Along the River During the Qingming Festival

Along the River During the Qingming Festival

Fantasy Li · 2024 · Casual, Historical, Retro, Education, Point & Click

PC
Very Positive89% · 93
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →

Screenshots

About Along the River During the Qingming Festival

This is a hidden object game with historical and cultural interpretations, attempting to carefully and seriously investigate and verify the intriguing stories expressed in "Along the River During the Qingming Festival".

The main gameplay currently involves finding 352 objects or characters in the painting. Each item comes with annotations explaining its function and situation in the painting.

Many objects and customs shown in the ancient painting no longer exist today and can only be guessed and inferred from existing books and experience. Naturally, there are some unsolved mysteries worth discussing and debating. Therefore, the game includes some unverified conjectures that may not align with mainstream views and are the author's personal interpretations, provided for reference only.
"Along the River During the Qingming Festival" mainly showcases the ships, bridges, houses, marketplaces, festive activities, and cultural customs of the Northern Song Dynasty. The details are so vivid it's as if the social landscape of that time was captured by a camera.On that wooden bridge with no pillars, whose manufacturing technique has long been lost, a crowd surges, with nearly a hundred merchants, officials, sailors, fishermen, and passersby filling the space.The streets are full of shops, signboards, and vendors, including fortune tellers, storytellers, bicycle repairmen, medicine sellers, doctors, barbers, touts, porters, sedan chair bearers, and gamblers - people from all walks of life.In terms of ships, it meticulously depicts the ship structure, detachable raise-and-lower stern rudder technology, anchor chain assembly, decoration styles of passenger and cargo ships, types of goods transported, and details of people's lives on boats such as cooking, worshiping, doing laundry, rowing, punting, sightseeing, and resting.

Let's journey with Mr. Zhang Zeduan through the urban life of the Northern Song Dynasty 1100 years ago.

What Steam players say

Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.

Not recommended Mar 22, 2026
This is one of hundreds, if not thousands, in the endless flood of minimalist 2D "find the hidden object" minimum effort shovelware games. "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" follows the exact same formula as all the others... click around a minimalist drawing to find a bunch of hidden radishes or whatever. I'm not kidding, there's so many of these now. That makes it impossible to point at just one of them and say this is worth anyone's time. I think in fairness it should be pointed out this is a little more sincere than most "find 100" copy + pastes, having a slightly more serious (if bland from a gamer perspective) backdrop of ancient Chinese history, as instead of a lazy line drawing, you go through some historical paintings and find various elements (over 300 things to click on, amazing). This is still not what anyone would call a bleeding edge PC gaming experience, but it might make for an interesting website. The whole thing could have been done in a web browser. We have to ask if Steam was intended to compete with Firefox, Chrome or Safari. I didn't spend thousands building a gaming rig so I could play glorified browser games. The other problem is just how …
1 found this helpful
Recommended Feb 17, 2026
This game invites us to explore one of the most famous classical paintings in china, via an hidden object game that cleverly reveals details about the epoch with a voice that seems to have been recorded for a museum exhibition. The interest is undeniable from a cultural and artistic point of view, the drawing is indeed very pretty and instructive. There is one problem that made me think about putting a thumb down, it is that the dev seems to have just loaded that huge graphic file onto a polygon in the unreal engine without any partitioning and it makes my computer fan sound like a boeing 747 about to take off. But I keep the thumb up because there aren't that many cultural games available. [h1](follow my curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33882793/]GenXPlayers[/url] for more retro and indie reviews)[/h1]
1 found this helpful
Recommended Dec 11, 2025
A really good game. Very entertaining and restful - like a jigsaw puzzle. I learned a lot playing this game and I appreciate how much effort went into it.
1 found this helpful
Recommended Mar 25, 2026
This game is a free to play hidden -object game. From my experience, The objects are hard to find, & very challenging because it's like you are looking at an old piece of art work, Or an old picture and The drawings are hard to see. The explanation on each item helps give hints without clicking the hint button.Also I learned recently that you can actually change the settings to "black and white" and made it easier to see a clearer picture as the colored set up messes up with the artwork.
Recommended Sep 17, 2025
Not recommended Jul 14, 2025
The hardest part of this game was actually seeing anything on the screen. There are some games that use historical Asian drawings. But they're clearly visible and not a brown mess like this one.

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