A Bottomless Pit? – Hidden Deep Review

There are very few scenarios more captivating and horrifying than caves filled with monsters.  From the rapid fire violence of Neil Marshall’s The Descent to the horrors of The Cave and even in novels like Jeff Long’s The Descent (no relation) and Scott Sigler’s Earthcore, our fascination with monsters and caves is a recurrent theme.  There’s something about the idea of being trapped in an inescapable tunnel with something hurtling itself at you in the dark cold where no one can save you that hits the animal hindbrain in a unique way.  Between the claustrophobia and the terror, it’s a concept that stories come back to over and over.

In gaming we see even more caves, and games like Metroid and Castlevania pull us into the dark over and over.  Recently a game even came out where you play the monster in the cave, Carrion (review here), turning the tables on the genre.  In short, it’s always great to be up for a good monster-filled spelunking adventure and Hidden Deep from Cogwheel Software and publisher Daedalic Entertainment seems to fit the bill!   In Hidden Deep you play a group of rescuers out to save some scientists who mysteriously disappeared after reporting strange cave life.  Your mission is to save the researchers, find out what happened, and get out alive.  Sounds cool, right?  Like an amalgamation of some of the coolest horror movies turned into a clever little side scroller.  I’m all in for that.  But Hidden Deep is definitely not what it appears to be from trailers and promotional materials.

Let’s get the story out of the way first.  Sure, there’s a plot, but it is drip fed to you so slowly and weirdly that it’s hard to even care about it.  The characters interact, they talk about the happenings in the cave, and then you die a whole bunch of times and forget everything that’s been said.  Do not expect a fantastic narrative experience here because there just isn’t one.  In fact, you might as well just be wandering through a random cave that’s procedurally generated because by the time you managed to sort out what’s going on, chance are you just won’t care.  There’s a good reason for that though.

In point of fact, there are several good reasons why you won’t care about Hidden Deep’s plot, but the only one that matters is that the game simply isn’t fun.  Let’s look at the controls first.  The only way to control Hidden Deep is with a keyboard and mouse.  There is no controller support, which is utterly shocking for a modern game of any sort, but especially irritating here.  Why?  Because the game’s controls consist of a ridiculous number of hot keys, none of which are intuitive and they don’t interact well with one another.

For example, some sections of the caves are filled with carnivorous bats.  I need to use a grappling hook to grab onto ceilings to rappel down into the caves, but the bats are coming for me.  I need to switch to my pistol so I can shoot them.  Sadly, between putting my grappling hook away and getting my pistol out, I’ve already been bitten several times and I’m near death.  Or I’ve simply been killed by a tiny fluttering bat.  The only way to hit that bat is to use the sight on your pistol, aiming with the mouse and trying to get the finicky laser to line up with the enemy.  It’s a rather user unfriendly combat system that essentially has you dying over and over to get the enemies where you want them and/or learn their placement.  Bad design work all around.  But hey, that’s not the only issue here.

In addition to combat that’s overall not very fun, you need to find your way deeper and deeper into the caves.  This will require swimming, blasting, equipment and more.  But the controls for Hidden Deep aren’t just bad, they’re abominable.  Even the simple act of swimming through a small water-filled tunnel is non-intuitive.  The movement is rough, the orientation is difficult, and it’s easy to get stuck on small bits of the environment.  You need to jump up a ledge, but after 5-10 tries, your character still hasn’t grabbed it.  Oops, you didn’t move the mouse past your character to switch directions to fight a bat and accidentally shot your partner in the face, blowing his brains out.  Yes, you can do that.  Yes, it sucks.

Hidden Deep suffers from the age old issue of a great concept that’s incredibly poorly executed.  Controls are rough and unresponsive.  It’s easy to fall off of things.  Monsters are ridiculously powerful and fast.  And your characters are stupidly weak.  This leads to the vintage gaming style of wander off to your death over and over until you learn where everything is and then manage to make it through the game without trying all that hard.  But even that doesn’t work all that well in Hidden Deep because it’s often hard to figure out what to do.  There are no good tutorials that teach you how to perform certain actions and some members of your team are incapable of some of those actions.  So when you get to a chasm and your character makes it across, what do you do with his companion?  Shouldn’t there be an explanation of the way that you can control other characters?  One would assume that YouTube walkthrough clips aren’t the best idea for that, but here we are.

On top of the jerky controls, vast numbers of hotkeys, and lack of clear gameplay explanations, the game simply doesn’t look all that great.  Most gameplay is dark and lifeless and characters and monsters are small and move quickly, limiting how much you see of the graphic design.  The sound is similarly lackluster, playing tracks that don’t really create the required tension.  Sound effects are decent and echoing, but once you’ve died at the same monster several times, it just gets irritating.  Add all that overall weakness to the die until you survive gameplay of Hidden Deep and you’ve got an unfortunate recipe for failure.

It would be amazing to say that Hidden Deep scratches that itch for content like John Carpenter’s The Thing or Dead Space or even Alien.  But the simple fact of the matter is that even though some of the inspirational material is outstanding, the final product here simply isn’t.  Hidden Deep isn’t fun to play, it doesn’t look great, and it will likely irritate most players before they make it through the measly 6 hours of gameplay (much more if you don’t get the knack of the game!).  Oh, and did we mention that it’s $25?  That’s a pretty stiff price for what feels like a game that shouldn’t have made it out of Beta.  The quality of Hidden Deep is simply insufficient to justify that price, even if you really want to love the game.  This is the exact sort of game that should be amazing and it simply falls flat in virtually every aspect.  Even the monsters lose their allure rapidly as you die over and over to escape each section of the game.   Perhaps it’s better if these scientists never get rescued.

This review is based on a digital copy of Hidden Deep provided by the publisher.  It was played on a gaming PC using an I7-8700K with 16 GB of DDR4-3000 RAM,  and an Asus GeForce GTX 1080 ROG Strix graphics card.  Hidden Deep is exclusive to Steam at this time and is scheduled for a future console release.