Recently, I have been hearing people in my gaming news feed, like Patrick Klepek at Waypoint, talk about a game called Hidden Agenda. It isn't the first time the game fell onto my radar, coming up briefly in some of the presentations at E3 2017. As someone who has been casually looking out for news on it, I was surprised that it had been released without so much as a peep.
Hidden
Agenda is the product of Supermassive Games, the same studio that
brought us the surprise smash Halloween hit Until Dawn in 2015.
Rather than continue Until Dawn's loving homage to horror movies with
another, similar game, Hidden Agenda applies that same sense of
genre-awareness to the modern crime-drama. Taking the roles of ace
detective Becky Marney and hard-hitting prosecutor Felicity Graves,
players attempt to solve the case of the Trapper Killer, who
booby-traps their victims’ bodies in order to kill responding
officers.
As
part of PlayLink, Sony's initiative to offer Jackbox-like social
games to the PS4, multiple players could play either cooperatively or
competitively in order to change the course of the story. These
features only work if the mobile devices and the PS4 are all using
the same wifi, meaning it is impossible to stream the game to a group
of people and play across the internet. And since there's no way I
was going to try convincing my family, on Thanksgiving, to crowd
around my PS4 and download the Hidden Agenda Mobile App to their
phones in order to watch a crime-drama when they could be watching
“The Game” instead, I played in solo mode.
So
rather than focus on how playing it with multiple people impacts it,
I am going to talk about Hidden Agenda's place in the genre of
“Adventure Games” codified by Telltale and Quantic Dream. Though
I did not play with other people, the fact that Hidden Agenda is
designed to be played in a social setting forced it to make several
concessions in its design. With some exceptions, many of them worked
to improve the game overall, and could be easily applied to its
contemporaries.
As a
game meant to be played in at a party, or with a small group of
friends, a single playthrough of Hidden Agenda does not take long. My
run of the game took slightly longer than 2 hours. While this is
might be long for a police procedural, this is completely atypical of
a video game storyline from a big budget studio. For Hidden Agenda,
this proves to be a boon. I found that the game was significantly
more focused than I'm used to for games in this genre. Almost every
Telltale or David Cage game I can think of has at least one section
where it feels like the game was padded out in order to meet some
arbitrary length requirement. Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 1:
Episode 2 and Season 2: Episode 4, and the entire Navajo segment in
Beyond: Two Souls all could have been abridged or cut out entirely
without significant loss to the story of those games.
Hidden
Agenda's short length gives it a flow that these games don't
necessarily need to have. It is deliberate in how it paces itself,
making sure to carefully administer new plot points when they would
be most impactful to the story. I remained engaged with the game for
the duration of my playthrough, looking forward to the next reveal.
That said, Supermassive also remembered that not every scene can be
tense or exciting without burning out the audience. They made sure
that both the players and the two protagonists had room to breathe
after tense or exciting events. Though there is not much in terms of
character development, each member of the cast serves their purpose
in the narrative, driving the plot forward. If nothing else, Hidden
Agenda makes a strong case for the two hour, highly focused adventure
game.
Story
and writing aren't the only way Hidden Agenda separates itself from
its contemporaries. As part of the aforementioned PlayLink initiative
at Sony, the game does not use a controller. Instead, players
download and play the game exclusively through a smartphone
application. Using the phone as a touchpad, players move their
cursors in order to perform all of their in-game actions. Though this
seems like a severe limitation at first glance, limitation is the
mother of creativity. The PlayLink UI was leveraged in ways that made
me rethink many conventions in the space of the “Adventure” game.
Without
the use of a controller, specifically an analog stick, the options
for how to move the protagonists are slim. Rather than attempt to
answer how one could reasonably translate swipes on a smartphone
screen to avatar movement, the developers opt to just remove that
facet from the game entirely. At no point do the players ever have to
ferry their character from place to place, the game handles that for
them during cutscenes and story beats. This might sound like a bad
thing, but it heavily contributes to the pacing I talked about
earlier. The player does not need to worry about who they can talk to
for more dialogue or where the designers want them to go to move on
to the next segment. Instead, they can focus on the decision making
that exists at the heart of the genre.
Another
important part of being a game intended for social audiences
acknowledging that the audience will not be paying attention to story
events the whole time. The audience will likely be talking to each
other, and may miss some crucial details as a result. I suspect this
is why Supermassive Games included a logbook that keeps track of both
what choices the players have made so far and what they have learned
about each member of the cast. Since I played by myself, this feature
wasn't aimed at my style of play, but I did find myself flipping
through it to make sure that my understanding of events made sense
based on the available clues.
I don't advocate that games in the genre start flooding the Apple App and
Google Play storefronts with a ton of companion apps just to have a
case tracker appended to them. That said, I do see value in having
similar systems in other games. The concept is hardly novel:
Assassin's Creed is legendary for its use of the in-game database to
tie real history in with the game, and many RPGs like Mass Effect and
The Witcher have codices on their worlds and lores. When I think
about similar mechanics in the Adventure Game space, the only ones
that come to mind are Life is Strange and Until Dawn. That’'s
disappointing when so many of these games can benefit from having
these information storehouses available.
I
have a distinct recollection of my time with The Wolf Among Us, one
of Telltale's best games. Despite how much I enjoyed it, episodes
were slow to come out: So slow that I had difficulty remembering a
lot of the details, like who knew who and what their motivations
were. As for David Cage's offerings, I did not find it easy to follow
the stories of Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, specifically when it
came to characters and “why” they were doing what they were
doing. Having a log of “the story so far” is no magic salve for
David Cage's writing, but it can help the player keep pace when
trying to follow along.
With
no marketing, Hidden Agenda is a game you've probably never heard
about until you saw this article. And with all the barriers to entry,
Hidden Agenda is a game you probably won't ever play. It's not
perfect, but it serves as an interesting case study for lower-cost,
more focused content in the video game space. Though it requires
users to download a smartphone app and play together in the same
room, PlayLink's UI inspired Supermassive to build creative solutions
to its limitations, which can be ported to other games in the genre.
It's a tragedy that Sony hung this little gem out to dry.
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