HellSign is essentially a bare-bones isometric ARPG dungeon crawler that goes for something quite a bit different than the formulaic hack and slash.

You pick a class and some starting gear and head to your first haunted house to explore for signs of supernatural infestation. You might be a 'ghostbuster' but this isn't the typical ARPG

Not quite a hack and slash, not quite a stealth game and not quite a Survival Horor, the game borrows elements of all three and at times borders close to feeling like one.

The game consists mainly of grinding and repeating missions over and over to level up to gain you an 'edge' to access the next tier dungeon.

The freeform objective system is a pretty nice aspect of this game. Complete as many or as little as you like and onto the next mission

You have perks, skills equipment and various other consumables and ammo types to help your haunted house explorations and improve your odds of survival. Your quest is to farm for artifacts and make money. Searching every nook and cranny of a haunted house using weird ghost detection equipment that works in different ways and in different environments!

This aspect of the treasure-hunting is really what makes the game enjoyable (or tolerable) you have to listen carefully for demonic voices on a radio, or the clicks of your geiger counter. Its a very creepy, atmospheric tone. The experience did remind me a bit of STALKER (although i had just played it)

There are occasional cutscenes in the game that are pretty neat but I wish there were more and the story is rudimentary at best.

For a ARPG/dungeon crawler, the combat is kinda fast paced, hectic and actually not all that fun. It occurs when you trigger 'events' that you hope to avoid, but when you do its typically a very fast encounter and hopefully you dont die.

The neat thing about this game is you dont have to 'clear' dungeons you can access tougher ones (that have better rewards per artifact you find) and after hanging out for a little bit, leave when you feel like it! As you get tougher you can comb deeper, getting the completion bonuses and tackling on the bosses of the level (if you dare)

All in all I enjoyed this. It's got some really good ideas, but it's a very rough cut of a game that feels like it could still be tinkered with and balanced a bit more. There's not a lot of substance here behind the ideas of the gadgets and that of the Cryptonomicon.