Hell Is Us – creepy and weird, in a good way (Nacon)
A brand new IP from a little known developer is one of the most intriguing titles for 2025, with a mix of Dark Souls and This War Of Mine.
There’s always been a debate over when the best time is to announce and show off a new game. Previously, the average was a year or two before release, with a regular stream of trailers and preview events in-between – depending on the nature of the title. More recently though that has shrunk to less than a year and sometimes there’s no proper hands-on previews at all, if the publisher thinks the game is sufficiently high profile that it’s not worth risking any negative feedback.
Hell Is Us was first announced in April 2022 and we admit we completely forgot about it until this preview, and initially assumed it was being unveiled for the first time. It might as well have been though, as that first teaser trailer didn’t give much away and our first half hour with the game was equally perplexing.
Director Jonathan-Jacques Belletête initially spent some time explaining the back story to the game, of a civil war in the fictional country of Hadea, designed to be reminiscent of the various warring Eastern European countries of the 90s. You play as Rémi, who has defected from the UN to try and find his parents. Everything seems rather bleak and hopeless… and then the monsters turn up.
Considering Canadian developer Rogue Factor only has 50 developers, the first impressions of Hell Is Us are extremely good. The graphics are great, with a very realistic looking forest and a foreboding atmosphere, even when nothing out of the ordinary is going on.
Initially, you’re simply searching for your parents, but since you have no real idea where they are this involves looking for any signs of life and trying to work out from the few remaining locals what has been going on and where everyone has evacuated to.
Although it looks like it’s going to be, the game isn’t actually a survival title, but it certainly does a very good job of making you feel that everything in the world is against you, as you explore abandoned cow sheds and make your way through dark forests with no signposting – either literal or in the video game sense of the term.
Belletête is very keen to point out that there is no GPS (the game is literally set in the 90s) and no waypoint markers or other guides to tell you where to go or what to do. You don’t even have a compass. Nevertheless, the first proof of this – when a wounded UN soldier asks you to go back to his camp to retrieve some medical supplies – works very well. You’re told to follow lights hung in the trees, but these are not as obvious as the soldier makes it seem and you have to carefully trace your steps in order to …read more
Source:: Metro
