The Hidden: Source Review

Know your enemy... Subject 617

The Hidden: Source is a modification for the Source Engine (i.e. Half-Life 2 and co.) that pits a group of soldiers against Subject 617, aka The Hidden, a genetically enhanced experiment gone wrong. As part of a potential series of random MOD weekends, the Red Army got to trying this one out for size on Saturday night. We set up a server, which at the time of writing is still up and running, invited our friends lists and ploughed on into the unknown. Since most of us hadn’t even loaded up the game before, it probably made the experience all the more interesting. We did have a few visitors who had clearly played the game a lot more than us, which showed us what was at least possible in the game, but I think it would require a lot more practise to get even half as competent.

Here’s a short review of my own personal impressions of the mod.

Survival

The game lives off a pretty simple premise exploited regularly in the horror and thriller genres, but seemingly rarely in gaming circles, that fear of the unseen. All but one of the players on a regular map set up take the role of a regular soldier, and nothing out of the ordinary. You find yourself equipped with one of a regular array of weapons, shotguns, rifles and the like, and some extra goodies like laser sights, light amplification goggles and sonic alarms, whose purpose isn’t necessarily clear until you get your teeth into the game.

And that’s it. You’re on your own. Well, not quite, there are similarly another half dozen soldiers around you, stuck in a similar situation, to all intents and purposes very much on their own. At least to begin with.

Starting off as a grunt for the first time in the game is certainly a daunting experience. Knowing that you’re looking for something you basically can’t see puts your trigger finger on ‘itch’ mode, your old habits of aiming at silhouettes and bodies appearing around corners leaves you most likely to shoot a teammate than any potential fiend coming out of the shadows. It takes a while getting used to, but eventually we managed to get something of a clue as to our purpose in the game: ostensibly the soldiers are there to take out The Hidden, but actually they are very much the prey in this cat-and-mouse thriller.

The problem as the soldier was how little clue you had as to the state of play. The game provides no death notifications, so even when you think your back is covered, a few seconds without checking is more than enough to end your personal drama. Whilst I can’t speak for everyone, most of the time I never even saw our quarry/hunter. That includes the numerous times I was gutted by it, even when the thing stood apparently right in my face. Other times I saw things that I probably had little right in seeing, the wavy lines produced by The Hidden’s corpulence. Whether that was a result of poor play on the part of The Hidden, or on specific designs in the map, I’m afraid I have no way of telling.

The Hidden as 'they' saw him

Some of the maps included steam vents that gave a pretty illusion of The Hidden in various places, whilst others had dark enough corners and enough blinking lights, that even had I been chasing another soldier I doubt they would have had problems hiding from me. What became very clear after a short while, however, is that some people really had a knack for finding the beast. And I’m not just talking about the experienced players, even some of those of us playing the mod for the first time that night had much better eyes for the thing than the rest of us (yes, he’s ‘visible’ on that shot on the right). Maybe they just eat more carrots, maybe they’re the people who are good at Magic Eye posters, either way it was rather disconcerting news for the rest of us.

One thing we did eventually have to change on the server was the way in which the mantle was passed over: in the default settings, The Hidden’s vanquisher would take over the role in the next round, but this generally meant that a lot of people were running around pointlessly, whilst the experienced players when they joined simply passed the buck amongst ourselves (hdn_selectmethod 2 for a completely random mode).

The Hidden

The Hidden as 'we' saw him

So how is it playing the game as The Hidden himself? This is certainly what the mod is all about, the rest of the MOD is a filler for the real action. Certainly running through the tutorial is a wise move before stepping into his shoes, something that most of us hadn’t done on the night in question, but basically you could think of The Hidden as a mixed homage to the heroes of the Aliens and Predator franchises. The Hidden is pretty damn near invisible, particularly when standing still, and even when running leaves little more than a shimmery haze to give away his whereabouts. Principally armed with a knife, he’s slight and nippy, able to pounce fair distances, and also possesses the ability to hang on to walls and even jump wall to wall for a short period of time. Sadly, since none of us were versed in the fine arts we didn’t see much of that happening – but as already mentioned, most of us didn’t see very much of anything happening!

Slipping into his skin (he doesn’t appear to wear shoes) was at once a joy and a frustration. Being able to run around nigh-on invisible, and watch the others bumbling about from a safe corner was easily one of the most rewarding factors of the mod. With some practise, or with a lot of luck, you could also cause some real mayhem in a group by getting in, killing someone and then disappearing again just as quickly. Those were some very entertaining moments, even as one of the remaining soldiers in the clutch, waiting and hoping you weren’t to be next. The makers also provided The Hidden with an excellent addition to his arsenal in the form of pipe bombs, which acted like flashbangs in many other games, dealing damage but more importantly disrupting people’s vision, giving The Hidden plenty of opportunity to run in and pigstick someone to a wall.

Sadly, there was a lot that made your job as The Hidden one of frustration and pain. Given the fact that most people weren’t able to see you, their first resort was to start randomly firing in corners and down alleyways, with the pure hope of hitting something. Unfortunately, the tactic often paid off, with half a dozen people shooting down every potential corridor they would eventually hit something, and the blood spurt which confirmed a hit would bring a fair bit more concentrated fire to bear on you. More than once I was found sitting observing from a fair distance in the darkness, hit by what I can only assume was a stray bullet.

The soldiers are also armed with some tools that can make your job more difficult. The laser sights are perhaps the most obvious, in that they hit The Hidden before whatever wall or scenery behind him first. The sonic alarms I don’t believe I saw working, either because no player was fool enough to rush through them, or I simply didn’t notice them going off, but one of the soldier’s support weapons consisted of what looked like a paintball gun which fired some kind of blinding drug, which left The Hidden’s vision black for some seconds. If we hadn’t all been on TeamSpeak at the time, it may have been less obvious when the weapon had had an effect, but since someone generally screamed some obscenity when his screen went blank, it normally resulted in a kill and made it one of the more effective weapons in the game.

As previously mentioned, there was also the issue of those rabbit-eyed players who just appeared to be able to see you. Whilst most players were blind to your dancing around them, even so far as being unable to shoot at you properly when you were stood with your knife in their kidney, there were others who had the knack of spotting your trail from a distance. Perhaps also the experienced players were able to predict where you would stand most of the time, else had got used to the mysterious effects, but when they were on the server it often made your life a short and painful one.

The game

Aside from the basic mode described, in which The Hidden and soldiers are pit against one another over the course of a round, there is also a quicker version available, where each player killed becomes an additional Hidden. In the latter variant, the last player(s) alive are given a short time to survive against the team of invisible ghouls, and so can still score points against The Hidden adversary.

The Hidden playing with our corpses

All in all, the mod certainly had its moments. There were occasional rounds when things got pretty creepy, as one by one the soldiers were picked off, corpses were pinned to walls, whilst all the while the soldiers were chasing ghosts and shooting at shades. I remember one particular round when our experienced Hidden player had us shooting one another, and shivering in our boots as he returned to pin the body to the doorway. Similarly, life as The Hidden could be extremely rewarding, watching the utter panic fire after you’d successfully managed to cut down one of the soldiers in a group, or chasing a disoriented soldier after throwing a pipebomb into their clutches.

Sadly, those moments were also reasonably rare. Many a round for many a player ended without even catching a glimpse of something you thought was The Hidden. Other times, the round was over for you almost as soon as it began, and the rest of the time was spent looking through cameras, still trying vainly to find the thing which killed you. Which was unfortunately another downside to the mod. The authors had decided that to prevent players from cheating on out-of-game voice comms software, there would be no way to spectate The Hidden. As a result, the game as a dead person was even more boring than it is in a game like Counter-Strike, since the few camera perspectives available provided little clue as to where the next bit of action would take place, nor indeed would it necessarily happen in front of one of the few camera positions.

This decision, which should really be in the hands of the server admins, unfortunately also affected the SourceTV demo recordings, as the only way to manipulate them is to use cheats and fly around manually, not even able to lock onto the individual player perspectives (note: I had to increase my sensitivity to crazy levels to get this to work even within reason). Whilst we did eventually install a little plugin from this forum (Scuzzy’s Spectator Hidden Trail), this really could have been a lot easier and included with the mod in some way. There were also a number of bugs we discovered, such as The Hidden’s pigsticking animation only working the first time, or the shotgun which got stuck on the reloading animation and refused to fire until a weapon switch, which could really have been polished up.

For an evening of random mayhem, in which no one really knew what to expect, or what was going on, the mod was great craic and well recommendable. It’s not really something that I’d make into my regular diet, nor that I would be willing to play on my own, but for a kind of party game atmosphere it was pretty easy to get into. Unfortunately, the steep learning curve for getting decent as The Hidden (not helped by the default player selection mode), the randomness of being hit whilst apparently invisible, or even the inability to see the damn thing that’s making sausages out of your guts, make the game not one for the fainthearted, and very difficult to imagine getting into except on such a mod night. Since you’re likely to spend most of your time dead, the lack of decent spectator modes can also quickly turn this one into a frustrating yawner.