The Hidden Below

The Hidden Below is a video game in the action genre developed by Soft Enterprises GmbH and published by Soft Enterprises GmbH originally released in 1994. It is currently playable on DOS.

The Hidden Below ('THB') is about finding a large army of evil aliens under a factory, and sending them back to their place of origin.

The custom engine used for the game, the 'VR-6' engine, can be described as a hybrid of the 'Wolf3D' and 'Doom' engines, in some respects more advanced than the latter but in others more similar to the former.

THB features include VGA graphics, various resolutions with the ability to adjust height and width separately (80/160/320/320x240/400), stairs, diagonally angled walls, slopes, teleporters, switches, damaging terrain, controllable security cameras, crouching, light levels, flickering lights, rendered cutscenes, aiming aids, automatic map providing pickups, ambient sounds and the ability to look up and down. The game also keeps score and displays the top performers on a leaderboard.

In terms of content, THB has 20 large levels with radically changing texture themes, 40 different opponents with individual AI (although this includes a number of recolored opponents) and 14 different weapon systems.

THB's run and gun has a considerably slower pace than the aforementioned games, and relies more on each of the bad guys being hardcore and having a limited amount of health points, rather than a large number of enemies.

The visual aspect of THB is a bit disjointed, having been done in several different styles, from gritty to cell shaded to digitized to hand-drawn and so on.

The sound is 16-bit, although the game has three different quality levels for sound effects.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.