Topic: Hidden in Plain Sight - A Short Recommendation

I know there's a whole recommendations thread, so I hope it is okay to give a separate shout out to a game that may otherwise be buried in shovelware.

I rarely purchase games that have zero reviews on Metacritic, so it's a special occasion when one of those games actually turns out to be good. I bought Hidden in Plain Sight on a whim, and it has turned out to be a fantastic local party game. For those who enjoyed "Fruit" on Game & Wario, Hidden in Plain Sight is the closest thing to it. The game can only be played with two or more players, so keep that in mind.

The basic gist is you and your friends are randomly placed in a room of NPCs would look identical to you. You're first task is figuring out which character you are without calling attention to yourself, and then you have to figure out which characters are your friends and dispose of them before they do you. There are variants in which you have to win a race or collect coins without being caught, and I thought all of them were fun. Even with two players, games are funny and competitive.

I'll admit the game looks terrible in terms of graphics, and it is very basic. There's nothing to unlock, and gaming sessions will probably only last 15-20 minutes. Still, I really enjoyed it and want to call attention to it!

If you know of any similar hidden gems, I'd love to hear them!

I agree - I'm surprised not to find more about Hidden in Plain Sight and found your post after searching for it.

I only bought a Switch this year and am amazed at the quality of local multiplayer games. Have you found more since your post? Other recommendations that are budget-priced and seem to be hidden gems:

Death Squared - local co-op (up to 4 players, I think) with brain-tickling puzzles. I picked this up for <£5 after thinking the demo was genius. Also has a 1 player option.

Akuto: Showdown (up to 4 players) and Boomerang Fu (up to 6 players) - action/fighting games in single-screen arenas. Battles can get very tense, especially on my favourite of the two, Akuto: Showdown, which has a darker atmosphere (and lots of blood). There are optional AI players on both.

Conduct Together! - cost about 80p. Up to 4 players control the movement of trains and signals, which are both colour coded per player. I bought this hoping it'd be like a 2-player version of an old game I remember called Locomotion, but it's much more fun. Gets manic and very difficult, fast. Great fun. Urban Flow looks similar, but I haven't played it.

Bleed Complete Bundle - I picked this up for <£4 over Christmas. A Contra-clone with its own unique feel - again local multiplayer, though there is a 1 player mode too. I've only played Bleed 2 so far.

Upping the price range, I picked up Full Metal Furies for around half price (£15 is full price), and it's outstanding. An action RPG/blast 'em up/puzzle/local and online co-op with an excellent 16-bit style and fun humour. This was in a Hidden Gems article on Nintendo Life, though user ratings here only average at 6.5 for some reason, though there are only 10 ratings. Some people might not like its difficulty level, which I've never found to be annoying - and even when you lose, you still level up. I also read there were issues with the game at launch (long since fixed).

@AlexHarford

We share quite a few games! I've enjoyed Death Squared and Conduct Together. Boomerang Fu is well-made but is limited in content, which brings it down. Cake Bash has the same problem, especially when more content could have made it a stellar alternative to Mario Party. Urban Flow is a solid game if you liked Conduct Together, but too many of the mechanics add needless busywork, and some stage layouts are reused.

I may have to check out Akuto: Showdown. I've eyed Full Metal Furies and Bleed, but both of those fall into genres which my co-op partner dislikes. Otherwise, since making this post, Red Rope+ has been a surprise hit for me. It's tough as nails, making it one of the most difficult co-op games I've played. You and your partner are connected by a rope which you need to use to kill enemies (typically by circling around them). Each room in the labyrinth plays out like a puzzle in which you need to figure out how best to dispatch the enemies while minimizing how often you die. You start with 99 lives, and although there are ways to gain more lives, you'll burn through them quickly.

A quick list of other solid local multiplayer games include:
-Crawl
-Flat Heroes
-A Gummy's Life (a bit on the janky side)
-Neurovoider
-Rocket Fist
-TowerFall
-Treadnauts

Thanks for your suggestions!

I tried the Cake Bash demo before Christmas simply because I used to play in a band called The Cakes and wanted to send screenshots to my old bandmates! It was much more fun than I expected, though given the price, I wasn't tempted to buy it considering we have so many games we're yet to play. Chickens Madness felt similar so may be worth trying. Looking into your other recommendations - A Gummy's Life seems similar to these, but perhaps Human Fall Flat-like in how it controls (if you've played that)? Human Fall Flat was fun at first, but I became tired of it with so many other great options available.

I have Crawl already and have just downloaded a Flat Heroes demo based on your recommendation.

Red Rope+ looks the most interesting from your list, but I'm put off by the difficulty given a review I just read says you have to restart the game if you lose all lives. I've added it to my Wishlist for a sale.

Treadnauts and TowerFall look fun - added to my list if/when we run out!

NeuroVoider looks good, but I'm put off when procedural generation is involved. It seems lazy, and I don't like extra content for the sake of it (shorter games are a selling point to me).

If it's action/blast 'em up your co-op partner doesn't like, I'd still recommend Full Metal Furies, as long as they don't mind how difficult it gets at times. There's a lot more to the game and it's not really like Contra/Bleed in how it plays. My brother and I spent over a half-hour figuring out a puzzle at the weekend (the hardest so far - others have been much quicker). We even wrote stuff down on paper!

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a good co-op experience (especially if you're looking for something straightforward for a change), though I think much better (and more challenging) as one-player due to the control system and overall experience of it.

I love co-op World of Goo and have Unravel Two to play, if they're not too obvious.

Thanks for your recommendations!

I forgot to mention BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! That's a great co-op puzzle platformer - the puzzles remind me of Death Squared sometimes.

@AlexHarford

A Gummy's Life is similarly difficult to control like Human: Fall Flat, and I agree that the latter became tiring, despite the addition of new stages over the years.

I hope you enjoy Flat Heroes; it has been one of my favorite games on the Switch. As for Red Rope, my partner and I have not run out of lives, but we have had to save scum at times to avoid a game over, especially with the last boss.

Neurovoider's stages are pretty bland, so its focus is more on messing with your weapons and how they change the gameplay. Its biggest issue is that you cannot save during a co-op run, so you have to sink in two hours if you want to get through a run.

My partner and I did play Brothers, but she stopped early on because she felt it was too easy. I finished it by myself, and I had fun with it. Brothers was the game which actually reminded me most of Red Rope.

We also tried both World of Goo and Unravel Two! We haven't tried BoxBoy, so we may add to our lists along with Full Metal Furies.

I play a disgusting amount of games, so it's easier to give you the list of games I have rather than list all of them I would recommend. I have about 30 of those games I have not completed yet, and a ton I haven't reviewed.

Thanks for the recommendations, and I'll check out the Cakes' last EP!

Another game I've enjoyed co-op recently (but probably wouldn't enjoy alone) is Unrailed! where you build a train track before the train derails, mining for the materials as the train moves and upgrading your train between levels. I was hoping for a game more like Locomotion (an Amstrad CPC game I remember) with Conduct Together, and Unrailed! fits the bill though hasn't got anywhere near as manic as Conduct Together or Locomotion yet.

I also bought No Straight Roads (£15 physical) which looks like a fun co-op if you're a music fan.

Thanks for sharing your website, though I was surprised to see how low you rated Hidden in Plain Sight! I'd give it at least an 8 for how much fun 2 or 3 of the minigames are. We seem to have similar thoughts on games though - I've enjoyed a few reviews and articles and found myself agreeing with a lot of what you say (I was going to comment on your padding article - has the comments option disappeared?).

I agree Gorogoa is a great game, though I was stuck the last time I played it. One of the things I've loved about delving into the e-shop are the more unique experiences since I last owned a console (the Wii, and I
didn't delve into the e-shop much at all).

I bookmarked some of your short stories too. Attempting to write short stories are the reason I don't play more games! In my younger days I was up into the early hours playing games, but these days that's been replaced with meeting submission and contest deadlines.

Thanks for looking up The Cakes! I do think our last EP is the worst though. My favourite is "Relocate My Satellies," which is actually the least accessible of the lot.

@AlexHarford

I personally found Unrailed a bit too repetitive, and I wish the stages were designed rather than randomly generated. I still enjoy Hidden in Plain Sight, but because the package is relatively bare bones, I went with a lower rating. I'd still recommend it to others!

I agree that the pair of songs on Relocate My Satellites are pretty good. I prefer the harsher sound, even if it is not as accessible as your band's more poppy side.

Thanks for looking at my reviews! I turned on the comments for the one article you read. Many of my oldest articles don't have comments enabled because they were transferred from an older website.

I wish you luck on your writings as well!

I don't think I'd enjoy Unrailed on my own - I do tend to avoid games when I see levels are randomly generated.

We spotted a sale of Relocate My Satellites - thanks very much!

Back on topic, and we've enjoyed a game called Heave-Ho recently. We've only played it once, so I don't know if the order of multiplayer levels was random, but it started at a very high difficulty level. The five levels we played were great fun overall, with lots of laughing. I see it's listed on your website with no score yet. The game has 14 reviews on MetaCritic, with a Metascore of 80, so maybe it's not that hidden.

I just bought Runbow. 80% off in the UK eshop. Tied Together is very cheap at the moment and looks tempting.

And I forgot to mention we tried Flat Heroes. We didn't have much clue what was going on at first but it was fun once we got the hang of it. I think it was a demo I downloaded, so I'm unsure if I'll purchase it yet.

Heave-Ho was uproarious for our group, but we stuck with the co-op levels as opposed to the competitive ones, which I agree are difficult, especially when starting the game. Tied Together looks similar, but those reviews don't look too hot.

I didn't prefer Runbow, myself, but I hope you do!

Talking about hidden: to anyone who's still actively gaming on their 3DS, or even if you only dust if off every now and then, and if you like puzzle games, then you definitely have to check out "Tales in a Box: Hidden shapes in perspective!" or "Looksley's Line Up" as it is called in the USA.

Far as I know, it's still available for now, but going by how relatively fast Nintendo is pulling games left and right, it might just disappear altogether within the space of a couple of months.

What it basically is, is a unique 3D puzzler originally released on the DSi. Yes, a 3D puzzler, even before there was a 3DS. It works thanks to the camera on the DSi, which uses your face as a sort of reference point for motion tracking and then shifts/redraws the perspective of the scene you're looking at, to give it that genuine, almost glasses-free 3DS feel, except without the actual depth that you get on real 3DS games.

But it still works, somehow, and by turning and tilting the display of your handheld, you can either look behind items or match up (hidden) shapes to solve puzzles. It's a cheap and entertaining game, so puzzle lovers should definitely get this.

Here's an early tech demo of how the game works:

@ThanosReXXX I've taken a punt on that - thanks. I bought a 3DS last year, though I've neglected it pretty much since I began delving into the Switch eshop. I can't see 3D due a misalignment of my pupils - maybe you can tell in my avatar - so the method used in Tales in a Box looks intriguing.

I found The Art of Balance to be a nice little puzzler on the 3DS. It's also on Switch, but I think it works better on the DS.

@AlexHarford Yeah, that's a good one as well. I actually have it both on the 3DS and on the Wii. From the sound of it, Tales in a box is just the ticket for you. Get it while it's hot...

And you're welcome.

I forgot to mention Tales in a Box made me think of Superliminal, which I haven't played yet but looks great.