before I started playing.

That's because you're tasked with looking for missing items at the airport under the watchful eye of your no-nonsense boss - three strikes and you're fired, and each request that pops up from an irate passenger will have its own timer to add to the pressure. 

Sure, the anthropomorphic characters are adorable and there's plenty of humour in every query, but because you're pressed for time and there's just too much junk in Lost and Found, there's no room for dilly-dallying or idle chitchat here.

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Thankfully, failing a level - and essentially getting fired (or sent on extended vacation, as your boss likes to put it) - will only penalise you with having to start the level all over again. You'll come back smarter, faster, and hopefully with your eyes sharper, but because every customer that hops, flies, or stomps up to your counter is randomised, you can't really say for sure if you'll make it out of the carnage alive this time around.

Levels and mechanics

That randomised factor is what spices up the gameplay, to be honest, because trying to memorise each passenger's request won't do you any good here. The best you can do is try to remember how each item looks instead. Before long, I found myself drilling the images into my head just so I could look for them more easily.

The backpack, for instance, has a white background on its square tile, and I have to remember that the elusive shoe and the missing rollerblade look similar but not quite. 

Eventually, things will start to look more and more alike, so you really have to keep your eyes peeled if you don't want to mistake a hairbrush for a toothbrush and risk losing one of your precious three hearts with a wrong tap.

What's the appeal?

The time limit also includes finding the item, dragging it across the screen, and dropping it into the empty tile on top, which means that sometimes, your taps just won't register, or you might drag the wrong item thanks to clumsy fingers. 

Thankfully, all this pressure can be avoided if you decide to opt for the Zen mode, which eliminates the time limit so you can search for people's personal effects at your leisure. With the countdown out of the way, you can appreciate the humour here a little bit more, like that dude who lost his underwear but would like you to look for it with no questions asked.

Admittedly, I tried my best to clear the levels too to keep up with the challenge, but I encountered some sort of glitch on the Android version where, on the final stage at the Airport, I just couldn't progress even after finding the final set of belongings. The passenger I found the wayward item for just wouldn't go away, and there was nothing else to do but keep failing on purpose to end the level.

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In any case, Is This Yours? is an interesting take on the normally chill hidden object genre, with a cute premise I've honestly never seen before. If you're not going to be content with the Zen mode, the frustration might just get the better of you after a few rounds of impatient passengers obsessed with their random junk - or it might just make you appreciate the job you have right now, too, which is always a good thing.