Hell is Us - Deluxe Edition Upgrade (DLC)

I went into Hell is Us half-expecting another Soulslike dressed up in atmospheric clothing. What I got was something harder to categorise and, honestly, more interesting for it. Rogue Factor, a Montreal studio of roughly 55 people, built a third-person action-adventure around a philosophy they call "player-plattering": no waypoints, no quest journal, no mini-map. You play as Remi, a soldier who sneaks back into his war-torn homeland of Hadea to find his parents, only to find the country also overrun by supernatural entities born from raw human emotion. The Haze, as those forces are called, give shape to grief, rage, and terror in the form of Hollow Walkers, and melee weapons infused with Lymbic energy are the only things that can put them down. The combat is not the headline, and it knows it. You cycle through swords, polearms, and axes, each with distinct attack speeds and weapon EXP that improves the more you use them. Glyphs slot special abilities onto your weapon, from ranged splash attacks to heavy hammer strikes, and a companion drone named KAPI can distract enemies or trigger special moves. The healing pulse is the system's cleverest wrinkle: landing combos charges a ring of light around Remi, and a timed button press recovers both health and stamina simultaneously. It rewards aggression rather than backing off to chug potions. That said, enemy variety is thin, encounters start to blur together as the game progresses, and the default difficulty is gentle enough that most players will want to dial things up with the custom sliders before the mid-point. Death carries almost no penalty by default - enemies stay dead, clues stay found - which reads as an anti-frustration choice but also deflates tension. Where Hell is Us genuinely excels is in the texture of its world. Hadea is set in a fictional 1993, and the country feels ancient under the weight of its trauma. Destroyed villages, burned-out vehicles swallowed by marshland, shrines to forgotten rites - every area across the six Investigations tells a story without stopping to explain it. The no-map structure means you will occasionally miss things or spend time retracing steps due to no fast travel system. That backtracking is the game's most legitimate frustration. But the flip side is that discoveries feel real rather than orchestrated, and the atmosphere, bolstered by a score that shifts between loneliness and dread, does a lot of heavy lifting that less confident games would hand to cutscenes. The narrative is deliberately elliptical: dialogue is sparse, answers pile mystery on top of mystery, and the writing earns its themes about cycles of violence and grief rather than just gesturing at them. If you go in wanting a tight plot delivered cinematically, Hell is Us will test your patience. If you are the type who takes notes, re-reads found letters, and wants to piece things together yourself, this is the game that will hook you properly. It is imperfect AA work from a team that clearly outgrew their previous projects, running on Unreal Engine 5 with surprisingly clean performance on both PC and console.

Alex · Scout Team

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