And here we have another entry from the great Vidtec...or was it US Games? Whatever. Apparently Vidtec was just a brand label? No idea why. Moving on. So yeah, if you don't already know (and lucky you if you don't) "Sneak'n Peak" is a video game of...hide and seek. Yeah, real thrilling idea. Now, I understand that some publishers wanted to market games to children. There isn't really anything wrong with that, but this is a case where it really would just be easier for a child around the age of 5 to just go and play hide and seek. What kind of kid wants to sit with his friends and try to figure out what random spot on the screen will magically make your character hide? Or even worse, what kind of kid wants to play hide and seek alone? How sad is that!

So, with the obvious out of the way, we get to the game play and things just get weirder. "Sneak'n Peak" consists of 4 screens making up the areas of the house: The Living Room, The Pink Bedroom, The Blue Bedroom, and The Yard. In each of these rooms there are various areas to hide. Now this is from the manual. Just take a look at this picture...really soak it in.

Each rectangle or series of dots is a hiding place. To get into one of these hiding places you have to move in the stated direction at a certain spot on the screen and you will go in. For some areas this makes sense. You would expect to hide in a closet or under a bed. But a random spot under the carpet? Or offscreen in a random place? Or, hell, what about under the pathway? There really isn't an indication of where you can hide either. Even if I know that you can hid under the bed, I have to be in a pixel perfect spot in order to actually make it work. This also works if you have to seek a person. Also, why would you bother printing the hiding places in the manual anyway? There are only 20 possible hiding spaces to begin with, and if you read the manual (or played it a lot) you could just check every space before the time limit runs out. 

Really, this boils down to 2 main problems. This game was made for nobody, and it doesn't really play well anyway. You put those two together and you get a game that nobody would want. US Games apparently had a deal in which they would buy back their games you bought if you weren't satisfied within 5 days. I can't imagine how many copies of Sneak'n Peak were returned. Who knows. US Games went of business in 1983 and games like this probably didn't stop that from happening.