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The Hidden Ones is set in a modern-day, urban supernatural China where ordinary-looking people secretly wield superhuman martial and spiritual powers. Marketing frames it as an urban myth with ancient elements: a contemporary city world layered over deep Eastern mythology. The titular Hidden Ones, also called the Outcasts, are the people who carry these powers, and the game's Story Mode tells an original tale set in their world.
An Urban Myth With Ancient Elements
On the surface, the setting looks like everyday China: city streets, alleyways, and ordinary towns where the powered population walks unnoticed among ordinary people. Underneath, it draws on ancient Eastern myth, where martial-arts traditions and spiritual disciplines are real, practical forces rather than legend. The developers describe their vision as combining the movement of martial arts with the stillness of traditional culture, so the world is meant to feel both kinetic and grounded in older ideas.
That blend of the modern and the mythic is the core flavor of the game. Fights break out in recognizably contemporary settings, but the people throwing punches can also channel powers that come straight out of older Chinese tradition. The result is a world that reads as familiar and fantastical at the same time.
Philosophical Foundations
The world is built on a handful of traditional Chinese concepts. These foundations shape both the lore and the way fighters express their powers, and they run through the combat shown so far as much as the setting itself.
Foundation | Role in the World |
|---|---|
Taoism | The spiritual tradition the powered world draws from; it underpins the values and aesthetics of the setting |
Yin-Yang | The balance of opposing forces that frames how energy and power are understood |
Bagua | The eight trigrams; a classical framework woven into the world's martial and spiritual systems |
Qi (chi) | The internal energy that fighters cultivate and channel into their martial-arts powers |
These ideas are not just set dressing. The game's combat is framed around the source world's martial disciplines, detailed on the The Eight Secret Arts page, and individual fighters channel supernatural techniques rooted in Kung Fu, Taoism, Yin-Yang Bagua, and qi. The setting and the Combat System therefore share the same philosophical backbone.
The Hidden Ones and the Outcasts
The people with these powers are the Hidden Ones, also referred to as the Outcasts (Yiren). They look like anyone else, which is the central tension of the world: a population of extraordinarily powerful people living hidden in plain sight inside a modern society. This premise is drawn directly from the source material the game adapts, and it is where the game takes its name. For the franchise background and how the adaptation works, see The Outcast Source Material.
Because the Outcasts hide among ordinary people, conflicts in the world tend to play out in everyday places rather than on grand battlefields. The fighters of the Characters roster are drawn from this population, and their differing styles and allegiances are part of what drives the story.
Environments Shown So Far
The in-game environments observed in hands-on builds and trailers are street-level, urban brawling stages: alleys and modern city settings where fights unfold. These stages feature both human threats, such as crime-family encounters, and supernatural creatures, including shadowy snake demons that appear in the story. No named, confirmed list of stages or map names has been published yet, so the specific locations players will visit at launch have not been announced.
What has been shown is consistent with the urban-myth framing: grounded, recognizable places where the supernatural intrudes. As more of the game is revealed, the roster of confirmed environments is expected to grow, but for now the safest read is street-level urban combat rather than a fixed list of named locations.
Source-World Lore
The game draws on a much deeper body of lore from the original series, and some of it surfaces in the game's material. The enemy storyline covered on The Fulfilled page, for example, adapts a famous arc involving the Quanxing (All-Souls) clan. Beyond what the game has directly confirmed, however, the wider lore of the source world remains background context rather than documented in-game content.
In the original series, the world includes a broader framework of secret martial disciplines, historical conflicts, and powerful factions and institutions. Several of these names are recognizable to fans of the source, but the specific in-game locations, systems, and organizations that ship in this game have not all been confirmed. Where the source describes something the game has not yet shown, treat it as background flavor for the setting, not as a confirmed in-game place or system.
The world is adapted from the source franchise, but only what the game's own trailers and test builds confirm is treated here as in-game canon. Deeper lore from the original series is noted as context, not as shipped content.
Related Pages
The Outcast Source Material: the franchise the game adapts and how the original story relates to it.
The Eight Secret Arts: the martial-disciplines framework that shapes both the world and combat.
The Fulfilled: the enemy storyline adapted from a famous source arc.
Story Mode: the cinematic single-player campaign set in this world.
Characters: the roster of Hidden Ones drawn from this setting.
For the full game overview, see The Hidden Ones.