Parents' Guide to Intruders: Hide and Seek

Stealth games can employ a host of clever tools and techniques to trick enemies and throw them off your trail, but this isn't one of them. In Intruders: Hide and Seek, you play as a young boy who has to sneak past large, imposing adults who chase you when you're caught in their flashlights or make noise running. When you're undetected, you'll get momentary thrills bypassing their movement patterns and using cover strategically, but when spotted, it's better to just stand in place and go back to your last checkpoint. Enemies are faster and almost always have you in their sights, making many hiding spots in cabinets and closets worthless because you (logically yet frustratingly) get pulled right back out. This game could have benefited from extra features to impair enemies, like slowing them down with metal jacks, or having your sister activate house defense systems from the panic room. But all you have is a flashlight and walkie-talkie, and these serve little purpose.

The game boasts an impressively detailed three-story house to navigate with ample cover to move between. On the other hand, character models and animation are rough. Cutscenes play out in real time and drag on with awkward, wooden dialogue. But rocky performances belie an otherwise decent story. Unexpected plot twists and themes leave you enough to think about with regard to systemic issues in the pharmaceutical world, as well as how everyone is not always as they seem. Even with some compelling narrative components, the experience is too short-lived and lacking content to make it worthwhile. Intruders: Hide and Seek could serve as a beginner's game for kids interested in the stealth genre, but not much more than that. Originally a virtual reality experience, the game is more immersive that way, but when played on a TV screen or monitor, its shallowness in many corners can't be hidden.