When a new vein of precious ore opens up, there are bound to be obstacles. A group of adventurers decides to investigate but constantly runs into trouble. The ore they want to find has great power, but also great side effects that affect your party. You must balance your powerful moves with potential poisoning as you do your best to survive against enemy attacks. Even if enemies push you back, you can always strengthen yourself and move forward.
Hidden Pass adds some interesting mechanics that make you conserve your actions. Enemies are also powerful and numerous enough to pose a threat. Even if you fall in battle, there’s backup waiting to jump in and bring much-needed hope. However the difficulty can be overwhelming for a demo and the tutorial passes by too quickly. There’s a lot of potential for this game, but it’s not easy to play right now.
Hidden Pass has a free demo that is available on PC.
Airships are the main way to find Elyrium in the demo.
Story – The Race for Elyrium
Hidden Pass lets you take control of four adventurers who are part of an expedition to survey a new vein of Elyrium. Elyrium is a precious gravity-manipulating material that powers nations and everyone wants to find it. Due to the danger involved, an expedition team is sent to check it out. Despite the initial ease, it quickly becomes apparent that something fishy is going on and the group is attacked. They have no choice but to keep going deeper into the depths for any hope of survival.
The story is similar to Xenonauts 2 in that there isn’t much of a narrative other than the set-up. Your expedition team must keep passing through obstacles and fighting enemies, doing everything they can to survive. While there’s room for a stronger narrative in the future, this is a demo and it’s not present yet. The current set-up is enough to tell players they aren’t being attacked by enemies for no reason.The demo’s main goal is to throw you into the gameplay to understand how this game stands out.
As things become dire, the team travels deeper into the cavern.
Gameplay – Choosing Your Moves & Formations
The strategy gameplay is similar to XCOM 2 where everyone takes turns and performs actions based on action points. You move around on a grid with several terrain elements, ensuring that you don’t get too close to your enemies. Your proximity to enemies determines whether you can use regular attacks or unique skills. Distance is something that also plays a factor; long-range techniques have a drop-off before they are useless.
There are several factors to consider before making a decision and more enemies to handle. But you can’t use your skills freely; Elysium Poisoning builds with use and can inhibit your character’s performance. This forces you to consider not just short-term, but long-term consequences when battling. Adding even more tactical layers onto an already complex strategy game makes this appealing for anyone hungry for tactics.
The Steam Tank jumps in when someone falls in battle.
However, this game is difficult and that can be a turn-off when playing the demo. Several concepts aren’t properly explained to you and enemies are more numerous than adventurers. Cover doesn’t mean much and you have few methods of healing. It’s even more punishing than other games because you are thrown into the deep end.
Difficulty – The Biggest Turn-Off
This is not to say that strategy games shouldn’t be challenging or that you shouldn’t struggle. But it does feel like much isn’t explained. For example, regular attacks are possible but the demo tutorial quickly brushes over it. You might even think that regular attacks are impossible given your available options. But it’s available if you look in the bottom-left corner near the dash button. The tutorial can only be viewed once, making this game tough to revisit or difficult to remember.
There are many enemies and they overwhelm you.
The lack of available cover and the number of enemies also means that you are almost always overwhelmed. Even though you have replacement units, it feels like the scarcity of healing options makes no sense. You are overwhelmed and outnumbered, switching in your medic sounds like a great option.
As the difficulty is high, this may turn off casual strategy gamers who weren’t expecting to struggle as much. Enemy cover, terrain, and even accessing higher ground isn’t obvious or explained. This means you can make several rookie mistakes because you believe something works. Or you don’t get to test something effectively because the enemy swarms you. While difficulty may be adjustable in the future, it’s currently a tough demo to complete.
Audio & Visual – Decent Environment, Decent Voices
The visuals are a simple 3D environment and it’s easy to tell where everything is. There are some visual snags that occur when skills are being used but this doesn’t impact the skill or the effect. You can hear the audio of the skills and the background music, along with the voices of enemies and allies. But there’s nothing extraordinary and you don’t see much of the Elyrium. The glow around your screen when Elyrium poisoning kicks in is nice to see.
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- Nowhere you go is safe but you must keep moving if you want to live.
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- Hitting multiple enemies is your best chance at surviving.
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- The robots you summon are sometimes better than your initial characters.
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- Characters have lots of spells to stand out from each other.
Hidden Pass was previewed on Steam with a code provided by GG Studios.
