Hidden Agenda (2017)

I bought Hidden Agenda years ago when I was with some friends to try it out as a party game. We played if for about 30 minutes, then never tried it ever again. I found it today as I was going through my library and decided to see if there was a single player mode. Luckily it does, so I gave it a run through.

This game was developed by the Until Dawn guys, Supermassive Games. You can tell that from the graphics on display. Like Until Dawn, the characters all look close to photorealistic. There’s lots of expressive faces, but I did notice their animations were a bit stiff. I think it was due to the fact your choices could swing the tone of a conversation so much that it was hard to make fluid, follow through animations. Still the game is visually pleasing to look at. The world goes for that dark, gritty, modern crime vibe, reminding me of Heavy Rain. It’s always constantly overcast with most places drenched in shadows with only a faint blue light illuminating spaces. It’s the very stylized look of a premium cable crime show. You never get a definite location for this game. It doesn’t seem like you’re in a big city NYC or Chicago, but instead in a town near a big city, like a town in the Catskills.

As mentioned, Hidden Agenda was developed as a party game. A gritty crime drama may seem like an odd choice for a party game, but it’s like a watered-down murder mystery. You are all trying to crack the case and figure out who’s the killer. Your interaction with the game is very minimal. All the players simply vote on what response they want a character to give or search a picture for clues. Even more so than Until Dawn, this game is more an interactive movie. In the party mode, there’s an added layer of gameplay as one of the players has a hidden agenda, hence the name. I remember them being usually just something as simple as ‘Make the police officer be aggressive towards their partner’ just a little goal that you have to convince other players to choose it without outing yourself as the one with an agenda. It's like that card game Mafia. I do remember it being pretty easy to find out who had the agenda and you can vote on who you think the mole is. The single player game is a straight forward story experience.

You don’t actually control this game with a controller, players log into the game via their phones. This was part of Playstation’s PlayLink, which was a campaign I think lasted for about a month before dying out. It felt like Sony’s attempt to make a line of party games that were accessible to everyone without needing 3-4 controllers. I downloaded the Hidden Agenda Playlink app and connected it to my PS4. It was kinda like turning my phone into a Wii U tablet. It’s not a terrible way to play the game, but I do wish there was the ability to let player one use a controller, especially playing the single player mode.

As a party game, the story of this crime drama is on fast forward. Compared to a Heavy Rain or LA Noire, you don’t waste time on red herrings and hit a lot of the big twists quickly. You play as both a detective and district attorney throughout the game. The story starts off with you arresting a serial killer who plants booby traps on his victims to kill cops. The judge sentences him to death, but 5 year later as the killer is a day away from his execution he recants his statement and claims his friend was the killer. He has just enough credibility in his story that the district attorney decides to look into the case, and when a fellow detective ends up dead in a similar manner to the serial killer, the police reopen the case. Your detective, Becky, has a bit of a sordid past within the police department and isn’t well liked by her peers. From there the story branches off into different paths based on your choices. So I know what I experienced wasn’t everything the game had to offer. Instead of the Butterfly Effect from Until Dawn, Hidden Agenda has the Ripple Effect.

Slight spoilers, I learned that the real killer and the inmate on death row both lived in an orphanage run by a Catholic priest that, well, did what Catholic priests do, if you catch my drift. I investigated their past and learned that our awkward medical examiner was secretly the killer the whole time. He did give off the same weird vibes as Edward Nigma from that Gotham TV series. I ended up killing him, but without being able to prove he was the real killer. This led to Becky being fingered as the possible killer because of the animosity towards her from the department, but the DA and judge were both convinced of my innocent. I don’t get why, even with the examiner dead, I wasn’t able to use all the evidence I collected to show his guilt.

All in all, this game was definitely a flash in the pan. Even as a murder mystery, this game is a bit too serious for a party game. There’s maybe some fun to be had by having a few drinks and purposely trolling the game, but I don’t know if I have enough friend who would sit down for the 2 hours this game takes and take it seriously. As a detective game, it’s engaging. I was interested in trying to crack the case. If this were a full on game like Until Dawn, I think we’d hear it mentioned at least every once in a while. Supermassive can do interactive storytelling games well. I'd say if you are interested in detective games, this isn't a bad entry, but I'd avoid spending more than $10 on it.

I'm too lazy to look it up, but I recall reading that Hidden Agenda—done by the same studio behind the wonderful Until Dawn—was developed because the studio saw Until Dawn was being played like a party game. One person with the controller while a group provides input for the decisions, right? So they were like, why not actually develop a game in the Until Dawn vein that can be played with a crowd?

Thus, Hidden Agenda: a choice- and QTE-based game centered around a police department tracking a serial killer. The premise is fine, if a bit on the rote side. It recalls any number of films and TV series. Being interactive does make it surprisingly immersive, but it's not doing anything unique with the detective/serial killer genre.

The game uses Playstation PlayLink. If you've not heard of PlayLink before, don't worry, neither had I before Hidden Agenda. I don't know what all the feature does, but for the purposes of Hidden Agenda, it allows players mobile devices (phones, tablets) to be used to control things in-game. Which is actually a neat trick—even Nintendo, king of couch coop games, requires you have enough controllers for each person in the room. But with PlayLink you can have up to eight people doing the same thing with only one controller needed to launch the game.

I used the word "allows" above as if PlayLink is some kind of bonus. I should have used the word "requires" because even if you're just playing with one person (as I did), you still have to link up your mobile device and control from there. Which, in my mind, is pretty lukewarm. It's a nice feature in a crowd, but cumbersome and limiting when it's the only way to play.

Since all in-game controls are done via a touch screen, you're basically just swiping at various places. The choices are telling the character what to do (either action or reaction), so you swipe to one of the two (occasionally three) options. These are occasionally timed, but mostly not. Then the QTEs require drawing your finger across the screen to hit a specific area before the timer runs out. That, essentially, is the extent of your input to the game.

If you're playing with multiple people, you're all doing the same thing. Except the game goes by majority; whichever option the most people pick is what ends up happening. One early example is when your character has the option of inviting another character to dinner, or to not. So if 3 people chose to ask the person to dinner and only 1 person doesn't want to, well, that person is getting asked. Same with the QTEs: If the majority of people fail to hit the QTE on time, it's a fail even if some people do succeed.

Timers play a pretty key role in several places, not just the QTEs. The final type of game interaction is hunting for clues. You use your finger to control a flashlight and highlight clues, right? Simple idea. Unfortunately, it feels clunky when done on a touch screen, not to mention having a pretty brisk timer. I suspect the timer speed was calibrated with at least two players in mind cuz you really have to know what you're doing to find everything by yourself. It doesn't help that you can't just find the item, you have to linger on the item until the game registers it—something the tutorial doesn't explain, and I only learned by doing.

There are two other areas where Hidden Agenda feels made for multiple players: The lack of movement and game length. The characters move on their own, making Hidden Agenda feel more akin to an animated Late Shift (and other CntrlMovie games) than Until Dawn or other walking sims. And a single playthrough clocks in between, say, 90min and 120min—ie, perfectly sized to replace a movie during a hangout.

And that's all wonderful if we are specifically looking for a narrative-based, non-combative couch coop experience. But I think the developers really missed the boat by fixating so strongly on that aspect that the single player experience suffers. The coop feels like it should be a nice bonus, not the central piece around which to develop a game like this.