Intruders: Hide and Seek Review – PlayStation 4 / VR

I remember watching The Strangers when it first came out, and being creeped out for the majority of the movie, and then genuinely horrified by the ending. That movie came out over 10 years ago, but its subject matter of home invasions and seemingly random extreme violence has stayed with me, and so I approached Intruders: Hide and Seek with no little degree of trepidation. Released on PSVR, Intruders thankfully goes a little lighter on the scares than it could have done, but still presents a tale of a family home invaded by hostile forces.

You play the role of Ben, an older brother in a family who almost immediately seem to have more secrets than they’re letting on. Along with your father, mother and younger sister, you’re visiting a recently built vacation home for a relaxing trip away, but things soon go wrong. Once the sun goes down, your home gets invaded by three mysterious figures, and it’s up to you to sneak around the house, figure out why they are there, and try and get your family free before it’s too late.

Perhaps the closest comparison to Intruders would be a game like Alien: Isolation, where you’re trying to sneak around and complete objectives, all while avoiding detection by enemies and hiding in small spaces when necessary. Here, though, you can at least look out for the beams of flashlights carried by your enemies, and there are no instances that I encountered of creatures suddenly bursting out of vents. Despite the initial approach being a little calmer and kinder to the player than other games, the addition of VR makes the whole experience a lot more immersive and scarier than it would be played on a TV screen.

Unfortunately, the fact that Intruders is in VR is the only thing that raises it above being an incredibly dull experience. The entire experience is flat and short, and gameplay consists of you moving from one side of the house to the other searching for an object, before being given a heavy-handed piece of exposition and then being asked to go to another room. The story, for what it is, can be guessed almost entirely from the awkwardly delivered dialogue in the opening cutscene, and the voice-acting and writing throughout is poorly delivered and unrealistic. Ben, who is supposed to be 13, and his sister, who is even younger both sound and speak like adults, and all of the dialogue feels like it has been written more to deliver information than to match how people would actually communicate in such a situation.

Though the VR aspect of the game does add a lot to the sense of actually being in the house, there isn’t much to it aside from being a visual aide. You use the DualShock controller to play through the game, and your interactions with the world consist solely of single button presses, rather than any attempt to be able to grab or manipulate objects. I did find that the game being in VR helped me visualize the layout of the house better though, and I was quickly able to find my way around without relying too heavily on the map, which helped with feeling like I was actually in the world.

Considering the short runtime (I completed the game in a couple of evenings, and that was with taking a fairly relaxed approach to being detected), I was disappointed to run into a number of fairly serious technical issues with the game, the most frustrating being a sequence where reloading a checkpoint put me into an fail state before loading had finished, essentially creating a loop where I would go from loading screen to fail screen until I manually restarted the chapter. Another persistent issue was with the game’s audio, where soundbites would occur outside of where they were supposed to. Intruders seeks to help the player by having the intruders mutter to themselves as they look for you, which helps in giving you some idea of where they are in a room, even if you can’t see them. However, for a decent portion of the game I could constantly hear lines delivered from one particular character, even if she was in the opposite side of the house from where I was at that point in time. For all the immersion that playing in VR brought to the experience, the illusion was shattered every time that this occurred.

From its opening cutscene full of awkward dialogue and obvious foreshadowing, to its uninspiring finale, Intruders: Hide and Seek is an exercise in mediocrity that is only slightly redeemed by the immersion offered by its inclusion of VR. There’s no real sense of urgency to either the narrative or the gameplay, the characters are weak and difficult to sympathize with, and the twist within the story is so clearly telegraphed that you can see it coming from the opening moments. The addition of VR does bring a sense of life to the house, and I did have one moment that genuinely made me jump, but it almost feels as if the developers were hoping that the inclusion of VR would be enough to make the experience exciting enough to overcome the other flaws of the game. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, and Intruders: Hide and Seek is a forgettable and uninspiring game about a subject that could have been much more interesting.

Author: Jack Moulder
Born in England but currently living in Toronto, Canada, Jack's been gaming as long as he can remember, which just happens to coincide with his 6th birthday, where he received an original Gameboy and a copy of Tetris, which his parents immediately 'borrowed' and proceeded to rack up all the high scores that Jack's feeble 6-year-old fingers couldn't accomplish. A lover of sports games, RPGs and shooters, Jack's up for playing pretty much anything, so long as it doesn't kick his ass too frequently. He has a delicate temperament.

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