Who Is Otto? The Animal in the Long Striped Scarf, Explained

Every day in Find Otto you are looking for the same character, and every day he looks different. On Monday he might be a cat in a pink cap; on Tuesday an armadillo in a propeller cap; on Wednesday a swan in a pith helmet.

So who is Otto? This is the character explained: what never changes about him, what changes every day, the fox who stands for him in the game's logo, and why he is drawn the way he is.

Otto is a part that a different animal plays each day. There are 62 animals in the cast, from a fox, a cat and a duck to a walrus, a sloth and a red panda, and every one of them takes a turn before any comes round again. Then the order is shuffled and the round begins afresh.

What makes all of them Otto is the outfit. Whatever the animal, he always wears a long striped scarf, a hat and a top, and on most days he carries something too. The day's clue names the animal and each of those things, so the player always knows what to look for, even though the face is new every time. The game calls him "he" whatever the animal, and so does everyone who plays.

The scarf is Otto's signature. It is always long, always knitted in stripes and always in two colours, and it is the only piece of his outfit that never changes kind. It also reads from far off: a long band of alternating colour at the neck catches the eye even when the animal wearing it is small on the screen.

That is exactly why it cannot give him away on its own. On an average day about fifty other animals in the crowd wear a long striped scarf too, and about a dozen of them wear one in Otto's own two colours.

Otto's hat is one of 27 kinds, from a cap, a beret or a bowler to a deerstalker, a fez, a crown of flowers, a golden crown, a sombrero or a propeller cap. Some only fit certain heads, so the game picks from the ones that suit the day's animal.

His top is one of 16: a T-shirt, a jumper, a jacket, a dress, dungarees, a long coat, a raincoat, a hoodie, a cardigan, a waistcoat, a sailor top, a poncho, a cape, a uniform with gold buttons, a jumpsuit or a tunic. About three days in ten it comes patterned, spotted, checked, striped, starry, flowery or zigzag, and the clue says so. When the top leaves his legs bare he gets trousers or shorts, and he always has boots or shoes, though the clue never mentions those.

What he carries is one of 38 things: a balloon, an umbrella, a newspaper, a broom, a bunch of flowers, a basket of fruit, a kite, a trumpet, a butterfly net, a sunflower, a telescope and many more, now and then even a magnifying glass of his own.

Otto dresses from a palette of twelve bold colours: red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, pink, black, white, navy and sky blue. Each thing the clue names is in a different colour from the others, so his scarf's two stripes, his hat, his top and the thing he carries never repeat a shade between them, and none of them is ever the colour of his own fur.

The palette is deliberately small and loud. Every colour in it can be named in a word and told apart from the rest at a distance, which matters for a clue that has to be read once and then carried in your head across a crowd. The crowd around him dresses from a wider range of eighteen colours, including softer ones such as lilac, tan and cream.

A good hidden character has to be hard to find and fair to find at once, and Otto's design is a balance of the two.

The hard part comes from sharing. Nothing about Otto is unique on its own. His kind of animal is common in the crowd, around 45 of them on an average day, and the decoys of his kind even share his fur. His hat, his scarf, his top and his carried thing each turn up on other animals, and about fifty animals each day are dressed to match some of the clue on purpose: his kind in his hat with the wrong scarf, his kind in his scarf with the wrong hat, another animal in his entire outfit.

The fair part comes from one rule the game never breaks: among the animals of his kind, only one wears both his hat and his scarf. However many decoys there are, the full clue always points to exactly one animal. The research on why that kind of target is so slow to find is in the science of visual search.

Where Otto stands follows rules of fairness too. He is always in the busy play area, never in the scenery at the edges of the world and never in the outer sliver of the play area itself. He is always full-sized and on his own feet, never sitting, never behind a counter, never in a boat. At least three quarters of his head is always in view, so his face and scarf can be seen. What the game does like is to tuck the rest of him partly behind something: another animal, a stall, a tree.

He also never moves. Smoke drifts and strollers pace about the picture, but Otto stands still, and the strollers are never his kind of animal and never wear a scarf, so nothing in motion can be mistaken for him.

There is one Otto who never changes: the game's own. He is a fox in a navy beret, a long teal-and-mustard striped scarf, a red jumper, navy trousers and brown boots, holding up a magnifying glass, and he is the face on the game's home card and share image.

His face also lives in the logo, looking out of a magnifying glass, and that fox is alive. Every few seconds he blinks. Now and then he ducks down out of the glass and peeks back up over the rim, or leans in close to the glass for a better look at you. Tap him and he reacts: a boop, a start, a shake of the head, a dive out of sight. Keep tapping and he gets cross, his brows coming down and an anger mark appearing on the glass, until on the seventh quick tap he huffs off altogether and stays away until he has calmed down. While the game is loading, the same glass sways back and forth as if he is already searching.

Each day's Otto has his own moment before the search. On the start screen he stands on top of a small round world with his name over his hat, holding whatever he is carrying, while the day's crowd walks past him in both directions. He never walks with them; he only breathes. It is the best look you will get at him all day, so it is worth a few seconds before you press Start.

Otto reads the same backwards as forwards, which suits someone you spend your time looking for from every direction. It is short enough to say in one breath and easy to type, and as a given name it comes from an old Germanic word for wealth or fortune. For a character who is someone new every day, a name that stays perfectly still seemed right.

Who Otto is today depends on the date, and the clue on the start screen will tell you. For the places he can turn up, from a skating rink to a crystal cave, see the tour of Otto's worlds; and to meet today's Otto in person, head to Find Otto.