REVIEW – With its first major release, Rogue Factor throws out the usual triple-A playbook and chucks the quest log, map, and guiding arrows straight out the window. Hell is Us doesn’t hold your hand – instead, it dares you to solve problems on your own. Playing the PlayStation 5 version made it clear: despite its clunky story and underwhelming combat, the game’s puzzles, exploration, and richly built world make for an experience that sticks with you. It’s a risky but admirable experiment that rewards careful players many times over.

Most triple-A games are designed to reach the widest possible audience, which usually means sanding down combat, exploration, and puzzles until there’s barely a challenge left. The result is often a hyper-guided, sterilized ride. Hell is Us does the opposite. There are no quest logs, no maps, no arrows telling you where to go. Instead, it puts its faith in the player’s wits, letting clever level design and puzzle construction shine. What you get is the thrill of real discovery – even if the fighting is middling and the story uneven.

Hell and Civil War

You step into the boots of Remi, a soldier sneaking back into Hadea, a mysterious nation cut off from the outside world. He returns seeking his parents and answers about why they smuggled him out as a child. Trouble is, he barely remembers them, and their fate is a complete mystery. That leaves him relying solely on his own intelligence to piece things together in a land torn apart by civil war and, for reasons unknown, invaded by bizarre otherworldly monsters. It’s a great hook that sets the stage for what Hell is Us does best: letting players dig up clues and put the puzzle together themselves.

Without the usual guidance tools, you’re forced to truly immerse yourself in Hadea’s semi-open hubs, which feels both refreshing and rewarding. While not a full open world, each area is packed with hidden dungeons, environmental puzzles, and desperate NPCs begging for help. Solving mysteries becomes real detective work: letters, relics, lost keys, or lengthy conversations – the kind you’d expect from old-school point-and-click adventures – all push you forward.

Whether you’re tracking down milk for a starving infant or flipping the right sequence of hidden switches to unlock a mysterious door, puzzles are consistently logical and entertaining without drifting into cheap obscurity. Nearly everything you find matters, and even the smallest trinket can later prove vital. Every discovery feels like it might be the missing piece to a problem you haven’t uncovered yet – which makes exploration exciting in itself.

Puzzle Overload

The variety of puzzles is one of Hell is Us’ strongest assets. Some tasks use your compass and landmarks to guide your path. Others feel ripped straight from a Zelda dungeon – like stepping on spike traps in the correct order to offer a blood sacrifice that opens a door. A handful of puzzle types repeat, such as mysterious locked doors marked with symbols, but most appear once, giving every location its own flavor. Smaller challenges also feed into bigger mysteries, adding a sense of momentum and purpose that keeps you digging deeper.

While the game never holds your hand, it does give you a basic lifeline: flowcharts that track key story beats, like important people and objects. That’s all the help you’ll ever need, since the game trusts you to decide how to use this knowledge. My only complaint is the cluttered menus and poor filters, which make hunting for a specific clue more annoying than it should be.

Side quests, meanwhile, offer no such support. The menu simply confirms their existence; the who, where, and what you’ll need are up to you to remember (or jot down). While that might sound tedious, it actually rewards attention to detail. Spotting subtle visual cues and making logical leaps is the heart of Hell is Us’ design. The game manages to challenge without ever becoming opaque or unfair – a tricky balance that Rogue Factor handles with confidence.

The Grind of Backtracking

Even when I stumbled upon something I couldn’t use right away, it only motivated me to comb through every corner of the environment. Returning to previously explored areas was always worth it – they often hid new clues. But the lack of widespread fast travel eventually grew tiresome, especially when I had to trudge back to the same spot for the tenth time. Still, I’d usually uncover a relic packed with lore, expanding Hadea’s fascinating history of cultural and religious schisms. These well-written bits of backstory are among the game’s highlights.

Thankfully, puzzles make up the bulk of Hell is Us, because combat rarely rises above “functional.” Fighting is basic to the point of monotony – you’ll spam the same one-button combo until monsters drop. Remi’s drone adds some flair, letting you distract enemies, stun groups, or spin Remi like a human buzzsaw. The healing mechanic, which works like an active reload system in shooters, adds a nice sense of timing-based tension. Unfortunately, by the second act the enemy variety dries up, combat grows stale, and I often just avoided fights once my weapons were leveled enough.

Monsters and a Bland Story

Of the four weapon types, only the dual axes felt fun to use. While you can equip two weapons at once, the game never pushes experimentation, leaving the emotion-based abilities underused. And that’s a shame, since they’re actually interesting: red “rage” powers unleash devastating damage, while blue “grief” abilities inflict debilitating status effects. A few of them are pretty inventive, but the combat system never lets them shine. At least the monsters are striking: pearl-colored, abstract horrors that look like melted sculptures, spewing grotesque manifestations of human emotions. They’re unlike anything I’ve seen in recent games, evoking the surreal terror of Alex Garland’s 2018 film *Annihilation* in the best way possible.

The world-building grabbed me, but the story didn’t. Remi is a forgettable protagonist whose emotionless, sociopathic traits serve only as an excuse for his dull personality. His partnership with a strong-willed journalist barely develops, and the supposedly menacing main villain ends up sidelined with little payoff. The game opens strong, builds momentum through its lengthy second act, then collapses in a rushed final act that leans too heavily on combat and ends with a flat conclusion that betrays the buildup.

Hell is Us feels like a modernized throwback to classic action-adventures – and as a third-person game, it can’t escape including combat. Thankfully, the investigation and exploration are far more developed than the fighting, which at least remains tolerable as filler. Even after the credits rolled, I kept thinking about the puzzles I hadn’t solved and the mysteries still left to uncover. Hell is Us isn’t flawless, but it’s a bold and respectable debut that lays a solid foundation for whatever comes next in its strange and fascinating world.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”

Publisher: Nacon
Developer: Rogue Factor
Genre: Action-Adventure
Release: September 4, 2025