Publisher: Nacon
Developer: Rogue Factor
Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S
Hell is Us is a truly rare specimen for me: it's a game I actually pre-ordered....well, I mean, entirely on accident...but it shows how excited I was for it after completing the demo. I just went and bought it without thinking about the fact that it wasn't out yet. So, I'm now officially part of the problem, but only an unintentional part of it...and I'll accept that. Either way, clearly I've had Hell is Us on my brain for a while, and it's been especially on my mind since playing the demo. Did it end up living up to the hype?
I see no reason to be coy at this point, the answer is a resounding "yes"! Hell is Us is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience that you just don't see anymore. It isn't going to be for everyone, but if it's for you, it's going to be for you bigtime! So, let's get into it!
I'll say this about Hell is Us: the world is the star of the show. The moment-to-moment plot is fairly generic, and the most interesting bit of character development you'll find is that Remi is a diagnosed high-functioning sociopath. But the world, my god, the world is a true marvel. Despite it being a fictional country in the real world, Hadea has this otherworldly, almost magical feel to it. The lore is, some might argue, impenetrably thick. Elegantly-moving entities wielding the ugliest sides of human emotion as a cudgel, richly-realized royal lineages, Arthurian secret vigils, Hadea's lore has no shortage of rabbit holes to go down.
But the interesting bits aren't just in the past. Hell is Us also boasts the single most realistic, ugliest depiction of civil war in any game. There have been plenty of games that feature civil war as a kind of backdrop conflict, but none have ever captured the intricacies of the concept like this game does.
The conflict is between two factions: The Sabinians (a kind of militant antitheist force that is, as far as I can tell, mopping the floor with the opposition) and the Palomists (a religious order that is, as far as I can tell, decisively getting its robed ass kicked). In so many games, conflicts like this are depicted as constant bombings everywhere and nonstop guerilla warfare...but in Hell is Us, all of that is only going on in the big cities. Most places in Hadea are already conquered by one side or the other, and there's no real oversight from the big wigs. So, outside of the key military targets, the civil war is just whatever side happens to be strongest in a given area deciding exactly how to treat the opposition...and it's never pretty. Another notable difference between Hell is Us and other games that touch on this subject matter is the inclusion of exterior peacekeeping forces. Just about everywhere you go has a sizable O.N. (I guess the U.N. has a copyright on their name or something) presence trying (and often failing) to negotiate with whoever is in charge in the interest of the civilians caught in the crosshairs. But as is usually the case, civilians are the ones who have it the worst.
The first occupied location you visit is under Sabinian control. In this area, a handful of the local Palomists hung a Sabinian family that had been living among them. In retaliation, the Sabinians decided to seize all the food, inflict heinous tortures on anyone who tried to access said food, string up and beat the local priest in a way that wouldn't kill him, and take turns raping the one woman involved in that family's hanging.
.....yikes.
This sets a pretty clear picture in your head about the state of this country and who to root for. Yeah, some of these Palomist civilians committed a murder, but clearly the Sabinians are a bunch of bastards who take things way too far....
But then you end up in a Palomist-controlled village later on. There, you meet up with a one-armed man in order to accomplish your current goal. As you move around the village, you start to notice a trend: everyone is missing an arm. Then you see a little girl with seemingly both arms cut off, and it becomes clear that she's been told they'll grow back if she obeys. Then, as you pass by soldiers, they talk about how they can't wait to go to the barn...and then you go to the barn and hear multiple women crying inside. I assume you're probably intelligent enough to read between the lines there. In this specific village, there was no murder to inspire such rage. The crime was simply existing, and the punishment was across-the-board mutilations (and only that, if you're lucky).
.....yikes.
So, the Sabinians are indeed a bunch of bastards, but so are the Palomists. And the Palomists are horrifically mistreated victims of an unending cycle of hatred and violence, with the same being true of the Sabinians. Wherever you go in this world, it's the same story: the opportunists taking up arms in the name of their cause inflict suffering on the people they hate, and their (most of the time) innocent neighbors are the ones who do all that suffering. Thus, the cycle of hatred and violence continues.
There was one last example of this that I thought was profound. There's a historian character you help out at about the midway point of the story. He's a stand-up guy, a family man. You rescue his son, and you see the clear love he feels for him. When you go to that aforementioned Palomist village, you find the guy's house and an audio recording inside. It turns out this dude escaped from the village before the violence started. Why did he flee that village? Well, it had nothing to do with the possibility of violence or concern for his family's safety. It was because he didn't want his son to accidentally make friends with one of the filthy Palomists who lived in the area. This guy seems to be, for all intents and purposes, a great dude you might want to be friends with. But in this god-forsaken country, even this friendliest of dudes is ultimately ruled by the kind of hatred that makes a person afraid that their child will show kindness to someone different.
Hell, even the most positive outcome here is still marred with the kinds of violence these cycles inspire. One level you come across is the country's Ministry of Propaganda building, wherein Sabinian broadcasters stoked the fires of hatred against the Palomists. When you arrive, all but one of the workers in the building has been slaughtered by bipartisan militia forces. As you talk to the militia members, you hear them talk about how they had been moved to kill innocent people because of the brainwashing, and how they're atoning for it now. It would be heartwarming to see the country come together like that...were it not for, you know, the entire building full of defiled, brutalized corpses.
So...yeah...there's some really heavy stuff here that will be instant dealbreakers for some. There's no shortage of implied violent rape, no shortage of implied torture, no shortage of mass graves, parents wailing for their slaughtered children, pregnant women paralyzed by fear of what the occupying forces will do to their babies once born, the list goes on. All valid reasons not to pick this game up. And while you never have any hand in doing these types of things, there are some extremely upsetting outcomes that can happen if you don't complete certain side objectives within a given time frame. I didn't fail many side quests, but as a result of one of these few failures, an infant died of starvation. Like, Jesus Christ, I don't even want to know what might've happened if I'd failed some of those other objectives! Needless to say, if you're sensitive to any of these topics, you'll want to give this one a pass. If not, however, you're in for one of the most well-realized worlds you're likely to see.
Hell is Us opens up with a little disclaimer stating that it comes with no objective markers or hints, and that the way to make progress is to pay careful attention. While these are true statements, I do think they paint this game in a much more cryptic light than it deserves. I highly doubt anyone will actually be "lost" as to what to do. A person might have some difficulty solving a puzzle without any kind of hint system, sure, but I find it hard to believe anyone could possibly not know where to go next at any given point. Regions are distinct, so any hints you have to pay attention to are typically pretty obvious.
Still, it's nice to be treated like an intelligent person. Know what else is nice? Having a protagonist that keeps his goddamn mouth shut. Remi is, outside of dialogue sections and one or two odd in-world exchanges, completely silent. No "I should x" or "that thing reminds me of {hint}" or "I wonder what would happen if...". Not a single thing. In a world where we have to listen to AAA protagonists never EVER shut up EVER, it's so, so nice to never have to listen to one talk...and it's also nice because the dialogue in this game is pre-tty bad.
For example, there's a point in the frame narrative where Remi's interrogator makes a pointed remark about how he can always go back to torturing the kid and woman Remi worked with if he doesn't want to talk. In response to this, Remi says "Oh, so you'll torture a kid and a woman? Congratulations, you're assholes!"
Yeah. Not great stuff.
But believe it or not, this section was actually supposed to be about gameplay, so let's get on that.
Hell is Us is a third person action game with an emphasis on stamina management...but it's not a soulslike. There aren't any RPG elements, enemies don't respawn at checkpoints, difficulty is basically nonexistent until the last second, etc. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we call way too many things "soulslike." But Hell is Us is just an honest-to-goodness third person action game. Been a while since we've seen one of those!
Despite this taking place in the late 90's/early 2000s, combat is melee focused, as the only weapons that can hurt the demons that make up this game's enemy roster are special swords, axes, etc. So you'll slash, dodge, and parry to kill enemies, but there's one other gameplay facet that makes an appearance: an "active rally."
You may recall that in Bloodborne, if you took damage, you had a brief window to gain that lost health back by continuing to attack. Hell is Us has something similar, but improved. After you launch an attack, white particles will appear around you. This will create a little gray bar on the tip of whatever health you have left (if it's below full), and if you continue to attack without taking damage, the size of that gray bar will increase. After a small delay, the particles will turn into a white circle and the gray bar will turn white, and if you press a button at that point, you'll gain your health back to where that bar went. This isn't exclusive to health you lost during a single battle. You can go into any battle, swing carefully, and regain your full health that way.
Balancing this out is the fact that the stamina bar is exactly as long as your current health is. So if you've lost almost all your health, you'll only have a swing or two of stamina to use. On one hand, this makes things pretty dire in that circumstance...but on the other hand, even if you only get one swing's worth of health back, that's x amount more stamina back. If you play it smart, you get greater and greater returns, making it fairly simple to get out of these situations. There are, of course, some things like health kits (that don't respawn at checkpoints, this is not a soulslike), but I only needed them when I was really not in the mood to respawn. Otherwise losing was pretty much never on the table.
On that note, remember how I said enemies don't respawn at checkpoints? They also don't respawn if you die. What's more, unless you happen to look in the settings and find the option to include penalties for death, you don't lose anything when you die either (save for any consumables used). So even if you don't make it all the way through a giant horde of enemies, your progress through that horde will be saved for the next time you go up against it. I think this gets turned off if you add the hardcore rules into the mix, but I'm not sure. I wasn't in this for a challenge, so I never checked.
Don't let the fact that Hell is Us is pretty easy trick you into thinking it isn't gratifying, though. Weapon swings actually feel like they cut, and the sound effects upon killing an enemy create a tangible sense of "UMPF," for lack of a better word. It's a rare thing to be able to go up against an enemy that is neither Dark Souls-level strong nor Warriors-level weak and have a distinct "hell yeah" feeling when you come out on top!
That's an especially good thing considering that enemy variety is...almost nonexistent. There are basically two kinds of enemies.
Firstly, there are hollow walkers: pale demon things. They come in a couple of "classes" ranging from mindless husks to distant mages to slower brutes, but they all have the same pale palette.
Finally, there are "haze"s. These are essentially manifestations of ecstasy, fear, sadness, and rage that take the form of nondescript color-coded geometric floaty things. There are three tiers of each with slightly different looks, but that's neither here nor there.
You'll come across some lone hollow walkers from time to time, but a lot of them are specifically tied to haze. If that's the case, then the walkers are immune to damage until you kill the haze they're linked to (which is always right by them, not on the other side of the map or anything). Once you kill the haze, you can damage the walkers again for a certain amount of time until they respawn the haze with significantly less health. Most of the time, that isn't a problem, as enemies tend to go down quickly. But when you can't kill them fast enough, it only takes a handful of seconds longer to manage.
With that said, I think it's as good a time as any to discuss one last facet of gameplay: the drone. As I've now implied, you have a drone with you that can offer various support options. The one you'll use most frequently is the "distract" function. If you use that on an enemy, they'll remain occupied until you damage them. This comes in handy during those haze battles, as you can keep an invulnerable walker out of the way while you work on the haze. There are also functions like movement enhancement or damaging dashes forward, but I found that the distraction function was the best.
These time loops are giant black orbs surrounded by spikes, and there's at least one in every area save the absolute smallest ones. These are inaccessible until you hunt down and kill a certain amount of time loop "guardians." The guardians are essentially specific enemies or packs of enemies, but there's no discernable difference between them and normal enemies, so you basically have to rely on a key item to locate them. This isn't a big deal, as you'll almost certainly come across all the guardians organically if you're doing even a little bit of exploring, but it's still worth noting.
One thing that is at least a deal of some size is the fact that items are required to close the time loops after they become accessible. Once you enter a loop, you'll be able to see what "type" it is ("theta", "rho", etc). Depending on that type, you'll need an amine (NOT anime) stone corresponding to that type. This means you can enter a loop and simply not be able to close it because you don't have the exact right type of stone. All that work going around and killing guardians (NOTE: the guardians thankfully never respawn) to lay the groundwork for enemies not to come back only to have them all come back at least one more time when you leave to try and find a stone.
There's no reliable source to get these stones from like a shop or anything, so you basically have to hope you come across them in the world or get them as rewards for completing quests...and even if that happens, you then have to pray that the stone is the right kind. I don't get that at all. Canonically, you're one of the few people with the necessary equipment to kill the guardians...so it's not like anyone else could've accessed the loops in the first place. Why could you not just close them naturally once you get inside? This is the one design choice I couldn't get behind no matter how much I thought about it.
There's one puzzle where the hint is something about the south in a room full of movable torches, for an example of one of the few weaker puzzles. My thought was to bring my compass out, orient myself south, and make sure all torches pointed there...but it turned out the solution was something like only turning the torches that were already generally south, because turning them meant they were "on." But as I've said, this is the exception, not the rule.
For an example of one of the better puzzles, along the critical path there's a segment in a temple belonging to the subfaction akin to satanists. In this temple, the way to pass the challenges was to review this sect's ideology and their view of world history and use that knowledge to logic your way through things.
One of these puzzles features a total of 20 or so symbols on the ground, each with pressure plates on either side reading "higher" and "lower." Only 3 symbols are relevant, and you must select the correct pressure plate for each.
In any other game, this might be a tedious trial and error thing or an easy thing as the protagonist tells you the answer right away. Here, though, it's up to you to scour the room for context clues. If you pay attention, you can piece together the solution pretty darn quickly despite the clues being ultimately tangential.
As the dungeon progressed, this kind of lore-logic-based reason puzzles only got more and more seemingly perilous in their capacity for things to go wrong...but every time, they were doable. It eventually reminded me a lot of that one Indiana Jones movie about the Holy Grail, where Indy passes through a gauntlet of swinging axes and other hazards by taking up body positions related to the idea of a "pious" or "good" man ("a pious man falls to his knees in prayer," Indy drops to his knees, an axe swings just above his head).
I never felt like using a guide even when puzzles were taking me longer than they should have, because I could always be certain of two things:
1). The solution was right there somewhere, and
2). The logic wasn't too Machiavellian
Ultimately what makes these puzzles so great (apart from how well-constructed they are) is the mere fact that they treat you like you're an intelligent person. I felt legitimately proud every time I solved one because I had nothing to go off of other than my lines of reasoning. In a world where AAA companies are hell-bent on treating customers like a bunch of idiots, it might surprise you how gratifying it is to try a solution on a door, think "well, here goes nothing," and hear a sudden rumble before the door starts moving.
An effect of this treatment is that I wanted to do every little thing. More often than not, I feel compelled to do that in games. I feel that in a positive way, but it's usually a compulsion, nonetheless. In Hell is Us, though, I was chasing the reward of feeling like I'd accomplished something. In the end, I couldn't do that here. Actually doing everything ended up being the slightest bit too tedious (as a result of that aforementioned time loop problem), but having had the intention means a lot more than one might think.
So, let's start off with those negatives. One minor thing is that lip syncing in cutscenes tends to be off by just a little bit. There aren't a lot of cutscenes, but in a game that's as focused on atmosphere as this one, it makes a difference.
There are also some audio glitches at certain points, such as in a crucial dungeon you'll visit multiple times. Waterfall sound effects are littered with painful stutters.
Speaking of dungeons, the camera is unusually poorly-behaved in tight spaces. Most dungeons are big enough to avoid this problem, but when passageways get too small, Remi will end up blocking your view of enemies pretty frequently.
In some areas with lots of foliage, the rendering distance for said foliage can seem pretty limited. In the marsh, for instance, you'll practically be seeing little bushes slip in and out of focus the entire time you're there. It becomes a non-issue after how long you'll likely end up spending in hubs like this, but that isn't as good a thing as it might sound like.
To end the negatives on yet another incredibly minor note, there are typos in some of the item descriptions. The specific one I noted was a description with the word "featuring" written twice in a row.
As for the positives, hoo boy, they're certainly positives.
The biggest, most important technical facet in this game is the vibes. If the vibes were off, this game would flounder. But they weren't off, not even by a little bit.
Every single time you go to a new area, you're presented with a new kind of overall atmosphere, and it's always dripping with whatever feeling the area is going for. Whether it's the Witcher 3-style marsh towards the beginning, the mist-coated and long-abandoned wetlands towards the end, or the burnt orange sky of a torched village in the middle, no matter where you go, there you are.
This is partly due to the visuals. They lack any kind of overall fidelity, but they make up for that in their lighting and specific uses of color for each area. Verdant green with blue flowers by a lakeside. Rolling red hills leading up to a mountain. Dark oranges and light browns/blacks in that aforementioned burning village. Every area is given expert love and care in its visual design.
There's one specific example I want to give of this. One other temple you visit in the story was a mass grave at one point in time...not unheard of for Hadea. But then you step into an elevator that starts going below the temple and find a literal mountain of skeletons. You think you have a good mental picture, but you don't. I mean it. A literal mountain of them buried below the temple with the kind of scale you'd expect to see in a mountain. I took a note when I saw that, and it (verbatim) reads: "Mountain of bones underground - holy shit." The sight actually gave me visible goosebumps. It would've been easy to just make a bigger mass grave than the usual ones, but it was clearly important to the team at Rogue Factor to put god knows how much time and money into getting the point across as effectively as possible.
Another factor in this game's atmosphere is the soundtrack. It isn't the kind of soundtrack you're going to be jamming in the gym or having a relaxing spa day to, but it isn't trying to be. It treats the world like it's some kind of sci-fi setting despite it's clear place in the real world. Droning heavily-altered trumpets (maybe) provide a backdrop to slightly audible synthetic basses, to give one example. And like with the visuals, soundtrack pieces are specifically catered to specific hubs based on the general atmosphere idea.
Besides these positives, there are also several positives one would hope to see: no framerate drops, no hard or soft crashes, and no texture pop-in (though asset pop-in is obviously another story).
I remember there was a specific moment in my playthrough where I got the achievement for having talked to every NPC, and my heart sank. I knew at that point that it was almost over. The same thing happened when I got the achievement for having visited every area. When the credits rolled, I was upset that the experience was over. But it was the good kind of "upset that the experience was over." I had put in over 30 hours at that point, and the fact that I wanted more of it so badly was simply a testament to the power of what I'd gotten out of it.
As I said earlier in this review, there are a plethora of content-based reasons not to pick up this game. But if you're in the mood for an experience truly unlike any other in today's market, please, for the love of god, go out and give Hell is Us a shot.
Let us review:
Time loop item BS - 0.2
Minor technical issues - 0.3
The final score for Hell is Us is...
9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece
Bravo, Rogue Factor, bravo!
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