Helltown

My soft spot for small, handcrafted horror experiences means I went into Helltown already hoping it would surprise me, and it did, just not always in the ways the developers intended. You drop into 1959 as a mailman named John Roe, assigned to a cheerful new suburb called Little Vale where every resident is just a touch too happy to see you. The opening stretch, walking house to house, chatting with unsettling neighbors who keep mentioning an upcoming ritual, is genuinely effective world-building. The PS1-era visual language works hard here: crunchy pixels, dithered shadows, crushed color palettes that make even broad daylight feel slightly wrong. It is the kind of handcrafted aesthetic that takes real intentionality to pull off, and WildArts got it right. When the sun goes down and things get properly strange, the game shifts into a no-weapons survival loop. You carry only a flashlight. Monsters patrol the environment and you must either run or hide, learning their routes and slipping past them to find key items like orbs that need matching to specific portal locations. One late-game section that spans nearly the entire open map while multiple creature types hunt you is genuinely tense on a first run. The lack of any defensive tool sharpens the dread considerably. The problem is that the stealth itself is clunky enough to snap you out of the spell. Enemy behavior is pattern-based, which makes them predictable once you have watched them for thirty seconds, and the tension dips from unsettling to routine fairly quickly. Controller play adds another layer of friction, as the game was built with keyboard and mouse in mind and the input mapping shows. Where Helltown earns genuine respect is in its branching structure. There are five different endings, and they are not reskin variations of the same final sequence. Some require a completely different approach to the whole playthrough, and at least one asks you to hunt down nearly twenty hidden glyphs scattered across the game's locations. One ending lets you play a stretch of the game as the dog. The willingness to build genuinely divergent paths into a sub-two-hour horror game is admirable, and it gives completionists a real reason to replay. The Revival Update, which landed in 2024, did meaningful work here: the storyline was substantially reworked, new cutscenes added, town residents given more dialogue, and the soundtrack handed to Ockeroid, the composer behind Crow Country's score. The result is a soundtrack that genuinely earns its place rather than just filling dead air. The original 2017 release was a rough first effort from a two-person team still learning their craft, and the developers have been candid about that. The Revival Update is the version worth playing now. Expect around two hours for a single run, longer if you want all five endings or are hunting every hidden glyph without a guide. Some crashing issues have been reported by players both on Steam and itch.io, so saving often is a habit worth building before you get deep into a run. Helltown is not a technical showcase or a mechanical masterpiece, but it is a small horror game that knows what it wants to be, builds a persuasive world in very little time, and respects the player enough to hide real secrets rather than just locking content behind artificial gates.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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