A common lament among cozy game players is that some games commonly considered “cozy” are more stressful than they let on—lookin’ at you Stardew Valley optimizers. But managing your daily energy and getting to bed before 2am has nothing on the overwhelm of looking at a screen filled with thousands of almost identical clovers to find the one four-leaf clover among them. I’ve only managed to do it twice so far.
One In A Thousand: Clover Book is a cozy, relaxing, shockingly difficult hidden object game that I just couldn’t stop staring at the first time I saw it. The way all the clovers bend away from my mouse as if I’m delicately brushing my fingers through a field looking for that four-leaf prize reminds me of the physicality that I found so enticing in things like Potion Craft or Kynseed.
One In A Thousand is a bit of a misnomer. It actually guarantees one four-leaf clover out of 2,500 clovers on screen. That, too, is inaccurate, because the real life rate of four-leaf clovers is about one in 5,000, says solo developer Matteo Silvestro. This unexpectedly challenging cozy game could have been even more difficult, but Silvestro took pity on players.
One In A Thousand started out just a bit easier, with four-leaf clovers occurring at a 1:2000 rate. Silvestro says after doing his research on the real 1:5000 ratio he considered insisting on realism but didn’t want to stress players out quite that much.
“I ran a few playtests at various events and people already found it quite difficult at 1:2000,” he tells PC Gamer. “I realized that 1:5000 would be realistic, yes, but it would ramp up the difficulty even further, making for a more frustrating experience than I wanted.”
Silvestro enjoys looking for clovers in real life, and designed parts of One In A Thousand after his experiences. The journal that logs each of your special clovers is inspired by the one he keeps with his own four-leaf finds. All of the clover patterns are also based on ones he’s picked in the wild where he’s based in northern Italy.
(Above) Witness me finally finding a four-leaf clover and immediately pretending that I haven’t so I can take a clip of myself finding it, but more casually, instead of erratically.
The other important concession Silvestro made is the subtle hints system hidden within One In A Thousand. As you brush through the clovers, you can click on little round shadows to reveal ladybugs hidden beneath the leaves. The color of each ladybug is a “hotter or colder” hint, with redder bugs meaning your four-leaf clover is near at hand.
If you turn the hints system off though, you’ll have to use good old grit and some real life clover-spotting techniques, which Silvestro was good enough to lend me his expertise with.
“Instead of going clover by clover, one by one, you start by looking at the full picture,” Silvestro says. “Clovers usually have small white patterns on their leaflets. This means that if a clover has three leaflets, the white patterns form a triangular shape, but if it has four, they instead form a square. Our eyes are quite good at spotting patterns! So if you stand back as far as you can and scan the field, you might be able to spot the change in pattern and hence locate a four-leaf clover right away. It’s a very effective strategy I discovered while searching for them in real life.”
The brave and undaunted cozy gamers among us can go digital clover hunting now by finding One In A Thousand on Steam for $2.
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