Spot the Difference

To most, a spot-the-difference puzzle is something your teacher uses to trick you into doing something vaguely edifying. It passes the time, but it's not in the same league as a video game for pure entertainment.

In this post Brain Training era, however, gamers want to be improved as well as entertained, so it comes as less of a surprise than it should to see an end-of-term puzzle book staple reborn on mobile.

Spot the Difference – a game that, more than any other, lives up to its name – is a seemingly endless succession of picture sets popping up on screen complete with four differences each to pick out.

Play wisely makes no attempt to extend the parameters of the game or alter the rule-set – all you have to do is check the pair of pictures over and mark off the irregularities before the time runs out.

The pictures themselves – almost Christmas card style fare at times – aren't especially compelling, and do tend to repeat after a while.

Nonetheless, they serve their purpose - some rather tricky spots offset by a hints system that marks off a total of three differences across the course of the game.

The problem is, while the clock counts down at a fairly brisk rate, moving your pointer around to mark off each anomaly calls for either slow and steady taps of the number keys or holding each one down while your pointer flies past your intended target.

Picking each target off can often take as long as spotting them in the first place.

Either way, considering your sole action is scouting around each picture with said setup, it's a touch annoying that it hasn't been implemented in a smoother fashion.

That aside, there's little to chastise Spot the Difference for, with even the pictures that sprout up time again coming with an assortment of differences to keep things fresh.

The resulting question, therefore, is just how much you want to play a game of spot-the-difference in the first place.

Matarus's survival take – your resulting points tally typically added to a solo scoreboard – certainly doesn't bring anything new to the table, but then messing with a formula as established as this might have proved to be one difference too many.