Mystery P.I.: The Vegas Heist is a hidden-object game chock full of hidden objects. The premise is simple: A new casino is getting ready to open in Las Vegas. Four billion dollars in cash is stolen the day before opening. You have 16 hours to find the missing cash. If you do it, you win a $50 million finder’s fee. Sounds like a pretty good payoff for a little detecting. You aren’t actually going to solve the mysteries of who took the money or how. The story just gives you a reason to move between the different locations.

For those of you that may not have played a hidden-object game, it’s like Where’s Waldo or I Spy. You find things hidden amongst a multitude of other objects. And the clues you have won’t always be straightforward. In one scene you’re told to find “3 cakes.” One cake is a graphic of a cake, another is the word cake and the other is a slice of cake. A fork might be an eating utensil or a tuning fork. If you get stuck looking for one interpretation of a word, think of how else that word might be used.

Don’t let the 16-hour time limit scare you. I played at a pretty leisurely pace and burned through just over six hours. You probably won’t want to play this in one sitting, but you don’t need to commit a huge chunk of free time to it either. The nice thing about this particular game is that it’s easy to play for just a few minutes (if that’s all the time you have) and then come back to it when you can. You can have more than one save game, and the game will save automatically for you each time you exit.

Normally you have a little hint button that slowly recharges. Apparently using the hint button costs you some points, but I didn’t really care about the points so I wasn’t watching that closely. There is a game setting that lets you have unlimited hints if you’re worried about getting frustrated. There’s also a setting for unlimited time, if you feel like the 16 hours is too much pressure. Vegas Heist is very accommodating for the individual play preference.

There are 25 different standard locations to the game. There also are 25 different levels you’ll play through on your way to finding the missing money. Each level will have anywhere from two to nine scenes that you’ll investigate. When you finish each level, you’ll have a different kind of puzzle to solve. When I had about three items left on each level, I had the option to go to the puzzle or finish finding every object. I opted to find the objects, but if you’re getting frustrated, know that you can miss two or three things and still get to the final puzzle. You’ll do a word search, rotate puzzle pieces to complete a picture, place and rotate puzzle pieces to complete a picture, or swap pieces to complete a picture. Finish the puzzle and you’re awarded a clue that you will use in the future.

Just to mix things up a bit, there are three additional hidden objects to find in each scene — a poker chip, a key and a fingerprint. Here’s my advice: Do not leave a scene until you have found all three objects. You will come back to a given scene multiple times, but I didn’t find two of the fingerprints on my first trip through each scene and then could not remember in which of the 25 scenes that I still needed to find the fingerprint. Apparently finding all of the fingerprints unlocks something else — but I will not find out what that is until I play through again.

Finding all of the poker chips and keys unlocks unlimited seek and find mode. The entire game has more than 2,300 hidden objects. Unlimited seek and find allows you to go to each scene and find every hidden object in that scene. The trick is that you can’t just randomly click everything in the scene. You’ll have a short list of objects visible at one time, and you can only find one of the objects when it’s on that list. Still, I did enjoy going back through the scenes and finding everything. It’s kind of neat to see the basic picture before all the various hidden objects were added.

I enjoyed the graphics in Vegas Heist. I definitely felt like I was exploring scenes from Vegas. The sound effects go nicely with the graphics. There’s kind of a mysterious musical score along with the obligatory slot machine noises. For me, it maintained the atmosphere without ever really getting on my nerves.

At the end of the game, you get to do something a little different. You have 25 objects in your sidebar — the clues you earned from each level. You’ll be asked eight different riddles, and the answer for each riddle is one of the objects from your sidebar. Answer all the riddles and you move to kind of a Rube Goldberg screen. You need to place the eight objects appropriately to reveal the code to a lock. Enter the code and the room with all the money opens. Yay! You’re rich. Woohoo. If only real life were so easy.

I have definitely enjoyed the time I spent with Vegas Heist. I will say that the story isn’t particularly deep, but it delivers a very satisfying hidden-object experience. I can see myself playing again — especially to find those last two fingerprints and unlock the secret I’m still missing. If you like hidden-object games, you’ll want to give this one a try.