Hidden Agenda Reviews
Playing Hidden Agenda is like watching a movie with lots of plot holes and technical problems but just because you're watching it with your friends, you ignore its issues, trying actually to enjoy it. At the end of the day, Hidden Agenda is a half-baked, troubled game which only is enjoyable because of Playlink.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Despite how bad it is, you can have some fun with Hidden Agenda. If you play it with friends over a few drinks, you’ll probably have a laugh in the same way you do when watching bad horror films. That’s the best I can say for Hidden Agenda. It’s a narrative game with a dull and poorly written narrative. It’s a choose your own adventure game with boring and uninformed choices. It’s a “play with friends experience” that is likely to leave you with fewer friends at the end of it. Hidden Agenda manages to scrap a two out of five because, despite itself, I did laugh out loud a few times.
Supermassive's expertise in narrative and player-led storytelling brings us a gripping thriller that simultaneously shows the potential and the limitations of PlayLink.
Hidden Agenda is an engaging narrative experience that could benefit from a chapter select and some more plot details.
PlayLink's experiment in multiplayer narrative is sound but suffers from poor execution
Hidden Agenda is a funny - but very short - cinematic adventure game with a lot of QTE and social features, available only for PlayLink users.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Hidden Agenda is a great game to play both on your own and as part of a party. It's not very long, clocking in at around 90 minutes, but it's a decent enough length to play through in one sitting without losing interest. Once you know the plot and the killer there is still motivation for replaying the game as there are multiple hidden branches which you can't view within one playthrough, this will keep you coming back to experiment to see what you can uncover.
Games like Hidden Agenda are what we need to see more of. The game itself isn't perfect, but it is a perfect example of games that try new ways to tell a story. Full credit to Sony for trying something new with the mobile phone linking system.
Hidden Agenda proves that PlayLink works not only with funny party games, but also with more mature, dark stories that can be controlled even by very casual gamers.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Hidden Agenda is a hard recommendation, because the game feels like a natural fit to share with non-gamers, but we had one playthrough that ended so abruptly and unsatisfyingly I thought we had somehow skipped a section, and had I brought this game out at a party I would have felt like we totally wasted two hours.
It is a real interactive film that owes its narration to the choices we make, following our reasoning and our feelings. Unlike other titles in Hidden Agenda the choices heavily affect the game mechanics, turning the story into something always different than previously played.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Hidden Agenda is a great way to spend a night with friends, working together (or against each other) to get to the bottom of The Trapper case. It is playable solo, but it truly shines as a multiplayer experience, where other players' choices impact and sway the story in ways you wouldn't have taken it yourself. Which means playing through a second or third time could present very different choices and outcomes.
In the end, I wish Hidden Agenda was more of a traditional PS4 game rather than a PlayLink gimmick. Still, with a solid (yet slightly predictable storyline; at least, the one I played through), it's well worth a go. Supermassive is quickly becoming my favourite Sony developer.
Hidden Agenda is a nice thriller to play, thats lacks some fine tuning in terms of Story and mechanics.
Review in German | Read full review
With a huge web of choices to make and an enjoyable competitive mode to boot, there's a lot to like in this crime analysis. Hidden Agenda proves that the PlayLink initiative can be taken advantage of in more than just casual party games, but this particular outing doesn't quite realise its full potential. This investigation is absolutely one worth experiencing, but one too many caveats with the app itself holds things back from greatness.
Behold, the choice-driven narrative serial killer crime drama party game genre is born
Hidden Agenda is a gripping thriller with enormously high replay value.
Review in German | Read full review
There's some good ideas in how PlayLink can be used to let a group of players (and non-gamers in particular) join together and shape a filmic story, but the actual interface feels clumsy, and the story and scripting leaves plenty to be desired. It's safe to say that Hidden Agenda is an obvious disappointment.
Supermassive's dour whodunnit is a poor vehicle for PlayLink's experiment in multiplayer narrative - a woeful mismatch of genre and form.
As a game for chilling out on the sofa with a handful of friends or the family, Hidden Agenda is pretty cool. Yet there's a lot about the mechanics, the story, the situations and the characters that seems wilfully, crazily dumb. For £20 for a few hours of fun it's well worth a try, but this feels like an interesting concept that needs some work before it all comes good.