There is another world that exists just behind our own, invisible unless you know how to look. This promise is right at the heart of spy fiction, and indeed of both varieties of AR games, those for which the ‘A’ stands for ‘augmented’ and also ‘alternate’. If you imagine a Venn diagram of all three, at the centre is where you’ll find 007: Shadow Of Spectre, the latest addition to HiddenCity’s roster of what it calls ‘realworld adventure games’.
Which is a longwinded way of explaining why I’m spending my Saturday afternoon stood on a windblown London street, eyeballing a stranger. Wearing a trilby and raincoat with the collar turned up, talking loudly into his phone while rocking a wheeled flight case back and forth, this man could not more obviously be a stooge. And so I convince my teammate to linger at the edge of earshot, waiting for the trigger phrase that will surely get him to spill the contents of that case. Reader: he is not part of the game. We’ve just spent the past five minutes eavesdropping on a total innocent.