I can’t say I was particularly enthused by the preview coverage I had seen of upcoming third-person action adventure Hell Is Us. I’m an absolute pervert for a Soulsesque game, but with every other game being announced taking Dark Souls as its jumping off point, with its weighty weapon animations, reliance on parrying and dodging to mitigate incoming damage, and adherence to a ‘stamina’ system that sees your character unable to act until they’ve regained some puff, it's hard to get excited at the prospect of another. Hell Is Us didn’t, in previews, look like it was doing anything much different with the formula, and what I saw, I wasn't particularly interested in.
But then, they released a demo.
I have to take a moment here to expound on the beauty of demos. I’m of the age to have had demo tapes and floppy discs taped to the front of games magazines, so I still find something slightly magical about the ability to play the game (or at least a bit of it) for free! It speaks of a certain confidence to me; there’s the underlying statement of, “we’ve made this and reckon it’s good, and if you give it a chance you will too.” It’s bold. But it’s also in demos that one can see the core of what the developers want you to know about the game: what they choose to bring to your attention or elide, what they think you should find intriguing and satisfying about the thing.
And I enjoyed the demo of Hell Is Us a whole lot.
It starts with a cutscene, and you’re immediately thrown into a world of AA strangeness. We meet our protagonist, Remi, voiced by Deus Ex’s Elias Toufexis, and very much out of the stoic white guy range of yesteryear, BUT, and this is important, with a blonde perm!
It is at this point you know the developers are not anglophone. I don’t know how that’s clear, but it is. It’s the right kind of just off that could only come out of Europe. The developers, Rogue Factor, are from Montreal as it happens, so the point about stands.
Remi is strapped to a wheelchair being IV’d with what turns out to be a truth serum, and we meet our interrogator, and just look at this guy:
He’s so almost a different art-style: a grotesque Innsmouth by way of Demon’s Souls' ‘Fat Official’, that it captivates. It’s delightfully off. It’s the kind of choice that makes you think either that the developers don’t get it, and have misfired wildly, or completely get it. I haven’t played the full game. I don’t know how ultimately that’ll play out, but there’s enough here for confidence.
The fat official questions Remi and we get some backstory: Remi managed to get through the lines of a war-torn place called ‘Hadea’—again, a name obvious enough to be a bit clever. Your man wants to know why and how Remi got in. Remi is (was?) looking for his parents and it’s suggested this won’t be an idealised unattainable of a relationship. There's some animosity there. Remi was an “ON Peacekeeper,” which got him in where he took off, and this is where the game starts.
Now, I have a couple of confessions to make, both of which prove me to be very much not the model of an intended player. The first is important here: I’m an inveterate cutscene skipper / ignorer. Games usually frontload cutscenes, and I usually just want to get on with the thing to see if I actually enjoy it. This has the side effect of giving me very little investment in the plot of a game, so by the time I might care about what is happening to my little guys, I very much don’t / can’t. Hell Is Us shows the benefit of being just strange enough to form a connection.
The gameplay starts proper with Remi in a terrible outfit. The kind of disgraced-actor baseball cap and shapeless anorak that stank in the first Watch Dogs, and unappeals here. I will say this is paired with a rather fetching fisherman chunky-knit jumper, so it’s not completely wretched, and I know from screenshots that we’ll soon be moving on from this ensemble, so I can forgive it for now.
Taking control, I walk in in the intended direction, trying out all the buttons to see what verbs I have, or what their anaemic placeholders suggest I will be able to do: nothing yet. But I’m not confined to the injured-tutorial-limping which most games start with, so that gets a tick. You (I? This is real seat of the pants, working out the preferred pronouns of game interaction stuff here) start moving down a hill; there’s a little ravine on the right. Can you walk off the path? Yes you can! This is a small moment of interactive delight, working contra to the strict and narrowly linear path of many opening moments. I’m in a stream. Years of playing games has reinforced that I should always try to go against where it’s telling me to go—this is where they hide things. I find a little stone of indecipherable text which I can interact with to view. I immediately think of puzzle games like Fez, where one must gather data to parse an incomprehensible language. I’m simultaneously intrigued and delighted by this, and filled with dreadful forebodings of trawling through SEO’d-to-buggery game guides online.
I carry on. It’s a nice forest, with some spookily rustic graves. It soon gives out onto a farmhouse which has, charitably, seen better days. It’s ruined, there’s a dead cow, and a churned wasteland sits beyond its fence. This is the good stuff. Resident Evil 4 is a clear nod here, and creates a feeling of out-of-time-ness. Having a game with the trappings of modernity often means hours mired in the grey, corrugated boxes of factories and warehouses. The future is a shipping container; it’s hard for these places to evoke anything but transitoriness. This here at least suggests a neargone pastorality contrasting the grim wartorn present.
We go down into the cellar, and we meet our first NPC, an elderly farmer. He gives us a few proper nouns and fleshes out the situation: there are two factions at each other’s throats, the Palomists, and Sabonists, an enmity rooted in religious differences stretching back generations. War erupted after the brutal dictator, President Yankel (a terrible name), who turned the country “into a prison”, topped himself. There are also a third force, the ON, who have sent ‘peacekeepers’ into, well. It’s not clear who they work for, but I imagine they’ll be shown as a set of bastards in time.
The farmer has four sons, three of them dead, and the fourth missing. A sidequest, then. He gives us a key to the gate outside further into the forest, and we leave.
There’s a cow outside. A living cow. You may not pet the cow.
Interacting with the gate outside is straight out of the newer Resident Evil titles: a zoom in on the lock, a floating menu of key items. Selecting the key gives a satisfying animation of the key inserting and turning.
Into the forest and we can fully hear how much effort has gone into the sound design. Wind chimes hang from the trees, their delicate tinkling acting as an aid to navigation. The devs are clearly proud of their spatial sound tech. For those hard of hearing or preferring visual aids, you can turn on some truly ugly and intrusive directional sound indicators, but they seemed to work solely for these wind chimes and nothing else in the demo as far as I can tell, so their utility seems suspect.
The sound design is incredible here. The foley work is clear and crisp and reactive. And this battles with another of my cardinal sins of interaction: not only do I skip cutscenes, I usually have a podcast on the go when I’m playing something. Play video games is as much about having something to do with my hands while I’m listening to something, as it is about the joy of the game itself. Of course, these twinned sensory demands have no small part in the rotting of my attention span, and remove me from both enough to not truly engage with either. But having played the demo through once, I went back and played it again through headphones. Surprising no one, this is a superior way to do it.
The music is also excellent: the sort of melancholy electronic droning and fizzing I associate with Disasterpiece, and their incredible soundtrack to It Follows. Its welding of digital and analog sounds, distorting and crackling, speak to no particular time but perhaps a decayed once-future.
This forest is large, a maze in truth. And it is here that the originality of this demo shone for me. So much of any demo is about setting the mechanical agenda for the game. Usually by this point I would have met a threat and be wading into the fighting system (as that’s what it usually is). I’ve been in this for about 10 minutes or so. I don’t have a weapon yet, and I’m running around a forest. Of course, I’m alive to the possibility that I’ll be forced into a fight at any point, but they’ve also given me cairns and winding paths with only a compass for guidance. This is a bold choice for a third-person action game. I like the decision to foreground exploration, atmosphere, and puzzlement even at the risk of losing impatient players.
After a while I reach a clearing with an APC, some ruins, and a wounded soldier. The soldier tells me his squad are inside the ruins. His captain has the key to the APC, and it’s that we’re after.
There’s a ladder. We climb up and it’s the first puzzle! An honest to goodness find-the-symbols, then-turn-the-things so the symbols match. We can only see two of the symbols, a kind of fiery eye and a tower, so the third will be guessing. There are only three possible symbols, so it’s easy enough. Turn the things and click! A rumble of stone moving. Heading back down to the ruins’ entrance, I spot the third broken-off symbol on the floor. There’s a lovely feeling of, “Oh! I could have spotted that before. Better keep my eyes open.”
The ruins are now open and I descend. The way behind us crashes down after a bit, as of course it would. We’re now in an actual Tomb Raider-esque, Dark Souls dungeon. There are bones and cages and old stone pillars, but also snaking cables and floodlights. It puts me in mind of the for-me formative Gamecube horror title, Eternal Darkness, with its revisiting of ancient tombs through time. We’re now and in the past.
The soldiers have had a rough time down here, and we soon meet the first enemy which we’ll be fighting: a Hollow Walker. A kind of juddering, emaciated humanoid with a hole for a face, and a sort of blazing red energy thing spews out of it.
Remi fires at it, which of course does nothing. He bumbles backwards, about to be merced when were saved by a sort of samurai badass (SB) wearing a poncho. A balletic and expensive-looking cutscene plays as the SB and the transforming red crystal entity duel.
SB kills the red thing with her special-looking runic sword, but oh no! She didn’t see the white gremlin popping up behind to skewer her. She kills it for Remi, but she’s done.
Remi, knowing the value of a good poncho when he sees it, pops it on. Plus a sword and a drone. We’re the Billy Big-Bollocks now.
Now, I’m conflicted about all of this. First, the enemy designs. Whilst there is an eeriness and uncanny quality to the way they move, there’s visually not much to them. Whilst traditional zombies are over-used to the point of tedium now, it’s easy to see why they’re effective: they convey misery and anger and torment. There is enough humanity there to resonate. These are blanks. Furthermore, the joy of coming across new enemies in these types of action games is in seeing how they reinforce the themes of the biome they’re in, acting as a vector for environmental storytelling, and for seeing how the game’s artists have been able to express their creativity. These don’t quite work as a vehicle for horror, and their variations on the same theme don’t spark quite the same intrigue as a startling new design. There are a few different variants through this demo, but they’re all similar enough to not quite spark the joy of discovery, the feeling of, “What is that?”
Admittedly, the red animating energy which erupts from these enemies is striking in its design: a vivid red quartz which fluctuates and recombines into various offensive postures. It’s cool looking, but too non-human or biological to incite horror or glee at its malformation.
There’s also a trope used here which I find jarring: that of the hyper-competent fighter making an incredibly rookie error and being offed by your standard mook. The kind that you’ll tear though as a matter of course. I understand why it’s done: it’s supposed to signal how dangerous these enemies are, that you should stay aware of your surroundings and spacing in combat, and reinforces just how cool and good you, the player, are to be walking over them. But it’s so clearly going to happen as to paint your ninja-flipping saviour as slightly risible. Maybe that’s the point? Remi certainly doesn’t seem to give a shit, and is just glad for the free poncho.
We carry on through the dungeon. Our new little drone buddy (that mercifully isn’t a wisecracking sidekick) can scan and decipher the strange glyphs, putting paid to my hope that you’d be deciphering them yourself. But maybe that’s for the best. Your drone also has the ability to distract enemies, making group fights more manageable, and is extensible with new abilities not seen in this demo. The drone is a neat touch overall, adding more potential for engagement in combat.
There are more puzzles, of the find-the-clues and match-the-things variety, with some nicely spooky and aged murals of serpents and towers. There is also a further door locked, ala Resident Evil, with animal-themed crests.
Controversially, there is not a boss fight at the end of the dungeon. There are some enemies which are tougher, but nothing of the usual terrifying spectacle used in similar games. Hell Is Us seems surprisingly lenient in this opening stretch generally. There are usable health items, which don’t seem to replenish, but building up strikes on enemies creates a white ring around Remi, which can, with a well-judged button press, restore health, similar to the ki-pulse system in Nioh. This meant that, even if I couldn’t consistently judge the correct timing of the pulse, I generally had enough health to be going on with.
The whole health and progress management system deviates from the Souls template considerably. There doesn’t seem to be a bonfire-like system where resting recovers needed resources and health, but repopulates enemies. The save system is instead a large glowing tape-recorder icon which simply saves progress. These also allow for fast-travel to the APC when it’s unlocked, but intriguingly, this does not repopulate the enemies around you. Having not died, I don’t know what repopulates on subsequent attempts, but the decision to not have you constantly battling the same enemies is a bold one.
Further there is a desolate, Somme-inspired battlefield; an alien, inaccessible tower; more notes and findings; enemies. We make out way back through a snaking loop to the APC. Unlocking it we can enter it, switching to first-person mode. In here we can check our inventory, although eh screen isn't different from the one you can bring up any time, and we can move on. There is also a rack of shotguns and rifles which you may not use. Now I understand they seem impervious to handgun bullets, but surely you'd give a shotgun a go, right? Remi seems deeply incurious about testing this, ignoring them without comment. We travel to the next area where the demo ends. On our journey we're shown the vehicle traversing a map, which seems frankly cruel in that mapping technology seems out of reach for Remi and our droid. A shadowy anime character appears on the APC's screen to threaten Remi, but he's far too cool for that shit.
I came away from this demo feeling inspired and intrigued, but somewhat cautious. They are clearly taken inspiration from everywhere, and this does feel unique. There is enough strangeness and boldness in choices that I’d like to see where it goes. It comes out in a few days. I will look to the reviews of it to see if my hopes are well-founded, or my fears are confirmed. It’s in the unfortunate position of being released on the same day as the rabidly-hyped Silksong, a follow up to the remarkable Hollow Knight, which I too am anticipating, even if I’m mildly cooler on Hollow Knight than the internet would like. My game-purchasing power is little, so a first-day purchase is unlikely but not impossible. But I will look to and hope for its success, and anticipate playing the full-fledged experience.
