Hell is Us (2025)

Neat game. Fusion of Dark Souls/The Surge 2 combat with a semi-open world. Also kind of a Tomb Raider vibe with exploring lost civilisations and picking up bits of lore accompanied by many puzzles. I don't usually like puzzles that much, but I enjoyed solving them in Hell Is Us because a lot of lore is hidden behind them.

By far the best part of the game is the world building, general atmosphere, and sense of exploration. The way that the writers don't shy away from depicting pretty brutal war crimes was admirable. They kept it pretty realistic, only occasionally swerving into almost moustache-twirling tier villainy. I have yet to come across a game where this subject matter was handled in such a way.

The game had a lot of different options for combat, but there weren't many situations where the multitude of options were necessary and you could mostly just get by with parrying and the occasional skill use for added flair. Most weapons felt same-y as well. I went with the double axes. More enemy variety and different, interesting placement would have gone a long way. The enemy design was bizarre and interesting, but due to their nature it was rather hard to understand what the monsters were doing. Only later did I get the parry timings locked down.

The ending is the worst part of the game for sure. At the 80% mark, the quality of the writing took a sudden nosedive. I won't spoil anything, but I like what they did with the player character and I enjoyed him up to that 80% mark — a bit of quippy Marvelism snuck its way in by the end that killed the character that he was set up as. The actual ending felt like it came out of nowhere and left too many loose threads for my liking.

The whole soundtrack is pretty low-key, but I enjoyed it. Audio was generally very satisfying. Enemy sounds were properly eerie, and the background music had elements that felt like they were inside of the world. Killing all the timeloop guardians was a treat every time with the insane modulation and bass. I think there were only a few tracks that didn't land at all and felt out of place. They were very intense and angry, but it didn't feel as if they had earned that level of energy without building up to it first.

The art style, sound, concept, and gameplay were good, but the ending fell short. The combat also got stale towards the end, although it wasn't overly long so didn't impact the experience much. I did enjoy the exploration and lore found throughout the environment and items.

Hopefully there is a sequel that expands upon the story, because there is a lot of potential. If the ending was good and answered any questions I had, then I would have given it 4 stars.

In 1991, after a decade of trying to hold the country together after the death of Josip Tito, Yugoslavia fell into a period of prolonged war. A generation of immigrants and refugees from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo fled to Canada and other countries to avoid the conflict. Nevertheless, 30+ years later, there is still a certain ethnic tension between the diaspora here in Canada; as a Balkan Slav, I have seen it first hand... To be a Serb or a Bosniak or a Croat is a badge of honour; as it is to be a Kosovar, an Albanian, a Macedonian. Despite being located in a relatively small corner of the globe, these are people divided by lines of culture, religion, language and nationalism. Sometimes, they all get along. Sometimes, they are at in what seems like a perpetual cycle of war and peace. My family came to Canada, in part, because of the persecution of ethnic Macedonians in Greece in the early 20th century. My great-grandfather was an officer for both Greece and Yugoslavia in their fight against Italian and German fascism.

It is with this context that I analyze Hell Is Us. I suspect, having been developed in Montreal, that the creators of this game may have experienced something similar; perhaps not with the Balkans, perhaps it was the Middle East, perhaps it was post-colonnial Africa. The way humans can be family one day, and fierce enemies the next, knows no boundary of land, time or culture. We are presented with two peoples - the Palomists and Sabinians. Two peoples with an ancient history, presently locked in a brutal civil war - a civil war that has happened many times in history. The cause is not particularly important to those in the heat of it; they simply suffer. They lack food and medicine, they lack basic shelter, they face the underside of an invading militia's boot... And you see all this happening in real time. You see this suffering, and the game really doesn't pull many punches in depicting the horror of this war, nor of those that came before it.

Hell Is Us takes the misery of civil war and mixes it with mythology. What if these cyclical wars were not merely human folly, but events that summoned even greater peril? What if sleeping gods - if they ever existed - sent their minions to punish and destroy dominator and dominated alike? And what if the answer to fighting these creatures was not simply with weapons, but with knowledge? Knowledge of the past, knowledge of the mistakes of our predecessors?

It's that mix of reality and fantasy - paired with some incredibly bold artistic choices, both visually and aurally - that make Hell Is Us something truly special. It explores some themes that take a lot of nuance and care to get right, but it does it in a way that's supremely interesting thanks to a cohesive artistic vision, and heavy use of visual metaphor.

It has some problems, sure. The combat is a chore on higher difficulties, and I do recommend playing this one on "Easy" and playing more for the story and setting than the mechanics. But what you'll find here is a game with a fascinating structure - eschewing the open world for a series of smaller zones that are, nonetheless, quite dense in content and varied in things to do. I was never bored playing Hell Is Us, there was always another cool thing on the horizon, or another item in my inventory I didn't quite know what to do with yet, or another puzzle I was missing a clue for. It just barrels forward in such a way that you are always considering the next mystery.

And to that end, the way this game does puzzles and wayfinding is... Amazing. There's always a clue, but never yellow paint. "I saw strange runes somewhere around that tower." They're there; but there's no holographic waypoint line showing you where it is. Puzzles are often vague, or perhaps deliberately lack a missing piece, but they are always coherent enough that you can figure them out. Sometimes, you will have three pieces of a puzzle - a fourth is out there, but you haven't found it yet. Still, you have enough to solve the puzzle; keep trying the 4th piece of the code until the mechanism clicks open. The way these are done is utterly genius, and evocative of what real archeologists often have to deal with - having incomplete knowledge and making a logical guess at what the missing piece means.

I loved this game, a lot. There's nothing else like it, and the creative team behind this one were absolutely cooking. It's a strong frontrunner for my GOTY, and a strong recommendation.

This game is just so... different. I don't think I will ever be able to look at games the same way after playing this one. There are no markers, no map, you actually need to listen what NPCs say and read what is written everywhere. You need go around (a lot) and look for clues and items. And it is so refreshing! Finally, you actually need to THINK in the game, not only follow pins on the map.

Puzzles are really good and some of them take some time to figure out. You don't just find a safe code written on the wall next to you, no way. Sometimes you need to go to another city to find some note somewhere which guides you where to get the code from. Ok, it means a lot of backtracking but it is so fun :D

The story is really interesting, referring to both ancient times and current events. However, it relates to war and quite serious topics which might bother some people.

Each location is totally different and usually with a lot of "layers". Discovering them is quite fascinating. Sound effects are spot on, I got goosebumps sometimes. Fighting is nice, you can make it harder or easier and use different weapons or effects. I personally liked it but it is not the most important feature in this game.

Summing up, this game is for patient people who like slow gaming, reading, like to discover and solve a lot of puzzles. If you are looking for souls-like with multiple bosses and complicated fights, then this is not for you.

I wish there were more games like this one, spent 50 hours in it and I don't regret even a minute :)

I wasn't really looking forward to playing this because I'm kinda done with soulslikes (it has enough elements of the genre to be described as such), but it turned out to be great and now one of my favorite games of the year.

Why? Beacuse of the lore and the exploration. This game has an amazing mythology the practically includes all the mythology and past history of a fictional eastern european country beautifully embeded in all the aspects of the experience, including one of the best examples of environmental storytelling I've seen. And then is the exploration of the semi open world where the game NEVER mark when you should go or what to do next.

You can read my full review in spanish here.

Ah. Its also one of the best representations of the horrors of war I've seen in a videogame.