The Hidden Ones Hands-On Preview: An Intuitive Fighting Game for PC and Mobile

Earlier this month, Tencent announced that The Hidden Ones would launch in 2025. Developed by its subsidiary, Morefun Studios, The Hidden Ones promises engaging gameplay, story, and settings. As a highly anticipated title, the game has a lot of hype to live up to. Despite the game heading into worldwide pre-alpha testing next month, the Morefun team felt confident in offering a hands-on preview, and that confidence was not misplaced. Please note that I am not well-versed in action-fighting games and that I became familiar with non-Nintendo controls about a year ago. All that to say: I am not good at real-time fighting games. So if you’re interested in the game and you’re in the same boat as me, then you have nothing to worry about.

The Hidden Ones is an action-fighting game adaptation of the franchise, The Outcast. Starting as a web comic, the story was adapted into an original Chinese animation titled Hitori No Shita: The Outcast, which ran for five seasons. For North American-based fans, the first two seasons can now be streamed on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime.The Outcast franchise is firmly rooted in Eastern mythology, primarily drawing from Chinese culture and the Taoist philosophy. The Hidden Ones will be available on PC and mobile devices – Android and iOS.

The Hidden Ones Gameplay & Experience

Combat

Without getting too crunchy, the combat appears complex on the surface. Below that, it’s still complex, but becomes easier to learn and understand when you see it in action. Combat consists of four core components: basic attack, skills, block, and dodge. Certain actions will lead you down certain paths. For example, skills lead into combos.

However, while button-mashing will get you pretty far, the gameplay guides you away from doing that. First, all attacks are color-coded, indicating if the attack can be blocked or if you need to dodge. Your opponent will glow blue if you can block. Alternately, they’ll glow red if you can’t block and have to dodge. Second, unlike many fighting games, the basic attack allows you to break a blocker. The block “shield” produces a glowing white aura in front of the character. If you use a basic attack, you’ll both break the block and grapple your opponent, allowing you to launch into skills and combos.

Finally, if you’re bad at fighting games, the story mode grants you five revives per fight. The fight may have multiple stages, but you’ll spawn back in at the point where you died instead of at the very beginning of the fight. So far, this appears to only be a feature in the story mode, a welcome feature for anyone just playing for the story and characters. You don’t need to be amazing at the gameplay to succeed. You just need to be good enough.

Game Modes

The Hidden Ones will feature three game modes: Story, Duel, and Trial. As the game is based on The Outcast franchise, the plot will follow the general principles of the original story. However, you don’t need any knowledge of The Outcast in order to enjoy it. Morefun Studios deliberately crafted The Hidden Ones story to feature original characters within The Outcast setting. So if you want to catch up on five seasons of The Outcast animation series, the game shouldn’t spoil anything for you.

Duel grants full access to the character roster and allows players to engage in fair, competitive PvP. Each player chooses three characters and a limited amount of Doppelganger effects. Doppelganger effects cost 1, 2, or 3 points. Each player can use up to 5 points and up to 3 Doppelgangers. With three rounds to a duel, each round ends when one character gets knocked out or the clock runs out, whichever occurs first. The winning character receives a small HP boost going into the next round. While each round can last a maximum of 90 seconds, most duels will be over in 2-3 minutes.

Trial is the boss rush mode. Players will be able to fight bosses from throughout story mode, with each fight increasing in difficulty. This mode wasn’t available for testing.

Overall Takeaways about The Hidden Ones

As it currently stands, The Hidden Ones reaches a standard that all high budget games should strive for: getting your fundamentals down. This game knows it’s a real-time fighting game. Even in this stage of testing, I did not experience any bugs or lag in combat. Great care was put into animating each character’s fighting style. Morefun Studios motion captured various styles of martial arts, such as kung fu and tai chi, and animated the characters over that footage, resulting in realistic movements in an otherwise unrealistic setting.

Personally, I really appreciated how easy it was for me to track the movements of each character on-screen. I tend to easily lose track of where my character is, especially when there’s a lot happening on the screen and the camera keeps moving around. This wasn’t an issue, even when my opponent and I activated Doppelgangers at the same time. Maybe it was the color-coding.

Either way, the outlook is very good.

The Hidden Ones Release Timeline

Tentatively, The Hidden Ones will be in pre-alpha testing during January 2025. Beta testing is scheduled for the summer of 2025, with official launch following sometime in the fall of 2025. Players in the United States and Brazil can register for pre-alpha testing now, with the rest of the world following shortly.