Hidden in Plain Sight (2011)

I'd heard of Hidden in Plain Sight recently but didn't really expect to get around to playing it as it's focused on local multiplayer, ideally with more than two people. However, when someone forgot to bring along their arcade stick to a recent gathering with friends, we found ourselves looking for something other than a fighting game to play. This came into my mind and 80 Microsoft Points later we had it downloaded and ready to play.

I found it almost as difficult to describe it to my friends as it is to write a simple description of it here. It's a collection of mini-games, which all revolve around not knowing who is a player and who is computer controlled - including your own character. The first few seconds of any round are spent trying to figure out which of the many characters on screen is controlled by you, usually while trying to avoid giving away who you are to other players by making obvious movements. Each mini-game has different objectives, some of which are every man for himself and some of which are more team based. To start with we worked our way through each of them in turn but we eventually gravitated towards the game I had heard the most about beforehand - Death Race.

This is the most unique game of the lot as it has a different control scheme and every player has control of an on screen character and a gun sight at the same time. Moving your sights around is fairly straightforward but your character is moved by pressing either the A or Y button. A moves you to the right at the same speed as any other computer controlled character whereas Y makes you move much faster, which immediately highlights a player character as there is no other reason one will run. Your objective is to be the first player to get across the screen but you can also fire one shot per round, with the aim of killing a character that you believe is going to reach the finish line before you.

There aren't many other rules to playing this mode and you are left to work out your own strategies on how best to win. There are no penalties for shooting non-player characters and no restrictions on how much you use the run button but obviously wasting shots and making yourself conspicuous are not going to help you win most of the time. However I did find that I could use the run button sparingly at the start to quickly find which character I was controlling, most of the time others wouldn't notice as they were scanning for their own.

After a few rounds getting used to how the game played, with most learning to move their characters sensibly to blend in with NPCs, more interesting strategies gradually started to emerge. These would usually revolve around trying to misdirect the other players, which is something that I don't think would occur so easily if it were an online multiplayer game. The way people played would shift and change as time went on too - even making a run for it became a viable option on occasions. We all laughed at the first player to shoot their own character by mistake but by the end of the night almost everyone had done it (yes there was alcohol involved). I did it on one of the occasions where everyone started running from the off and for some stupid reason I took a guess on shooting one of the remaining runners rather than stop running to confirm which one was me!

This was just one of numerous situations that made me laugh harder than I have in a long time, not just specifically while playing a video game. I also managed to come up with some quite devious tactics, with two of them being variations on the same idea of following your own character with your gun sight. With only one shot available people would often assume that someone else would take the shot if the cursor was hovering over one character in particular, which could sometimes allow you to cover them to the finish line. I even did this on one of the occasions where we had got used to people making a break and running right from the start, covering my own character as I held Y all the way to the end zone. Obviously the same trick wouldn't work twice in a row and during the next games there would often be a tendency for all of the players cursors to hover over one character in particular that looked suspicious. Often one player would end up cracking and firing off a round, no matter whether it was a player or an NPC.

A lot of this was achieved without saying a word but sowing suspicion verbally could work very well too. Suggesting that a group containing your own character looked rather suspicious could be risky but at the same time suggested to others that you would be handling them. On one occasion it actually turned out that a group of identical sprites was actually controlled by myself and another player and I kind of unintentionally double bluffed myself, assuming that it was just coincidence and that the other sprite must be an NPC. I also took to holding back at the start of the round for a while and when a group of 4 characters formed at the head of the pack I remarked "we must all be in that group at the front". In the chaos that followed all of the other players were taken out and I casually strolled to the finish.

We could have carried on playing indefinitely, which was something I didn't expect at all when we first started, especially with some people unconvinced by the basic nature of the graphics. It really was the perfect party game, once again with it being priced at under a pound I feel that I want to give the developer more. One of my friends paid for it on Saturday night but I made sure to buy my own copy at home, even if I never get around to playing it. I'm sure I may try it with my wife eventually but it could lead to major marital strife...