Balance in a game usually concerns developers making sure a weapon isn’t too powerful in a multiplayer shooter or that every character is worth playing. But there’s also balance that needs to be achieved in friction, and Hell Is Us, developer Rogue Factor’s exploration-focused action-adventure game, deftly achieves it.
Friction in video games often refers to design choices that may trade in the smooth quality of life considerations we expect for decisions that might frustrate us, crafting an intended gameplay experience. For example, friction in Dragon’s Dogma 2 can be found in the way it limits fast traveling, making the player experience arduous journeys rather than teleporting past them.
Rogue Factor wanted Hell Is Us to be a very friction-heavy game. One of its opening messages is a statement about how the game won’t have maps or quest markers, and it’s up to you the player to put in the work of piecing together the game (or turning toward a guide — no shame). The statement is so self-serious it borders on parody, yet it’s also a tad endearing. Rogue Factor clearly is aping from Soulslike game design, which tells players jack shit about the world around them, but the developer doesn’t go full hog; Hell Is Us, either intentionally or accidentally, guides players just enough that it strikes an engaging balance with its friction.
Hell Is Us puts players in the poncho and ball cap of Remi. It’s the early 1990s, and he’s returning to his home country of Hadea, from which he was smuggled out of as a child, in search of his parents. He comes upon some ruins where he encounters horrifying demonic creatures — pale figures with circular voids for faces and oval black holes encompassing their torsos. A soldier takes some down with a special (and also pale) weapon, but dies in the process. Remi takes her gear, including her poncho, sword, and drone, and is off on his demon-killing way. How is he so good with a sword? What, you aren’t?
Remi’s investigation takes him across the country of Hadea. In its current state, Hadea is a ruinous battlefield. Its wounds of war seep with agony; nearly every location Remi visits, like a government research center and a national library, is littered with corpses. They’re victims of a civil war between factions that, up until recently, seemingly got along fine. Hell Is Us does well in not painting one side as obviously “good” and the other “bad.” Both the Sabinians and the Palomists religious factions commit atrocities against the other side, and all the people of Hadea suffer.
Religion is inherently tied to the history of Hadea, as Remi learns. There’s a lot of great lore to be discovered through the various levels, and players who love to comb through documents, books, and the like will have plenty of reading material to investigate here. Hell Is Us never explicitly reveals why the pale demons have sprung up around Hadea or how they’re connected to the civil war, but there are enough clues that players can piece together. I’ve probably found about two-third of the various collectibles, but, having completed the main story, I feel like I have a rather good grasp over just what plagued this land.
Remi carries around a rudimentary tablet that includes investigation boards, collectibles, and his loadouts. Notably, there’s no map data, meaning players will have to commit Hadea’s lands to memory. And though the investigation boards are very informative, they sometimes don’t explicitly tell players to go there or do that. Instead, research will reveal that a mechanic in Talju knows about someone Remi needs to talk to, and finding that mechanic will point Remi toward where he should investigate next.
In addition to the main investigations, optional mysteries and Good Deeds in Hell Is Us encourage players to listen to its characters and deduce what they need — I know the soldiers hiding out in the Acasa Marshes need medicine and a radio, and I keep that in the back of my mind — but the game doles out no punishment for getting anything wrong. I can offer to trade medicine and a radio to any NPC I encounter, and there’s no reason not to; if an item isn’t offered to the correct recipient, the NPC will just decline it. (Oh, the soldiers were dead when I returned to them, items in tow, by the way. Suppose I wasn’t quick enough.)
Puzzles abound in Hell Is Us, and that’s where the real friction lies. Remi has to solve a puzzle to do just about anything. Sometimes they’re rather easy, like just referencing a document to correctly guide me on where to place orbs in statues. Other times they require a bit more legwork, like scouring the portraits hanging in a government office for information gleaned from the dates and numbers mentioned. Those dates and numbers form a safe passcode, which is only discovered when tuning a radio to a certain frequency, and that frequency is only learned from carefully reading a note on a computer — you see where I’m going with this.
Hell Is Us does a good job of scattering everything the player will need to solve its puzzles throughout levels. It feels like it’s explicitly for the type of player who wants to spend a fair chunk of time combing through notes to deduce a solution on their own.
If there’s one potential fatal flaw in Hell Is Us, it’s the combat. Not that hacking away at demons isn’t a good time — I quite enjoy it, once I learned the game’s rhythm — but Hell Is Us is severely lacking in enemy variety, which makes the gameplay loop real repetitive real quick. Every enemy is a variation of the pale demons. There are no animals, humans, or other entities to fight. And those demons come in a few different forms — some move like creepy dancers, others throw projectiles from atop their perches — but they all mostly look the same. Some are tethered together by emotional Hazes, floating and colorful geometric shapes, that spawn from their bodies and must be defeated before the demons can be killed. Once you’ve slayed your way through the game’s first act, you’ve basically seen all that Hell Is Us will throw at you.
While the game has the look and feel of a Soulslike, thankfully it doesn’t lean into all the trappings of the genre. Case in point: dead enemies will stay dead, for the most part. While staying in one of the various levels, like the Vyssa Hills, for example, any killed enemies will remain dead even after you die or save at a checkpoint. This is a welcome way to ensure the repetitive nature of the combat doesn’t grow too stale, as you don’t have to worry about killing the same foes if they take you down. Leaving an area and returning to it will respawn enemies, but closing all of a levels’ timeloops — massive domes that have trapped unfortunate souls inside — will make sure any dead enemies stay dead permanently (on default settings).
While its lack of variable enemies to slay drags down the experience a tad, Hell Is Us is still a wonderfully gripping game. Over the course of my 25 hours in Hadea, I frequently spent entire afternoons scouring its levels or stayed up way past my bedtime so I could keep exploring further. It may not be as obtuse as developer Rogue Factor intended, but I appreciate a game that knows when to guide and when to allow me to get lost.
Hell Is Us is out now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Nacon. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
