Hell Is Us Review (PS5) – Hell Is A Place On Earth

Rogue Factor wants Hell Is Us to be a statement. An Experiment. Imagine if you could go back in time to an era before open worlds and quest markers and guiding tiny-attention-span gamers through their manufactured experiences. Instead, what if we did away with all that and you did it yourself, and we didn’t tell you where to go?

Imagine it. Wilderness, unknown terrain for hundreds of miles, no HUD, no icons, no directions, just you, your instincts, and your senses. And a Pip-boy, you know, for recording everything. It’s some gamers’ dream, it’s other gamers’ nightmare. This is what Rogue Factor has been selling us with Hell Is Us, an organic gaming experience without the modern-day handholding.

But can you make a game that never tells you what to do, or is it actually just hidden? Is it really as open as they want you to believe, or is it more linear than they make out? Does Rogue Factor’s intellectual experiment work, this ‘player plattering’, or is it just frustrating? Hell Is Us does tell you where to go. It’s just that, you know, you’ve got to read the items and logs, and listen to NPCs.

Hell Is A Place On Earth

Due to the entire premise of Hell Is Us, that each player has to discover the story for themselves, with no markers, no map, no quest, and little in the way of direction, we are being asked implicitly to avoid spoilers. Almost anything I talk about beyond the first two areas is going to involve a spoiler.

So gruff-voiced, curly blonde-haired Remi wakes, bound in a torture chair, drugged with truth serum. He’s being interrogated by a strange, fat man with an incredible case of the mumps. As the truth serum takes hold, he begins to tell his story – of how he infiltrated this wartorn state of Hadea, cut off from the outside, as part of a peacekeeping team. However, he was actually on the trail of his family.

Over the opening parts of the game, you track down your father’s whereabouts to a small town, uncover clues, and follow in his footsteps. But locating him is only the beginning. Your father was heavily involved in a mysterious cult-like order, neck-deep in the mysteries of Hadea. The civil war seems almost a surface-level window dressing, obscuring the issues beneath; strange white creatures have appeared across the state, dangerous timeloops scatter the landscape, and everywhere is mystery buried in the ground itself. Are these deeper mysteries actually what the civil war is about?

I’m being deliberately vague, because to be specific is kind of like giving you clues for finding your way in the game. Hell Is Us’ narrative never feels like it’s trying to throw a plot at you, or Hollywood action. Just a world to investigate, filled with revelations. And if you listen to NPCs and go exploring, it rewards your curiosity tenfold. The narrative seems to occupy that sweet spot I’ve been seeking for some years – the Lagrange point between Fromsoft’s enigmatic lore-based worldbuilding, and the plot-driven narratives behind things like Uncharted, or a Final Fantasy. Hell Is Us presents a compelling narrative mystery, far more so than something like Dark Souls, because what’s hidden in the items and NPCS and audio logs, actually drives the plot. I hope it’s a game-changing narrative style, because I love a good plot, but I also love a good soulslike.

Hell Is No Map – Exploration

There’s a lot of gameplay elements to cover in Hell Is Us. But let’s start with the basics. You have no real-time GPS map. What you do have is quest-specific or area-specific items and badly drawn maps and lore and information, with which to piece together where might be good to explore next. You quickly get control of an APC which you can drive to dozens of large open areas, that have towns in or tombs, and a lot of things to find. Hell Is Us is all about them relics, relics of Hadea’s past, linked to the strange creatures in its present.

You may not have a map, but you do have a Pip-boy, and it’s constantly recording everything everyone says, keeping track of items, relics, clues, codes, weapons, equipment, your drone, and plenty more besides. This is what you rely on, not the missing map. Let me give you an example of the quests and how they work without a quest marker.

NPCs will say things like the clue is in the Abbey. But you don’t have any information on where the Abbey is. Another will describe the Abbey as having a gold globe on its roof, or maybe you miss that and find the map a peacekeeper drew for himself, with a vague circle labelled Abbey, and you can then piece together where it is when you are back out in the swamp, by the other landmarks you can see. Once there, another NPC needs help, and so on.

Hell Is Other People

It’s an organic lived-in world that felt more real, more quickly than most run-straight-through open worlds. These NPCs live here, and they reference all sorts of things, like a real person might. There’s a system of doing ‘good deeds’ which is essentially finding items that you have a clue belong to an NPC, and then returning them, or reporting back the conclusion or whereabouts of another NPC.

You’ll meet a couple of more involved NPCs along the way, one of which takes up residence in your APC and talks through the drone. They are an expert in relics and the history of Hadea, and give you masses of clues as to how to progress beyond the initial find-your-family quest. They can unlock points of interest as you might get in an Assassin’s Creed game, and where vaults of hidden knowledge might be – weapon caches – which is pretty useful. It is the unfolding investigation into Hadea’s past and how its protectors are involved, and how it affects the creepy monsters, that is the driving force behind the plot.

Hell Is Enemies With Enemies Inside

The other thing apart from you roaming around these open areas are the Haze, those hole-faced jerky white creepozoids you’ve been seeing on the trailers since the first announcements. There’s a handful of types, from the basic figures, to larger ones with warped wings, or huge arms. And out of the hole in their chests, they very often birth a second enemy. This one is a neon-coloured geometric soul thing that acts like a second enemy, but also as a shield to the one that birthed it, meaning you can’t kill the original Haze until you deal with the geo shape shield entity. They change shapes and fire off projectiles, and demand fast reflexes and generally look like they came out of Returnal.

Cue the sort of pseudo soulslike combat. You have a handful of different weapon types – swords, polearms, dual axes – and your weird, creepy human drone – and you need to parry and attack these creatures. Parry is completely essential, but it’s only one of two systems working at the same time. The other is a damage-based heal. As you do damage, it collects as a ‘potential heal’ on your health bar, and you need to hit R1 at the right time after hits to bank it. Only trouble I found was that enemy counters and the heal trigger moment were almost always the same moment, forcing you to choose between parrying again and healing.

Healing like this makes for a really fun and aggressive type of combat, but getting the timing and space needed to heal was a lot like other soulslikes. And is it a soulslike? Not really. There’s some creepy dungeons, and a lot of parrying super-strong enemies, and a stamina gauge – maybe halfway to a soulslike. But there is no soul or equivalent currency, there is no death and constant rebirth, no bonfires or levelling in the soulslike sense. When you die, you just start again at the last save point, and you lose nothing.

Combat is complicated but also kind of intuitive. I found myself far more able to take this in with minimum instruction than to master the recent Wuchang combat, with dozens of tutorials and explanations. You also have your drone which can distract one enemy in a pack, or provide a projectile shield, and you have limbic moves, which are specials you can perform if you get the space, and you can hold three of them at once.

The enemy’s colours are tied to one of four limbic powers in the game, and can be countered, increasing your damage, by using the corresponding colour of sword or weapon. I found it best to have literally four different weapons – albeit variations of a sword – for each enemy and boss situation.

I also massively enjoyed the timeloop system, where killing a certain number of particular enemies let you deal with narrative portions and uncover more clues and scenes, and then return to the right NPC and get even more rewards.

Hell Is No Clue Where To Go

Hell Is Us doesn’t lack for inspiring and unique iconography and memorable designs. In a market where every game is beginning to look the same, it’s always nice to see a protagonist with a bit of a different look, here only really comparable to Metal Gear. The drone with its strange humanoid body, and the Haze creatures with the hollows in their faces and bodies, their geometric subcreatures – all are things I’ve never seen before. That white tipped sword. Even the symbols and magical icons, and relics all have a great look to them, and a working internal symbology that became memorable, maybe just due to the amount you had to engage with them.

Greg described the graphics as having a kind of ‘grim prettiness’ and he’s right. Hell Is Us isn’t going to change the world graphically, but it’s been beautifully designed to show itself off in the best ways. And musically, Hell Is Us doesn’t have just a few memorable tracks. It’s filled with eerie, ambient, droning and melodic glitches, all dissonant somehow, and yet, that’s the sound of Hadea. I remember areas and parts of the game vividly because of the creeptastic music that started as I was approaching. I will definitely be buying the soundtrack release and listening to it while I work.

Hell Is Getting A Little Bit Lost, But That’s the Point, Right?

Hell Is Us is pretty much what you bring to it. If you want something grown up, almost literary and demanding, this is it – you’ve got to listen to everything and pay attention. If you want mindless combat and a thrill ride, this won’t be the place to find it.

Rogue Factor have designed Hell Is Us to recapture that sense of satisfaction that we got decades ago, from uncovering everything a game had to offer on our own, rather than the modern open-world scenario of more markers than you can cope with, just clearing maps of icons. Hell is Us succeeds in that objective, but you can break it in a moment. You could resort to a guide, you could cheat, but where in most games I don’t think this causes much harm, in Hell Is Us, you’d only be robbing yourself of the experience. It’s been crafted to work this way.

Even though it starts off a little hard to penetrate, Hell Is Us succeeds in creating a compelling mystery. I soon grew obsessive about finding out the secrets of Hadea. Its atmosphere had me, and its style, letting me investigate this place with far less direction than usual, was welcome. It’s soon compelling you onward, each new area promising to build on the last, each new mystery, like a jigsaw piece fitting into place. I never felt like I was going the wrong way, because every route led somewhere interesting.

Open worlds of the modern era have grown stale, and I rarely seek out all the secrets and optional content – it so often feels like bare-faced filler. Hell Is Us compelled me once again to seek these optional parts out by making them the reward for mysteries solved, or through a sense of having earned them. In the end, I hope Hell Is Us’ impact is as heady as its ambition, as an actual game changer that affects the way developers create games in the future.

Hell Is Us is available 4th September on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series S|X and PC via Steam.

Developer: Rogue Factor
Publisher: Nacon

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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