Hidden in Plain Sight (PC)
Competitive single screen multiplayer stealth. The concept of Hidden in Plain Sight is practically paradoxical, the idea of needing to hide from other players while everyone is looking at the same field of play at first sounding pretty farfetched. However, Hidden in Plain Sight manages to pull this off by having the screen crowded with tons of AI controlled decoys, players first finding themselves amongst the crowd and then needing to act without drawing the suspicions of the other players.
Hidden in Plain Sight is an exclusively multiplayer experience where players need to use a controller despite its PC release, but since up to 4 players can play at once, it’s easy to imagine even a split keyboard setup would get too crowded. Packing seven unique modes, all of them have a few things common to their design. First, the play area is one still screen that gets filled with characters who seem pulled from medieval fantasy. Royalty, wizards, golems, and ninjas all walk around pretty aimlessly under the game’s control, but at the start of any game mode, players are randomly assigned to one of these characters, the start of each round requiring players to locate themselves so they can start completing that mode’s objective. The second commonality to the modes is the punishment for being too obvious. Whether it’s by a free moving sniper crosshair or another character hidden amongst the crowd, death awaits anyone who makes themselves too obvious to the other players, a few modes offering victory to either whoever does the objective best or whoever happens to be the last character standing. For the most part, AI characters won’t participate in the objective chasing either, so areas of interest can often ask for the most careful or clever acts of subterfuge to ensure you aren’t immediately revealed to the other players when performing your designated tasks.
Ninjas are appropriately enough the de facto main characters of Hidden in Plain Sight, mainly because they have four modes tied to players using them almost exclusively. Ninja Party is the first mode in the list and a good introduction to the concept of needing to discover your identity and complete goals in subtle ways. A screen full of ambling ninjas features five statues that participating players need to touch to earn points, the statues emitting a loud ding any time a human controlled ninja has made contact with them. You need to mix up which statues you touch since no statue will provide two points in a row, and to win at Ninja Party can often involve not just tracking your own character’s actions, but trying to suss out which other ninjas in the packed play field could be other characters. If you do have a good guess, you can attack a nearby ninja, the move being an instant kill if you’re correct but only stunning any computer controlled ninjas. Of course, if you’re wrong or there are other ninjas left competing after an attack, you’ve just revealed yourself to the group… but you pack a smoke bomb to briefly cover some of the screen so you can slip back into the crowd.
Ninja Party Classic takes the design of Ninja Party and simplifies it greatly. All the same moves and setup are present save for your goal being changed to needing to touch each statue only once. Rather than a points race, its a much tighter challenge of trying to be the first to sneakily hit each of the five objectives. This mode isn’t quite as good though, mainly because the win condition is easy to achieve even without being too cautious and ninjas all move at the same speed so you can conceivably just run from statue to statue and outpace any pursuing opposition. Ninja Battle Royale is a more interesting deviation but again not as strong as basic Ninja Party. A group of ninjas are placed on a battlefield with no goal beyond surviving, but a large blue ring is slowly closing in around them, any ninjas on the outside of it immediately dying. AI ninjas will walk right to their dooms and tend to shuffle around blindly so you still need to blend in with your behavior to avoid being found out by other players, but until the ring is really small there’s not much motivating you to act in a way that could reveal yourself. Like Ninja Party Classic it isn’t exactly bad, but these two don’t feel like they nail the core concept of Hidden in Plain Sight too well since it’s often too easy to either ignore the premise of the mode or you lack any strong reason to risk revealing yourself.
Knights vs. Ninjas is the last ninja-focused mode, players assuming roles on opposing teams with different goals. The Knights team needs to protect a king, queen, and princess from harm while the ninjas are tasked with assassinating them. The Knights win if they can kill the player controlled ninjas, but the ninjas can only win by killing all three members of royalty, and those targets are often pretty hard to approach without revealing yourself. Knights are slower than ninjas by default to make up for how hard it is for ninjas to sneak up and kill the targets, but Knights are also completely unkillable, only stunned by any ninja attacks. Both sides will want to blend in as best they can with the AI knights and ninjas who aren’t capable of performing the main goal, because even if the ninjas have a speed advantage, the knights can puppy-guard the royalty and slash anyone suspicious approaching with impunity. A time limit will push the ninjas to take that risk, but being sneaky when someone is on guard is much harder than the other modes of play and it can sometimes be almost impossible for the knights to lose if they’re canny enough.
The final three modes all have some players as members of the crowd and others using a sniper’s reticle to try and find them and shoot them dead. These might actually be the most tense of the modes because the snipers don’t have to manage their stealth with their targeting reticle, and while they will have limited shots to prevent them from firing on everyone in the hopes of a lucky hit, the player performing the objectives has to be much more careful with how they move. Catch a Thief scatters a bunch of coins around the play area, the AI characters still unable to participate in the goal but one team of players needs to collect as many coins as they can within the time limit or before they’ve been shot dead. Coins don’t necessarily disappear visually when picked up though, the way the thieves achieve their goal being to pick up coins that the snipers don’t have their crosshairs over. If they’ve been claimed they’ll fade away when a player’s crossovers pass over them, thus revealing a thief was in the area, and while snipers can try to constantly cover the coins as best they can with their reticle, there are far too many to feasibly do so and the coins are adequately spread out to give the thieves a chance of picking up some undetected.
Assassin is similar in concept, but instead of coins being collected, the hidden players need to kill other characters who only properly drop dead when a sniper puts their cursor over them. This can mean the dead will walk for quite a while, allowing the assassins to put some distance between them and their targets to better help with the subterfuge. Just as tense as Catch a Thief if not more so, both modes are more about getting as many points as you can before you die or run out of time, the sniper team not so much winning as preventing any further success. Alternating who is on which team can essentially make this a high score competition, and the balance between both sides feels quite fair here. The Snipers have free movement and powerful shots, the hidden characters have the means to avoid detection even while performing the objective. The sniper reticle feels like it could communicate the size of the player’s shot better, but it does its job well otherwise.
Death Race is the final unique mode in Hidden in Plain Sight, and every participating player here is both a character in the crowd and a sniper. All the characters in Death Race start on the left and need to make it to the right to cross the finish line, players able to walk or run to achieve this. However, managing the deception is more important than ever. Players at the head of the pack risk being shot just to prevent anyone from making it to the finish line first, but falling too far behind means even the AI might end up completing the race before you. AI characters won’t run and move in strange ways, and with your limited sniper shots, you can’t risk wasting bullets on a computer controlled opponent since it pretty much gives other players the freedom to dash to the end without that risk of death. While many modes of Hidden in Plain Sight nail it in different degrees, Death Race is the perhaps the strongest when it comes to mixing together the risk of being caught versus the need to complete the objective.
While there is no single player option for any part of the game, the multiplayer can lead to plenty of hilarious moments or tense competition. A player might think they’ve been sneaky right up until they’re killed by another player, or a deception could have been so perfect that another player reveals themselves or wastes a bullet on a computer player instead. It’s the kind of game that can make a player feel clever or lead to a funny reveal where you weren’t as clever as you thought, and the game’s option menu actually provides for a bit more longevity to each mode. Some modes like Knights vs. Ninjas can start to have tactics develop that are hard to beat, and even Death Race can start to get a bit familiar after a while, but pop open the options and new complications can be added to most modes. You can absolutely flood the screen with hundreds of decoy characters to make it even harder to find a player in the crowd, or you can turn up the amount of coins in Catch A Thief to make the scores much higher but the likelihood of being found out much higher. Sniper shots and smoke bombs can be increased in number, and for a really ridiculous round, the speed of characters can be cranked up insanely high so everyone is zipping around the screen like flies. These can be tinkered with to just make for a better balance between players of different skill levels as well, but while these shake ups can be quite enjoyable, these complications won’t help Hidden in Plain Sight’s weaker modes escape some of their limitations.
THE VERDICT: Hidden in Plain Sight is the perfect local multiplayer game for starting off a party, but it doesn’t have the meat to carry the night by itself. The need to act stealthy among a crowd of decoys makes for plenty of moments where players can feel like ninja masters or laugh as they realize they gave themselves away, and the modes and options provide enough variety that Hidden in Plain Sight can consistently entertain with different twists on the core subterfuge concept. Some modes like Knights vs. Ninjas and Ninja Party Classic have some tactics or play styles that are hard to beat, but modes like Death Race and Assassin have a lot more longevity for mixing both the hiding and hunting aspects into play expertly.
And so, I give Hidden in Plain Sight for PC…
A GOOD rating. Hidden in Plain Sight could have been better if it pursued some of its stronger mode ideas and introduced more twists to them, but the package of seven modes is still great at mixing up both the style of play and the ways finding other players and hiding from them manifest. It’s a shame certain modes like Knights vs. Ninjas can essentially be solved, some other element perhaps necessary to prevent the knights from surrounding the last remaining target as most of the AI ninjas keep their distance so humans have no means to sneakily approach. The options can almost overcome some of these issues, and being able to adjust variables can ensure that even once you’ve had your fill of the basic idea behind a mode, you can alter it in some way to refresh that style of play. Death Race definitely feels like the most nuanced execution of the concept and one that executes the stealth vs. risk aspect best, but modes like Assassin will be more exciting for some since the goals are more quickly achieved and the ramping up of tension is more tied to player action than the actions of the decoy AI characters. A few of these modes could be split off into their own game and given many more shakeups to their design like different levels or power ups, but here they still provide a lot of fun that is simple in design but requires cunning from participating players if they wish to win.
Hidden in Plain Sight’s concept fascinated me since I first learned of it and I’m happy to have finally experienced it in action. Some modes are certainly better or worse depending on if you have 2, 3, or 4 players, but the game as a whole is still an excellent supplement to a day of multiplayer gaming.