Hell Is Us

2026-01-10
I know a game has potential when I crack open my notebook while I'm playing. When the sheer wealth of opportunities to explore and mysteries to unravel beg to be codified with pen and paper. When the developer trusts the player to possess the cognitive function to deal with ambiguities and explore a world on their own. Without being leashed and dragged along by a set of sterile menus and markers pointing the way and spelling everything out all at once. A game that's confident enough to let the player miss some of its best parts instead of corralling them like children on a field trip. Hell Is Us is one of those games.

I can't tell you the joy I felt when I found there was no map. That I had to just learn and memorize the layout of every level with only the help of a compass. That every time I found a locked door with a hollowed out shape I didn't recognize that I had to remember where it was and what that shape was. In a lot of ways it feels like one of the core joys of Resident Evil: exploring till you find a locked door, going somewhere else, finding a key, and coming back. Only here in Hell Is Us the keys and doors are everywhere and the directions you can go are myriad. I always had something I was hunting for or finding or feverishly scrawling in my notebook. It's the best I've felt all year playing a game.

It helps that you are in Hell. They call it Hadea but it is Hell. Children hung from trees, mothers stabbed on kitchen tables for fun, men burning men in heaps behind the barricaded doors of a church. It is refined grimness, crushed up in a mortar and pestle and smeared across everything, leaving the smell and taste of brimstone. Like the devil walked the earth but you just missed him. Everything you see has already happened--just happened--before you arrived. You're just here to witness the consequences, to pick over the burning wreckage of an ex-society.

And what a society it was. Francis and the Followers of Teear, Lady Margeurith, the Blood Queen, Lymbics entities, and secret societies. It's one of the few times I actually read through every codex entry because the world and the lore that ties it all together is so compelling and tightly cohesive. So wonderfully alluring in the web of mysteries it lays out and then slowly unfolds as you pick at all the threads in your travels. And the way that it all wraps up neatly at the end, laying out a single timeline of violence plotting Hadea's past to its present.

And what is a society without people? You meet a handful of people and conversations play out like Morrowind with a handful of topics--"Tell me about this religion", "Have you seen so and so", "What the fuck happened here?"--to choose from as well as the option to offer items to complete the various Good Deeds they may have you pursue. It's a delightful touch that each one seems to have a place in the world. Often a connection to other NPCs in the world and sometimes a little mini narrative that has them moving across the map between zones, often missable. It's reminiscent of Dragon's Dogma or Xenoblade Chronicles where there's a feeling of the world evolving as you explore it and a reward for being diligent in turning over every blood-soaked stone. And really it breathes a tremendous amount of life into a game otherwise focused on death and destruction.

It wouldn't be Hell without some pain inflicted on you, the player, as well. Here it’s the combat. Another merely fine rendition of 3rd person combat in FromSoft’s vein, that even has a fun little heal after attacking gimmick a la Bloodborne. It’s that “merely fine”-ness combined with whopping total of four enemy types in the game that make it become boring incredibly quickly. Further salt on the wound is the fac that a lot of the rewards in the game are tied to this middling combat. There are approximately eight million equippable trinkets to acquire–all related to combat–but, because the combat isn't that engaging or challenging to begin with, you're basically being tossed a bunch of trash. It's a bummer to solve a chain of puzzles merely to get yet another whatsamajig you're never going to use. But hey you can turn down the difficulty once you get bored of the combat and focus on the joy of exploring the world of Hadea.

It's those flaws paired with the core of a game that won't hold your hand and will let you miss side missions right and left that remind me the most of Dragon's Dogma. Another game I played back at release and fell in love with most people seemed to bounce off of. I can only hope it'll have a similar future as a cult classic that people finally come around on. After all, who wouldn't want a chance to visit Hell?