The opening hours of Hell is us are brilliantly confusing. The game is trying you to accelerate on a complicated civil war between pallomists and the Sabinians. A deluge of appropriate names is unleashed: lymbical weapons, tutor detectors, etc. But the clearest means that the game communicates that you should feel completely stunned is through the cryptic stone panels dispersed in the middle of its ravaged framework and coded in Eastern Europe; You cannot read the text engraved in these tablets. At each turn of the first levels – a humid forest then a foul peat bog – the meaning and, just as important, understanding, escapes.
In this way of voluntary perplexity, Hell is us evokes the constellation of Hidetaka Miyazaki of souls. Like these games, especially Elden ringHere invites a world of esoteric symbols, puzzles and inscribably complex history. Combat if not the cadence of the titles par excellence of Miyazaki: endurance drains with each thunderous strike, recovering only in moments of panic or planned retirement.
However, this is where Fromsoftware’s comparisons end. Hell is us is also a detective game: you have a pleasantly coarse retrofuturistic data in which you store the value of a small encyclopedia, and there are spider diagrams filled with tracks to follow. To solve the more diabolical puzzles of the game, you may want to have a pen and paper at hand!
According to its own name and game title, Hadea’s fictitious country fell into a carnage torn by war – in essence, becoming hell itself. The first hour shows the macabre consequences of a shooting team and lynching bodies swinging with a tree. Nearby, a soldier plays a gloomy melody on a violin. The bizarre white creatures track down the marshes and the windy plains; The gigantic orbs barbed wire with points – supposedly temporal curls – pulsat. These abnormal cracks in time and space are the result of the so-called “calamity”, and it belongs to the protagonist Rémi, a researcher from Gorpcore-Cum-Action-Hero, to return them to oblivion.
At the beginning, the game looks like a meli-melo of visual styles: dark landscapes, mannequin-type creatures, technical method of wear, gigantic swords to compete with rival cloud conflicts Final Fantasy VII. Slowly, it begins to merge, taking a sublime and haunted quality imbued with dream logic. Strangeness is aggravated by the pure density of dark puzzles. What exasperating kingdom shelters so many arcanic puzzles?!
There is much to treat Hell is us. This extends to his enemies which, although particularly powerful, invoke supporting beings via a bizarre and metaphysical umbilical cord. One is a white and humanoid creature; The other is a geometric enemy in bright colors. There is another wrinkle, because each color corresponds to an emotion: blue for sorrow, green for terror, etc. The metaphor is a bit hackney but powerful. These enemies are physical manifestations of the emotional wreckage of war. They wander in the landscape, including it of a surreal psychic quality. But symbolism is a little limited: how do you end the intergenerational sorrow? According to Hell is usby clearing it in two using infused rage hand axes.
There is a magnitude of ambition and imagination here but an uneven execution. Take our hero, who looks great in his beating and rain -resistant poncho, but speaks like a brutal and more cynical version of countless male gaming protagonists in the late 2000s. Looking at a mound of the size of the human bone cathedral, Rémi (played by Elias Toufexis, alias Adam Jensen God God Series) handles aloud: Sabinians can be the victims here, but the region is also strewn with pallomists. It is a strange and shocking line, to make this type of equivalence when faced with such monumental loss.
Image: Nacon
After the opening hours wonderfully disbubulates, Hell is us Loses a certain momentum. Hadea remains an attractive setting everywhere; The desire to shoot its different lactées never decreases. But the same cannot be said of the other narrative strata, that is, Rémi’s own personal trip to discover the fate of his parents and the place where he fled when he was young, or precisely calamity. The first is intended to propel the player’s exploration, but he does not compare himself. Without the narrative intrigue required, the plot comes down to unlocking a series of doors decorated with ornate glyphs. At one point, a character inadvertently sums up the prosaic intrigue: “So you found a door with a strange mechanism. What happened next?”
Meanwhile, the fight – which is an activity that you need to do a lot to decipher the strange event which caused the appearance of disturbing pale creatures – becomes by heart. My attention started to decrease around 15 by a possible 30.
It’s a shame because Hell is us made so many admirable and interesting. The real dungeons that fall under the semi-open areas of the game are a space symphony of claustrophobic passages and streams and altar. There is no waypoint or quest markers; You should carefully read journals for navigation indices (and sometimes use a compass). Another choice of intelligent design: you can only talk to characters about the information you have already discovered. At this time of video games often anodist and non -budget goal, where everything that could potentially limit the public of a game is carefully considered and often avoided, it is refreshing to play something that is so intentionally thorny.
While I go into this muddy and miserable earth, my mind continues to return to language and understanding: the codes, symbols, languages and customs of Hadea. It is clear that I only grasp only a tiny fraction of this millennial conflict. But there is another language more universal than the game seems to use, which it relays by the offending imagery: the misery of war.
Whatever time and place, violent conflicts break people in the same way, making them frighten, angry, avengers and, naturally, violent. Despite his myriad of gaps and pure information density, Hell is us Speak with clarity: of war, it is impossible to close the Pandora box once his ailments have escaped.
Hell is us Launches September 4 on the PS5, Xbox and PC.
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