Hell is Us overview
In Rémi Letam’s protection, I do not consider he thought wandering into an energetic struggle zone searching for his dad and mom was going to be a stroll within the park. Nonetheless, I do not suppose the man deserved to finish up kidnapped, tortured, and hooked as much as a fact serum drip: he did save the world, in any case.
Must know
What’s it? A creepy action-adventure journey by pseudo-Yugoslavia
Launch date: September 4, 2025
Anticipate to pay: $50
Developer: Rogue Issue
Writer: Nacon
Reviewed on: Home windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM
Steam Deck: Unsupported
Hyperlink: Official web site
There’s so much that occurs earlier than this. Hell is Us performs out as Rémi tells his story to an disagreeable consultant of the Ziel Council (not the IIlluminati). He tells them about how he grew to become an ON Peacekeeper (not UN) in Hadea (not Yugoslavia) solely to interrupt away to seek for his dad and mom, a quest that ends abruptly as he as a substitute battles horrifying monsters known as Hole Walkers and ends the apocalyptic Calamity. A enjoyable trip for anybody.
As Rémi arrives in Hadea, it’s damaged into civil struggle between the Palomists and the Sabineans, two ethnic teams that share the territory however have an extended historical past of violence. The latest eruption of violence has triggered the looks of timeloops and these Hole Walkers, or “lymbic entities,” which have occurred all through Hadean historical past.
The supernatural components are creepy and efficient, nevertheless it’s the setting’s roots in our current actuality that make Hadea work: legacies of ethnic battle, spiritual strife, nationalist manipulation of politics, and the ineffectiveness of out of doors forces to interrupt the cycles of violence.
Whether or not Rémi is additionally perpetuating cycles of violence by attacking every part he sees with a big axe is as much as interpretation.
Struggle fireplace with fireplace
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Catch-up overview
There have been just a few video games final 12 months that we did not have time to overview, so we’re kicking off 2026 by rectifying a few of these omissions. Sorry we’re late!
Most of Hell is Us is fight. There are three separate programs by which to kill: conventional combo- and parry-based melee fight, drone fight, and lymbic fight, that are particular powers accessible by glyphs that Rémi can connect to his weapons. Weapons and armor may be upgraded, as can glyphs and drone modules, and Rémi additionally has house for a passive and an energetic relic that additional modify his habits. For essentially the most half this vary of various programs feels distracting as a result of there are solely 5 completely different enemy sorts within the recreation.
Typically these enemy sorts are modified by bulbous offshoots of lymbic power that must be destroyed earlier than the precise enemy will take any injury, however you continue to spend the sport preventing mainly the identical issues your complete time. There are two (2) precise boss battles. The primary one I encountered felt so misplaced that I believed my recreation had glitched.
Fight itself is satisfying once you get right into a circulation: I caught with twin axes by a lot of the recreation, and getting the dangle of sending my drone off to distract whereas hammering a lymbic stun capacity was sufficient to drift by most battles. The intelligent therapeutic mechanic primarily based on what number of hits you possibly can land in a row meant that even more durable fights by no means really feel too brutal. However the lack of enemy variety meant I not often had any tactical motive to discover my abilities. As soon as I knew the way to method each enemy, fights depended primarily on timing and luck.
This is not helped by the truth that Hell is Us frontloads its weakest ranges. Early areas are supposed to be returned to, so there’s some sense to the simplicity of their construction, nevertheless it additionally means the components of the sport that you simply’re spending essentially the most time in are the least fascinating. Repeatedly preventing the identical 5 monsters on the identical flat patch of land by no means feels rewarding, simply boring. Theoretically that is an incentive to shut the neighboring timeloop, guaranteeing that you will solely should do these fights as soon as, however in apply the timeloop mechanic is annoying too.
All timeloops work the identical approach: after a sure quantity (unspecified) of “Timeloop Guardians” are destroyed, the timeloop may be entered, and Rémi’s drone drops a magical prism within the middle to blow it up. Destroying just a few of those is required however most are optionally available, and serve primarily to cease a stage’s monsters from respawning. There are just a few issues with how that is truly applied. The timeloop guardians look precisely like different monsters, so you do not know you are dealing with them till after they have been killed.
Rémi’s guardian locator is a bizarre wisp of wind that is not significantly useful in bigger maps, the place it is most wanted. You do not know what number of guardians it’s worthwhile to kill for a given loop, so if you would like to shut a loop you typically find yourself clearing your complete map, which is extraordinarily tedious. After which, after getting killed all of the guardians and entered the loop… there’s nothing to do.
There is no boss battle, no sense of problem to beat to realize the reward of closing it. You simply get your drone to nuke the factor and bounce. It is anticlimactic, and seems like a chore.
Be sure you write that bizarre S down
Exterior of fight, Rémi spends plenty of time doing puzzles. They’re in every single place. It’s humorous. I really like the thought of an historic society in the midst of a violent sectarian battle whose major cultural heritage is image matching.
The puzzles required for the primary quest are simple sufficient to determine so long as you take note of your environment and have a pocket book close by to jot down symbols or codes. There are secondary duties known as “Good Deeds” which can be basically smaller puzzles; they have an inclination to have options that require exploration throughout maps, and typically do not actually make a lot sense in context (I am nonetheless mad a few half the place I may hear folks screaming inside a barn and could not break open the door with my big-ass sword. I needed to deliver a can of gasoline to a completely completely different man to sneak them out on a ship. Certain, I suppose.) These duties are optionally available, so it is not an excessive amount of of a problem once you miss one, nevertheless it provides Remi one thing to do as he is exploring moreover hack and slash.
Exploration is the primary draw of the sport. It forgoes conventional maps and checkpoints, however that doesn’t trigger a lot of an issue—not one of the ranges are big, and it is arduous to get misplaced (except you are in a single specific mine. Fuck that mine.) So long as you are thorough, you must have every part you want once you arrive on the place you need to go. They’re additionally completely beautiful, and a few later ranges, that are extra linear and targeted, are genuinely glorious items of constructed storytelling.
Essentially the most spectacular was the Auriga Museum, during which you descend slowly by an R&D division in a state of emergency by managing the restricted energy provide, and discover two competing timeloops: one historic, from the museum’s founding, and one just lately established, so the museum’s researchers and the navy may experiment with the lymbic entities’ potential use in warfare.
The extra linear design permits Remi to expertise a whole narrative, first studying in regards to the Auriga Museum’s previous as he discovers it, then seeing the way it has been modernized and weaponized, and ending with the closure of the dual timeloops, the acts of violence that generated them echoing one another between tons of of years.
As a result of it may be accomplished in a single go, it would not overstay its welcome, and since there’s mainly just one solution to navigate by it, it is capable of house out enviornment fights (the closest factor it has to a boss battle), more durable monsters, and the timeloops in a approach that feels satisfying.
The problem is that, in areas that aren’t this tightly authored, exploration exposes the vanity of the remainder of Hell is Us’s programs. The extra monsters I killed, the clearer it was that the fight system solely has just a few tips up its sleeve. The extra puzzles I solved, the extra I noticed I used to be largely fixing the identical puzzles. The maplessness and checkpointless nature of Hell is Us works in opposition to it when the linear components of the sport are the strongest. And on high of every part else, even supposing it is 90% monsters and 10% story… it feels overwritten.
Much less is extra
Hell is Us’s visible design is simply too good for the lore to be shunted into multi-paragraph textual content dumps. NPC encounters are haunting, efficient, and completely overridden by the quantity of speaking-directly-to-camera-about-extremely-structured-historical-chronologies that Rémi endures. Every thing that the sport tells you can also be proven in a greater and extra impactful approach, nevertheless it would not belief its personal artwork to precise the story. Nature, the trendy buildings of Hadea, the traditional ruins, and the disruption of the timeloops and the Hole Walkers come collectively to construct a world that feels each actual and chillingly doubtless.
Hell is Us did not want to inform me outright that Hadea’s civil struggle is the newest occasion in an extended historical past of exploited violence with supernatural penalties: it is written all around the world. It is among the solely occasions in a recreation I can consider that I wished to know much less so I may think about extra.
Solely the later areas within the recreation actually let the environment do the heavy lifting. You have to get previous 10 hours of lore dumps and repetitive enemy encounters first, however the feeling upon getting into town of Marastan, trying on the our bodies and the looming monsters of their streets, after which listening to Palomist nationalist bulletins echo by the useless city. “Marastan is a mistake that wants correcting,” they are saying, and your mind fills within the blanks. You dread the issues that you simply later uncover: that Marastan was an try at an built-in city, {that a} terrorist assault was used as an excuse for anti-Sabinian riots, that the well-intended dream of brotherhood burst into the acts of violence that lured the monsters.
These moments the place Hell is Us trusts the participant are unbelievable—they’re simply few and far-between.
Virtually there
Hell is Us is overloaded with mechanics that it has little use for. Fight has too many choices for the samey encounters, Remi’s bought too many keys to match as much as too many doorways, and regardless of the emphasis on exploration, the perfect components of the sport are the components that briskly transfer you from one place to the subsequent.
That being mentioned, Hell is Us’s missteps underscore the components the place the sport actually works. It’s a beautiful recreation, and components of it have a number of the most unbelievable stage and character design I’ve seen in a scorching minute. It takes itself critically, and (absent its goofy body narrative) treats subjects of ethnoreligious battle, nationalism, and cyclical violence with an earnestness and care I discovered humbling. It has an actual eye for historicism and the constructed surroundings.
It may possibly, when every part is working correctly, really feel extraordinarily good to play, fluid and intuitive and sharp. It simply additionally asks you to spend far an excessive amount of time in the identical uninteresting areas, with the identical restricted monster sorts, beholden to the identical disappointing timeloop mechanic, ready for the half the place it will get good.