Intruders: Hide and Seek Review: Home Invasion

A child’s home should be their sanctuary. A place where they feel protected, cared for, and, above all else, safe from the threats that the outside world can hold. Intruders: Hide and Seek asks the question, what happens when you remove that level of comfort, and the safety provided by the home is ripped away as a result of a cruel home invasion? It’s a scenario that 13-year-old Ben must face, the teenage protagonist at the heart of Intruders: Hide and Seek, and it just about manages to make it worth sticking through every child’s worst nightmare through to the end.

Home Is Where The Hate Is

You’ll pick up with Ben as he and his sister, along with his parents, are returning home from a family vacation. With all seemingly going well, the family gets about returning to normality, glad to be back in the safe haven of their enormous, secluded house, when disaster strikes and a trio of mysterious strangers suddenly break in and bring an end to the family’s peace and tranquility. There must be some mistake, right? What could this trio of miscreants want with Ben and his totally normal family? Well, it turns out that perhaps Ben’s family isn’t so normal when his father directs him and his sister to hide out in a state-of-the-art panic room, seemingly purpose-built for this very occasion.

From there, matters get strange, as it seems the intruders are here for reasons related to Ben’s father’s work in the pharma industry, which, for reasons you’ll uncover, led them right to Ben’s doorstep. With his parents restrained and unable to do anything, it falls on Ben to try and make a break for it and reach the outside world in an effort to get the help the family desperately needs.

Tread Carefully

What all this equates to is a simple, yet quite effective, stealth horror title that sees you sneaking around the house to avoid the enemy, all while ticking off various objectives. Being a title that was originally devised with VR in mind, the gameplay is relatively straightforward.

You’ll spend a lot of time making your way from one end of the house to another, hiding in cupboards and under furniture along the way, while also stopping the odd time to solve light puzzles. The journey’s you make are never quite that simple, though, as Intruders: Hide and Seek sees Ben constantly being stalked by the three home invaders, adding a great deal of tension to the whole ordeal. Played out in first person, the first hour or two do a great job at instilling fear into the player. The intruders stalk every nook and cranny in the house, and despite the house being a sizeable space, knowing you are in an enclosed area and have no combat capabilities really adds to the fear factor. Get spotted, and your only hope is that you can turn a corner quick enough to break line of sight, giving you a precious few seconds to get into a cupboard, where you’ll engage in a small rhythm mini-game that has you controlling your heartbeat and breathing.

It’s a basic, but engaging gameplay loop that does a great job of tone setting, and for those first couple of hours, I was totally engrossed. It feels like the developers looked at the Outlast series and thought to themselves, “how much scarier would this be if the protagonist was a child?” and, honestly, the answer is that it would be a hell of a lot scarier for its duration if frustration didn’t begin to creep in during the back half of the game.

Unfortunately, there are a few design choices that do detract from the overall experience once the novelty of the concept wears off. The biggest sin the game commits for me is in just how slowly Ben moves. Honestly, I’m supposed to be controlling a 13-year-old child, yet Ben moves with the grace and agility of a hippopotamus riddled with arthritis. Ben has three speeds; slow, slower, and stop, and, eventually, it totally kills the illusion that you’re playing an energetic kid who should be running for their life.

There’s also the checkpoint system which is pretty uneven. With how slowly Ben moves, expect lots of retries due to being chased down and caught. Also, expect quite a bit of frustration due to the game frequently putting you back by about ten minutes of progress. Initially, this added to the tension, as I knew that one wrong step could have devastating results. As the game progressed, however, along with my growing tired of the sluggish movement, so too did my patience for the spaced-out save points. Thankfully Intruders: Home Invasion is only several hours long, so credits did roll before I pulled what little hair I have left out of my head, but I can’t deny that I was headed in that direction.

Interior Design

With the gameplay experience being quite uneven, it’s unfortunate that Intruders: Hide and Seek is a bit of a mixed bag at the technical end, also.

The house itself looks great; A sprawling modern mansion that’s impressively detailed and full of wonderful lighting effects. With the events of the game taking place at night, the lighting really gets a chance to shine, with my heart racing any time I saw a light beam whip across the environment from one of the aggressors’ torches, signifying that I was no longer safe and that danger was nearby.

For whatever reason, though, despite opting for a realistic art style with the house itself, the developers have opted to go with a more stylized look for its characters. Exaggerated facial features, big cartoony eyes, and a plasticky look to skin all come across as really jarring when a great effort was gone to in making the house feel frighteningly realistic. As you’ll be playing in near-total darkness a lot of the time, it doesn’t detract from the overall experience too much, but it’s a bizarre decision all the same.

I’m happy to report that the audio fares much better across the board than the visuals. The weather outside, the creaks and bangs around the house, and, of course, the frightening footsteps of the enemy all combine to great effect. It’s a minimalistic approach to sound design, this is a house invasion taking place in the dead of night, after all, but this is definitely a case of less being more. Voice acting is also pretty solid for a budget indie title. It’s far from award-winning stuff, but the actors do a great job of selling the terrifying scenario they’re experiencing.

Conclusion

Intruders: Hide and Seek is a decent addition to the growing library of indie horror games available on Nintendo’s hybrid machine. Mechanically, the sluggishness of the movement does begin to wear thin, which is exacerbated further by the frustratingly implemented checkpoint system, but overall, the tension and tone set in those first couple of hours make it worth stepping into Ben’s shoes for a few hours and helping him save his family from a desperate situation. If you’re a horror fan itching for an Outlast-style experience, then Intruders: Hide and Seek is a nightmare worth experiencing.

Final Verdict: 3/5

Available On: Switch (reviewed), PS4, Xbox One, PC; Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment; Developer; Tessera Studios; Released: February 22, 2023; Players: 1; ESRB: T for Teen; MSRP: $19.99; 

Full Disclosure: A review code was provided to HPP.