The opening hours of Hell Is Us are brilliantly confusing. The game tasks you with getting up to speed on a complicated civil war between the Palomists and Sabinians. A deluge of proper nouns is unleashed: Lymbic weaponry, Guardian Detectors, and more. But the clearest way the game communicates that you should feel utterly dumbfounded is through the cryptic stone panels scattered amid its ravaged, Eastern Europe-coded setting; you’re unable to actually read the text engraved in these tablets. At every turn in the first levels — a dank forest and then a fetid bog — meaning and, just as importantly, understanding, eludes.
In this manner of willful bewilderment, Hell Is Us evokes Hidetaka Miyazaki’s constellation of soulsborne hits. Like those games, notably Elden Ring, here beckons a world of esoteric symbols, puzzles, and inscrutably complex history. Combat also apes the cadence of quintessential Miyazaki titles: stamina drains with each thunderous strike, recuperating only in moments of panicked or planned retreat.
Yet that’s where the FromSoftware comparisons end. Hell Is Us is also a detective game: you are given a pleasingly chunky retrofuturistic datapad in which you store a small encyclopedia’s worth of information, and there are spider diagrams filled with leads to follow. To solve the game’s more devilish conundrums, you may wish to have a pen and paper on hand!
Befitting both its own name and game title, the fictional country of Hadea has fallen into war-torn carnage — in essence, becoming hell itself. The first hour shows the grisly aftermath of a firing squad and lynched bodies swinging from a tree.
