The Broken Hourglass Monday Update

Planewalker Games' official website has received its usual Monday update for The Broken Hourglass, this time detailing how the game handles hidden characters and objects.
Inanimate objects may also be hidden from view or otherwise conceal some sort of secret. The usual categories for hidden objects are traps, doors, and containers. Although each serves a very different purpose, the mechanics for finding each one is essentially the same. The object to be hidden is assigned a Perception score, which indicates the Perception a searching party must possess in order to find the object.

If you have a sufficient Perception score, you find the hidden object-it illuminates on the screen and the character which found it alerts you to its presence. Traps can also be "found" the hard way-by walking into one unaware and suffering its attack. Some traps will automatically disarm themselves after firing once, while others can fire again and again. Either way, you only see the trap's danger zone if you beat the Perception check. Hidden doors and containers typically have no such clues. Because perception is shared across the party, once a hidden object is located once, the members of the locating party can see it again on subsequent visits.

To disarm a trap without setting it off, you must first locate the trap with a sufficient Perception score, then click on the trap to attempt to disable it. Your character's Locks and Traps skill is compared against the Locks and Traps difficulty associated with the trap. Beat the value and you disarm the trap. Fail, and perhaps nothing happens... or perhaps the trap is sprung on the would-be disabler.