Hell is Us Deluxe Edition

I went into Hell is Us expecting a Soulslike with grotesque creatures and stamina bars. What I got was closer to a notebook-and-patience simulator wrapped in one of the bleakest war narratives a video game has attempted in years, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. You play as Remi, a UN peacekeeper who goes AWOL to sneak back into Hadea, a fictional Soviet-Bloc-adjacent country shattered by civil war and then further broken by a supernatural catastrophe called the Calamity. The Calamity has spawned creatures called Hollow Walkers, manifestations of grief, terror, ecstasy, and rage that stalk the land. The human factions, meanwhile, commit atrocities that frankly make the monsters look pedestrian. Rogue Factor is not subtle about what Hadea represents, and the writing earns its darkness without sliding into empty shock value. The design choice that defines everything here is the refusal to guide you. There is no minimap, no quest log, no objective markers. You navigate by reading NPC dialogue carefully, noticing smoke on the horizon, recognising landmarks, and, yes, taking your own notes. It has a Metroidvania-ish skeleton underneath, with keys, emblems, and codes opening previously locked areas, which means revisiting zones constantly without a map to remind you where that locked door was. Some players will find this genuinely thrilling. Others will bounce off it hard within the first three hours. The game does include an in-game notepad that tracks plot-relevant information, and accessibility settings offer a compass option if the navigation becomes genuinely opaque, so it is not quite as brutal as the marketing implies. Puzzle variety spans simple cipher locks up to multi-zone mysteries that reward the patient and punish the impatient. Combat uses a stamina system where incoming damage also reduces your maximum stamina temporarily, creating real pressure to stay aggressive. A timed healing pulse after landing combos restores both health and stamina, and successful parries build toward a finisher that lands with satisfying weight. On paper, that is a decent toolkit. The problem is that Hollow Walkers come in roughly five Entity types across three tiers, and by the midpoint most players will have seen everything combat has to offer. The default difficulty is forgiving to a fault. Death costs you almost nothing; enemies stay dead, puzzles stay solved. Cranking the aggression and damage sliders up helps, but combat still sits firmly in the background rather than the foreground of what makes this game interesting. Firearms are useless against Entities, so you are leaning on upgradeable melee weapons, axes and swords primarily, plus a drone for ranged support. The finisher animations are visceral and well-directed. The enemy roster is not. What genuinely works is the world itself. Hadea is rendered in Unreal Engine 5 with striking consistency, from foggy forests and swampy marshes to bombed-out villages and eerie underground ruins. Performance on PC is notably clean, with solid frame rates at 1440p on mid-to-high hardware. The soundtrack does heavy lifting on atmosphere, and the environmental storytelling in each zone rewards the kind of slow, thorough exploration the game demands. The story's central theme, that civil conflict turns neighbours into monsters long before any supernatural event arrives, lands with real weight. The writing avoids easy bothsidesism and takes a clear-eyed view of how propaganda and power turn ordinary people into instruments of atrocity. It is the rare game where the setting itself is the protagonist. Hell is Us is not for everyone, and it knows it. If your tolerance for directionless wandering is low, or if you need combat depth to carry you through twenty-plus hours, this will frustrate you. But if you are the kind of player who keeps a notepad on the desk during games, who lights up when a world trusts you to figure it out, and who wants a story that treats the human capacity for cruelty as seriously as any monster design, Rogue Factor has built something genuinely unusual here. The combat is the ceiling on how great it can be. The world is the reason you stay.

Alex · Scout Team

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