Hell Is Us is a pretty fascinating game, but one that has me struggling to figure out if I really like it. I mean, I do fundamentally like it, and I think it does a good job of letting you explore and discover things on your own while offering puzzles that are simple enough that you’ll get all of the important ones done with very little issue. I also think it’s a game that respects your time by not being too long, but it then fails to respect your time by making some parts of the interface needlessly clunky. It’s a game that you’ll absolutely want to play with a notepad and pen nearby, and one where you’ll rapidly overcome the initial feeling of horror in favour of something closer to monotony at times.
Hell Is Us has you exploring the country of Haldea, which is currently in the midst of a brutal civil war, resulting in overwhelming brutality to all sorts of people. Children are not safe from the horrors of mankind, nor are the pious or the kind. People die in wars, and Hell Is Us wants to constantly remind you of that fact. A big part of the game is dedicated to the evil of mankind, which does a good job of balancing out the horrors of the unkown calamity that’s also descending upon the country.
The calamity brings with it some wonderfully unsettling creatures that contain geometric infinites within them, along with the distilled feelings of grief and beyond. The combat is fairly standard stuff, although if you’re good at it you’ll never need to use healing items because you can actually heal after finishing a combo, sort of like in Nioh. I have no idea how that fits in, but it’s definitely very convenient. It’s probably because combat just doesn’t feel like the point of Hell Is Us. Instead it’s the investigation, exploration, and basic human kindness that are at its core.
You’re meant to wander around the beautiful and haunted landscapes, finding mysteries, people to help, and the odd dungeon to explore. I initially found all of this pretty exhilarating, and the game does a great job of making you feel like you’re clever enough to work all of this stuff out as well. However, a lot of the exploration ends up being restricted because of a knee-high obstacle you can’t cross, and a lot of the puzzles just turn into “where is the key I need for this specific door?” It loses its lustre pretty rapidly, and after only a handful of hours, I found myself more aggravated by each mystery instead of being excited to solve it.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the clues you get just get chucked into your inventory, which takes longer than it should to open up, and then you’ll need to find the specific bit of paper you were looking for, take a picture of it on your actual phone and then use that to solve the puzzle from there. I really want to like the design here, and sometimes I do, but it feels like a punishment for not having an eidetic memory. I have ADHD, which is pretty close to being the opposite of that, unless you’re asking me to recall how to perform a Hadouken or some D&D-related fact.
You’ll note that this means I’m a bit unconvinced by the two main ways the game lets you interact with it: both the combat and the puzzles. So, uh, you can see why I don’t love it. The characters and story are fairly interesting for the most part, and I do really like the general message of the game. I’m a sucker for anything telling us that the best way to save the world is to just help people out, and Hell Is Us does that a fair bit. I just wish it were less antagonistic towards the player.