Platform: Nintendo 3DS

Developer: 1st Playable Productions

Publisher: Majesco Entertainment

# of Players: 1

ESRB Rating: E 10+ (Everyone 10 & Up)

Official Site

Score: A- (85%)

The Hidden is a nice little surprise from developer 1st Playable Productions and Majesco Entertainment, offering up some fun ghost tracking and shooting missions while getting you up and about in the process for a bit of exercise. While the game is definitely geared toward younger players, there’s enough to like here that even “core” gamers will want to take this one for a spin. The game’s big draws are its use of augmented reality, first-person shooting sequences and the fact that each person playing the game will have a unique experience thanks to using the 3DS cameras to capture actual locations as backgrounds for the action. While there’s no multiplayer modes to speak of, the game still manages to impress and you can expect a few passers-by to ask what you’re playing as you’re walking about scanning actual locations for ghosts to bust.

As a new member of G.E.I.S.T. (Ghostly Entity Investigation and Strike Team), your job is to seek out and capture or eliminate assorted ghosts that have managed to escape into the real world. Using an ever increasing range of tools to track, trap and vaporize these “shades” makes up the bulk of the gameplay (broken up into five mini-games in three phases) as you travel from place to place literally creating new stages as you walk around. Pretty much everything works well here, When you first fire up the game, you snap a photo of yourself with the 3DS camera for your photo ID badge and the game really adds a great sense of “OK, I’m a professional ghost hunter!” stuff thanks to some nice tutorials that show you the ropes and some back and forth chatter from fellow operatives as you play missions.

Gameplay is part Luigi Mansion, part Ghostbusters, but there’s also enough originality here that the game isn’t a direct swipe of either. For starters, you’re using the 3DS to hunt ghosts in your own home and surrounding environments (provided you’re in range of a wi-fi hotspot) and secondly, the game isn’t a straight-up shooter at all.The game actually also reminded me a tiny bit of Artoon’s Japanese PlayStation 2 release. Ghost Vibration, although that game suffered from a horrific camera system that tried too hard to control the angle as you played. Here, you’re making the camera movements and choosing locations yourself, so you’re never trapped into a blind spot, bad corner or have to worry about not seeing what’s coming (as the ghosts practically pop right off the screen)

There’s also bit of investigating involved in the Scanning and Tracking modes, then once you’ve found some ghosts and pull them into the environment, you can blast away while trying to keep your shields from draining as they take hits.  Occasionally, you get to play a Wormhole mini-game where you’re pulled into the shade dimension and need to blast ghosts while avoiding flying rocks and a Recon mode where you need to avoid spirits that are too strong to deal with. None of the ghosts are really that scary (some are quite cute, actually), and I wish there were a few more types in the game, but you’ll get a few minor scares in the boss battles, the Recon portions or in areas where you’re surprised by multiple ghosts. The funny thing about the game is since you’re playing it in an actual location, even if it WAS scary, you can’t run screaming from the room park or wherever without a bunch of people thinking you’ve gone off the deep end.

As you complete areas, you’ll earn points and ectoplasm which can be used to buy weapon and gear upgrades. If you want to play cheap, you can abuse the tutorials a wee bit too much and rack up a nice ectoplasm stash, but you REALLY wouldn’t do that now, would you? There are six different game modes (Quickdraw, Endure, Outlast, Duration, Survive, Ultimate) that add longevity to the game, but then again, this is one of those game that’s a keeper because the number of possible levels you can play in is endless if you travel a lot and take your 3DS with you. The art direction here is solid and you’ll see some cool effects throughout. It’s hard to describe an augmented reality game to someone who hasn’t seen or played with an AR “toy” previously, but what’s here works well enough to be more than a gimmick. Another nice thing about the game is some cleared areas will have shades return after a short while, so you can go back and replay these locations (and have more people asking you what you’re playing).

While the game uses the cameras well enough, don’t expect any Street Pass or mulltiplayer functions. Also, there are only a dozen missions, so it’s not the longest game out there. Nevertheless, as noted above, the replay value is there if you’re one of those people that likes to revisit a game more than once. As I’m someone that actually does this with his games, I’ll be hanging on to this one for a while. Overall, I liked The Hidden quite a lot for what it is and hope some of you out there take a look at it even though it’s not a big-budget well-hyped release. Sure, AR is the latest gimmick to get used in games, but the tech is getting better and better as developers see what they can do with it while not repeating the same things over and over. I’d actually love to see what 1st Playable could do with the PS3 and Move or Kinect, as the idea is sound enough for a home console update at some point as both a family-friendly game as well as a potentially more mature title (an AR Fatal Frame, anyone?).