HELL IS US is unique and creative, but very flawed

HELL IS US is another one of those games that just caught my eye with what little I saw about it. Some posters, a few video clips here and there, and I already decided that I was gonna give it a try. Even the name is intriguing: HELL IS US. Cool.

Before the game even starts properly, you are presented with the following text:

I will not lie, this initially scared me a little bit. Are we not all accustomed to having access to a map at all times, with our objectives and destination being shown to us with a press of a button? But it also got me excited. I started thinking about how true exploration is supposed to feel like, like how it felt in Elden Ring. This game goes even further, as you will not have access to a map either. Overall, it got me excited to see not only how such a game would feel, but how I would react to it.

Starting the game you find yourself strapped to a chair with a disfigured man sitting across the table from you. You are being interrogated, and have been injected the truth serum. You are being asked as to why you came back to the land where you were born, and how did you get back, why did you leave in the first place. You say that you have come back to find your parents. Then as you starting telling the story of how you got back, a separate cutscene starts as you enter your home land and are then given free reigns to play the game. The gameplay is technically flashback to the interview. This leads to a nice touch in the game. Whenever you die in the game, the screen turns black and you hear your interrogator commenting on how that couldn’t have possibly happened and asks you to try again. I like it when the death and revival in a game are explained with in-game logic.

Not long after you start the game, you come across the first NPC, and you are introduced to the core of the game, the most important aspect, the investigation. My first reaction? Being intimidated. I don’t think I’ve ever played real puzzle games or games where finding clues and key items are essential to your progression. The whole game will revolve around this mechanic, not just the main storyline, but the gameplay itself is tied to exploration and investigating the world around you. What this means is that you cannot approach this game as a simple action one where you go through the motions and progress.

Furthermore, things that you find by solving mysteries and solving puzzles can at times be related not to the story but rather the gameplay. Think upgrades, health items, resources you need to make yourself stronger, weapons. Roaming the world randomly you can still find these things, but solving mysteries and puzzles often bring a lot more rewards than what you would find laying around, another way in which the solving of mysteries and investigating are essential to the game.

Overall, I would say this system works. Finding the solution to puzzles or key items can feel very rewarding when you’ve had to work form. You feel that you have earned your reward and it is a quite satisfying feeling. However, this system does come with a huge drawbacks. There will be A LOT of backtracking in this game, and it does reach a point where it becomes a little annoying. Additionally, the game world is made of different zones/areas that you can fast travel between, but not within. It means that, for example, if you find a key to a chest, you might have to get back to the fast travel point of the zone where you are, fast travel to the zone where the chest is, and then get to where the chest is. This leads to a considerable amount of gameplay time spent running and going from point A to point B. Another drawback, because of the need to find solutions and investigate your surroundings, the impactful moments of the story will be further apart. Yes you will make small discoveries here and there frequently, but it takes time between key objectives to get things done. Your patience might start to wear thin at some point.

That brings us to the gameplay that will fill these gaps and moments between the mystery solving and investigating. Is it really a souls-like? The short answer is no. Sure you have a stamina bar, you can parry, you can dodge, you have items that you can use, etc, but these are simply elements that the game has in common with a souls-like, but it’s not designed entirely in that way. By default, you don’t lose you resources when you die, nor do enemies respawn. However, you do have an option to turn this on if you wish. It’s hard to exactly define the way the game is played because it’s not exactly simple but it is the type of gameplay that many have played across different games, and so it doesn’t stand out in that way. It works do not get me wrong, the combat is responsive and can feel very good but that is to be expected from a game that has combat as a big part of it. Apart from the combat itself being average, one can have doubts regarding this game when considering the variety. You have access to 4 weapons and there are 5 enemy types. I realized this when after a couple of hours into the game I got a trophy for defeating every enemy type in the game. It was concerning to say the least.

This doesn’t mean the gameplay is boring without its own identity or innovation. A nice touch is that based on its initial upgrade, the aesthetics of your weapon can change and can determine what kind of abilities you assign to it. You have a drone that itself can have different abilities, so you have access to two sets of abilities as you play, technically three as you can carry two weapons at the same time. Perhaps the biggest standout is how your health bar and stamina are tied together, together referred to as your endurance. If you take damage, your maximum endurance decreases; meaning not only does your maximum health decrease, but your stamina does as well. There are items that you can use to restore your endurance but these are not on cooldowns, but are items that are found while exploring the world. So how do you restore your endurance? There is a mechanic in this game called “healing pulse”. Think of it as the rally mechanic from Bloodborne but a little different. As you do damage to enemies, you gain the ability to restore endurance afterwards by clicking a button. So, not only is this mechanic your main way of restoring health, but the fact that it restores stamina means you can keep up the aggression. Be mindful though, you can do this once you have stopped attacking. The amount of endurance that is restored is proportional to the amount of damage you do, but getting hit by enemy attacks prevents you from using this ability. So there is some strategy involved here. You want to be aggressive but at the same time you want to be mindful of the enemy attacks and the fact that you need a slight pause after finishing your attacks to gain endurance.

And the enemies. While yes there are 5 enemy types, called Hollow Walkers, some of them can be linked to an entity called Haze. When encountering them, both the walker and haze can attack you, but only the haze can be damaged. In order to kill the walker for good, you need to damage the haze enough so that it retreats into the walker. then you can kill the walker, with it the haze. This mechanic gets more elaboration as the game goes on which I will not detail here. It is an interesting mechanic though. Especially because in some way it addresses the lack of enemy variety. There are 4 types of hazes, and each of these can be linked to any type of the walkers. Furthermore, enemies with higher levels have a more ranged set of moves and attacks, both the walker and the haze. So yes while technically there are 5 types of enemies, there are different combinations and levels to diversify the enemy encounters.

Combat aside, can I just say that the hazes are very beautifully designed. As you’ll come to learn soon, hazes can be tied to a certain emotion or sentiment. Based on that, the visuals and the presentation of the hazes can be different as well, and they are very well done. The way the hazes move, their sound design, they way they attack, all reflect the type of sentiment that they are based on.

The main story itself, the one revolving your parents and the secrets behind the creatures is driven by intrigue and curiosity. Unfortunately, not much by our connection to the main character or any other characters really. The main character is very stoic and not in a cool menacing way. Other than that, I can’t really tell you much about his personality. Same goes for pretty much everyone else. Some characters may be likable but that’s as far as their design gets. The facial animations of the characters is limited, given the amount of characters though, it is understandable that they may not have had the funds for precise facial animations for all of them. The voice acting is decent overall, with some being better or worse than average, but the tone of the voice of some characters does not match the situation they are in. To be honest, most of your interactions are quite limited in the sense that you meet someone, talk to them, and then you might come back to them for a quest, but then that’s it. You’ll move on and forget about them. Some characters you’ll be dealing with a little more frequently and consistently throughout the game, but they are in the rarity. All of these together bring down the story in some way as we are not invested in anyone really.

The different zones of Hadea also offer variety as each zone offers a different scenery and environment. Also depending on where you are in the storyline, some zones may change slightly or have characters appear in or disappear from them. Each zones varies in size as well, with some of the being quite big and expansive, but these ones suffer from the fact that backtracking in these areas can be time-consuming. Regardless of size, each zone is detailed and no corner or structure should be dismissed as unimportant as clues and items can be found throughout each zone, not just in key land sites or structures. You are encouraged to explore each zone top to bottom and when your exploration leads to a key item or a puzzle solution, you feel rewarded for your exploration. But this bring me to my next point.

This game can take up to 20 hours or more to play through. There is definitely enough content to make your money worth. BUT, after a certain point, the cons of the game begin to outweigh the pros. All the running around, backtracking, puzzle solving, lore reading, it does become tiresome after a while. The combat of the game, while it has some depth, cannot sustain your investment throughout the game. After the around 10-12 hour mark, you’re really not gonna be doing anything new. Bigger is not always better, and I think in this case a shorter playthrough time would’ve benefited the game more. By the time I reached the finale I simply wanted it to end as I wasn’t enjoying the game anymore. The finale of the game I think is disappointing enough, but this sense of just not caring anymore makes it even less impactful, leaving me with dissatisfaction after finishing the game. There are things that you can do after the story has ended, but without the drive of the story and with the drawbacks of the game, I couldn’t bring myself to playing the game anymore after finishing the story.

Some final notes before wrapping things up. I think a great addition to the game would have been an in-game tool for taking photos or taking small notes, I had to resort to taking screenshots or using a pen and paper for some of the mysteries and that kind of tool would’ve made solving puzzles and such easier. The fall damage in this game is ridiculous. If you decide to jump down instead of using even the smallest ladders in this game, chances are you’ll take fall damage. It may be small and perhaps not very significant, but nevertheless it is annoying. There are difficulty settings in this game and, most importantly, you can customize it. There aren’t that many options to tune such as in Doom: The Dark Ages, but it is definitely appreciated as you can customize the difficulty to suit what you are looking for, either a smoother experience to focus on the story and puzzles, or an unforgiving combat for those who crave challenge.

The investigation system of this game is very well done, so is every element tied to it. Solving mysteries requires you to always pay attention to everything, and the puzzles, feel like actual puzzles, not just like obstacles that you already know how to overcome. You need to take your time, think, focus. This made solving these all the more gratifying, especially as it almost always led to progression in story or a reward that can be used either in combat or in solving other puzzles. There are a lot of puzzles, NPC interactions and mysteries, all hand-crafted and done with attention. Perhaps this is why the rest of the game falls short. So much emphasis has been put on the investigation system itself that it seems to perhaps have been overlooked how it fits in the game, and how the other mechanics may feel underwhelming. Creativity and pasion should always be applauded, but we must also remain honest and address the flaws and mistakes when we see them.

This is perhaps something that sets the game apart and, at the same time, dwindles down the players who will be able to enjoy it. You really do need to pay attention, to the world around you, the dialogue, items and their descriptions. The game is structured so that you can progress in this way. Maybe you can accidentally find your way through the game or find the clue you needed to progress, but I think that would rob you the satisfaction of achieving so by your own effort and investigation. From the very beginning you will find items that you do not know how to use, locations you do not know how to enter, and pieces of lore and the world that you do not understand. What you need is patience, and trusting that by playing the game and moving forward things will be revealed to you in time. If you do not have patience, this game is simply not for you. That is what I meant that it is not just an action game.

We have talked the central mechanic of the game and the combat, but what about the world and story? That took me by surprise. By the promotion material, I assumed, rightfully so, that there will be a fantastical/magical element to the world, but there is so much more that that. A big part of the story is figuring out the origins of the creatures that you fight and how to get rid of them for good. The pursuit of that story takes place in a world that has a lot of real world elements in it. The game takes place in Hadea, a land currently in the middle of a civil war between the Palomists and the Sabinians. Learning about these groups and their history and their conflict, can be a little unsettling actually. There is religious zealotism, hatred, racial disparity, generational trauma, and worse things involved in this story. Not only do you learn about these through reading letters and listening to recordings, but at times you can see it present in your surroundings, in the behaviours of characters, what they say and how they say it. There are moments that actually made me feel uncomfortable as I was shown some of the worst that humanity is capable of of. Perhaps that is where the name of the game comes from. Making the player feel uncomfortable is not an easy task, and it is not a bad thing in this case. It is a reminder of the terrible things that exist in our own world, and the horrors we are capable of.