Find Otto Hints: How the Colour Drain Works and When a Hint Is Worth a Minute

Every search in Find Otto comes with three ways out of a bad day: keep looking, take a hint, or give up. A hint is the middle path. It tells you roughly where Otto is without telling you which animal he is, and it charges you a full minute for the help.

This guide explains exactly what a hint does, how much of the picture each of the three takes away, and how to decide whether the minute is worth paying.

The Hint key sits at the top right, beside Give up and the clock, with its price on it: +60s. A hint takes two presses, because a slip would cost a minute. The first press turns the key into Tap again: +60s, and if you do nothing for a few seconds it turns back.

On the second press, three things happen:

1. The camera flies to the part of the world Otto is in, framing it on your screen.
2. The colour drains out of the rest of the world. A ragged edge closes in from beyond the screen like a dry brush, each stretch of it setting off at its own moment, until only a patch of colour is left.
3. A note confirms it: Otto is where the colour is · +60s. The clock jumps by a minute and the cost shows beside it.

Everything outside the patch stays in the picture, just washed to grey, so you can still see where you are. The small map at the bottom left shows the drained part too.

You can take up to three hints a day. Each one leaves a smaller patch inside the one before, so the colour closes in step by step. Once all three are spent, the key is switched off until tomorrow.

Here is roughly how much each leaves you to search, worked out over 150 days of worlds:

• The first hint keeps the colour on about two fifths of the play area, where about half the crowd stands: some 140 animals besides Otto, about 25 of them his kind.
• The second keeps it on about a sixth: some 70 animals, about 12 of his kind.
• The third keeps it on about a twentieth: a couple of dozen animals, of which about five are his kind.

Those are averages. A world with a dense crowd near Otto leaves more animals in the patch; a sparse one leaves fewer.

The patches follow rules of their own, and each is worth knowing before you search one:

• It is never centred on Otto. He always stands between about a fifth and a half of the way from the patch's middle to its edge. The very middle of the patch is no better a place to look than anywhere else in it.
• He is never on its rim. All of Otto stands well inside the colour, clear of the ragged edge. An animal half drained by the brush is not him.
• It changes nothing else. The decoys inside the patch are still decoys: animals of his kind in his hat, others in his whole outfit, striped scarves everywhere. A hint narrows the ground; it does not do the checking for you.

The patches are also the same for everyone on the same day, and the same on every device. Reload mid-search and the colour you paid for drains again at once. When you find Otto, or give up, the colour comes back to the whole world.

A hint changes the search more than its size suggests, because grey is the best background the clue's colours could have. Outside the patch nothing competes for your eye, and inside it the top's colour and the scarf's two stripes stand out far more than they did in a full-colour crowd.

So after a hint, do not start again from the animal. Fix the top's colour, sweep the patch in strips, check the scarf, and only then the animal and the hat, as in the search plan for finding Otto faster. Skip the rim and anything moving, and give the animals half tucked behind others a second look.

Each way out has a different price:

• A miss costs 10 seconds and tells you only that one animal was not Otto.
• A hint costs 60 seconds, six misses' worth, and removes a large part of the picture from the search.
• Giving up costs the day. Otto is shown, circled, the day counts as played but not found, and nothing goes on the board.

Two conclusions follow. Guessing is a poor substitute for a hint: tapping animals at random until one is Otto costs 10 seconds a guess, and even the third hint's patch holds a couple of dozen of them. And if you want a time on the board at all, hints always beat giving up. Three hints and a find is a slow day; a give-up is no time at all.

A hint pays for itself when it saves you more than the 60 seconds it costs. The first one roughly halves the crowd you have left to check, so it is worth taking once you would expect to need more than about two more minutes without it. The second halves it again, and the same rule of thumb applies.

In practice that suggests a simple habit:

1. Search the whole play area once first. A hint taken in the opening seconds spends a minute you might never have needed.
2. If one careful sweep finds nothing, take the first hint. By then you have shown the day is a hard one, and halving the ground beats sweeping it all again.
3. Search the first patch properly before taking the second. It is big enough that a rushed look there is the usual reason for wanting another.
4. Treat the third hint as the last resort. It leaves so little that you can check every animal of his kind one by one.

On dark days, at night, in a storm or underground, where every colour is dimmer and the clue is slower to read, the case for the first hint comes a little sooner.

Your time on the board includes every hint, so the comparison stays fair: Faster than 80% of today's searchers is measured against everyone's full time, misses and hints added on. The result card lists your hints separately with their cost, and so does your share, as in Found Otto the zebra in 2:14 (1 miss, 1 hint).

There is no shame in a hint. The board puts you among everyone else who found him that day, hints and all, and a find always counts for more than a give-up. For how the board reads your time, see Find Otto today, and for today's world, head to Find Otto.