If you’re bothered by a world map littered with quest icons or the thought of being shepherded through an adventure rather than unravelling it instinctually, the freedom that Hell is Us promises will immediately draw you in. It’s evident every time you boot up the game, with a tooltip reminding you that you’ll get no quest markers, no world map, and no hints as to where to go next while you explore its world. This promise is kept throughout its campaign, although how challenging this makes it overall is less impactful than you might think. Hell is Us definitely demands more of your attention for exploration than most other modern video games, but it’s also quite forgiving in how much information it litters around you to keep you subtly on track. Coupled with a brutal but captivating world and a combat system that’s more than meets the eye, Hell is Us is an engaging, albeit imperfect, attempt at defining a new type of action/adventure game.
Set in the fictional region of Hadea in the late 1900s, Hell is Us blends together the centuries-long mystery behind the appearance of ghostly monsters and the calamity that follows them, with an ongoing civil war that is tearing apart the land. Citizens of Hadea align behind two factions, the Palomists and the Sabinians, with decades of heritage and ongoing propaganda fueling gruesome war crimes and countless lives lost to bloodshed. It’s here where Hell is Us features its most striking, and upsetting, moments, routinely letting you come across acts of depravity that depict how the divides between people can drive them to commit acts of brutality. You’ll naturally come across shockingly violent scenes or hear about gruesome tortures through conversations, which give shape to the brutality of the civil war you’re in the middle of. It’s not played wholly for shock value, either, with these unsettling scenes providing needed texture to the region and the plights of the citizens desperately trying to escape.
As you explore the various hubs that you can freely travel between, you’ll encounter a variety of characters hoping for some help. A grieving father at a mass grave can find solace in a picture of his family that you retrieve for him, a trapped politician will thank you for finding them a disguise to navigate a hostile office space, or a lost young girl can be reminded of her missing father by a pair of shoes he asked for you to deliver before his death. These good deeds aren’t critical to the central story, but they deepen your connection to Hadea further with each one completed. They also do the best job of delivering on Hell is Us’ promise of guideless exploration, with subtle clues pointing you towards the items that each character seeks, whether it’s in the town you’re currently exploring or waiting for you in another location much later. It’s satisfying to recall a brief conversation you had hours prior when coming across a new item, letting you close the loop on a side quest you had all but abandoned.
This sense of discovery extends to the main plot, with solutions to puzzles often requiring some pause and thought in order to overcome them. They’re multi-staged too, turning spaces into small puzzle boxes reminiscent of games like Resident Evil. The clues can be anywhere, including small phrases mentioned in conversations, throwaway lines in emails, and on notes you’ll discover alongside critical items. It’s not as simple as finding a safe combination scribbled in blood a few rooms away, but it’s also not so gruelling that you’ll often find yourself directionless. You won’t receive hints as to where to go next, but the character and location summaries that are generated give enough of a nudge in the right direction to keep your progress steady. You can think of Hell is Us as an action game that borrows more from classic point-and-click adventures in its approach to exploration than other contemporaries in the genre, just without the overly obtuse puzzles and hours wandering around in circles.
As you peel away the current events transpiring in Hadea, you’ll start learning about the centuries of history that led to this point. It’s filled with monarchs and betrayal, missing heirs and star-crossed lovers, but none of it makes much of a lasting impression or fully justifies the horrors taking place because of these events. This is interwoven with the story of protagonist Rémi, who was born in Hadea before being smuggled out as a child by his mother. Returning to find his family, Rémi’s story and the secret protectors of Hadea that his family is tied to is uninteresting and rote, ultimately concluding with a predictable ending that does little to explain the interrogation you continually flashback to from the start. It’s a pity that while you get to witness Hadea at its worst, Rémi never really seems to remark meaningfully on what is happening around him. Voice actor Elias Toufexis, most recognizable as Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, is disappointing as Rémi, with the alluring raspiness of his voice lost in weak dialogue and a monotone delivery.
The intersection of the real horrors of current-day Hadea and the mysticism of its past allows for its various hubs to stand out visually. Your journey starts in a small town resting in a swampy marsh, with smoke from the embers of a recent siege filling the air. It contrasts with the open fields you’ll find yourself in next, littered with old statues from past monarchs while hiding a labyrinthine catacombs beneath the surface fitted with archaic machinery and gloomy stone passageways. Hell is Us moves you between war-torn cities engulfed in smoke to underground laboratories that are etched into the walls of old religious sites, and none of it feels out of place. Unfortunately, your ability to move around these spaces is incredibly rigid, with the lack of a jump preventing you from scaling numerous waist-high obstacles between you and some loot. It feels egregious artificially in the context of Rémi being rather dexterous otherwise, and is clearly done to force puzzles to be solved in a specific way.
While the soldiers around you brandish assault rifles and roll around in tanks, you’ll be forced to contend with a variety of monochrome creatures, known as Hollow Walkers, using melee weapons exclusively. Hell is Us’ combat will look and feel a lot like many soulsborne titles. Attacks and dodges are tied to a stamina bar, whose total is defined by how much life you have left. It’s a confusing coupling that makes early encounters challenging, but one that is counterbalanced by the combat’s encouragement of aggression. Similar to Bloodborne, each hit claws back some life from enemies. Here, however, you can regain more health than what you’ve lost in a fight, letting you use enemies almost like healing items when you know you can dispatch them without taking damage. It’s a system that makes fights very dynamic, with just a few well-timed and reserved hits taking you from death’s door to fully healed up again. Snatching away victory like this is exhilarating, producing a similar sensation to defeating a tough boss in a soulsborne without having to mimic the steps it takes to get there.
Outside of basic and strong attacks with one of the four weapons you can choose between, combat is aided by a variety of special abilities to choose from. These are divided between equipable perks for your weapon and bird-like drones, each with their own cooldown timers to manage. Your drone provides support mostly, latching onto your back to give your dodges a little more speed and distance, or distracting an enemy to grant you an opening. Weapon abilities are more active. I gravitated to abilities that let me crowd control effectively, such as one that dealt damage to foes around me, or others that would do large amounts of burst damage to single enemies at a distance. The combat has some breadth, but the overall depth doesn’t really match it.
Abilities and enemy types are limited, with both relying on bigger damage numbers and new attacks at higher levels respectively to make up for the variety. The limited enemy pool is helped somewhat by the inclusion of husks–brightly colored foes that are tethered to some enemies and shield them from damage. Some of Hell is Us’ best fights feature a husk tied to multiple enemies at once, forcing you to dispatch it a handful of times as you pick away its hosts one by one. But these moments are undone by Hell is Us’ reliance on enemy count rather than evolving challenges to maintain difficulty in the latter stages of the campaign, which results in some frustrating encounters with cheap deaths. They also expose problems with the game’s finicky lock-on system and camera, with both struggling to accurately find their targets while you’re being swamped in dark, gloomy underground corridors.
The combat is more lenient than its inspirations, too. Enemies do respawn, but only if you travel away from your current location. Each area also contains a timeloop; a constantly recurring moment of intense trauma that also keeps enemies in the area respawning. By clearing out certain enemies around it, you can enter the timeloop and close it for good, ridding the area of enemies and allowing you to explore it in safety. You’ll come across datapads that allow you to save and set your respawn point should you die, but you don’t lose anything when you do, making it significantly less punishing. Difficulty levels also allow you to tune combat to your liking, an option that isn’t extended to exploration, so that you can focus on that instead if you’re finding going toe-to-toe with Hollow Walkers less engaging. All of this means that while combat in Hell is Us looks like a soulsborne, it differs from the genre more than you might expect.
While I was left dissatisfied by the narrative conclusion of Hell is Us, its journey to that point was pleasantly engaging. It was refreshing to not just follow a quest marker through a story, but also a relief that I was never spun around for hours on end wondering where I needed to go next. This balance is what made traversing Hadea and experiencing all the horrors it contained a rewarding one, making each new step feel earned rather than routine. It’s backed up by an imperfect but engaging combat system that’s only let down by some shallow enemy variety and imprecise control, but never to the point of outright frustration. If Hell is Us is developer Rogue Factor’s first stab at a new type of third-person action game and although it’s less revolutionary than the initial promise might suggest, it is one that still managed to stay surprising until the end.
