Hell is Others

Every thread about this one drags Escape from Tarkov into the conversation, and I understand the reflex: you go out with gear, you come back richer or you come back with nothing. The difference that actually matters is the camera. This is top-down, so you never get the comfort of a scope or a steady hand or a long sightline you control. You get a narrow cone of light, a smear of noir rain, and the constant suspicion that the shape moving two rooms over already knows where you are. The loop is small and vicious. You keep an apartment in a city that decided long ago that blood is a resource and bullets are money, and the things you grow at home need feeding. Feeding them means going outside after dark, into streets that hold both hostile AI and other players who were never going to wave. Scavenge what you can carry, get back to your door, and the run banks. Die and your loadout stays on the pavement for whoever walks past next. The base building half is the quiet half: expanding rooms, improving what you can cultivate, converting a disastrous night into a marginally less disastrous tomorrow. The PvPvE label is honest here, because the AI is not filler between player encounters. It hunts on its own schedule and it is patient. What holds all of this together is craft, and there is a lot of it. The art direction is the reason to sit down in the first place: Century City is rendered in oppressive blacks and infected reds, hand-composed rather than tiled, and it reads as a place that curdled slowly instead of a level that was assembled. The sound does most of the horror work. Footsteps that might be yours, a shot two blocks off that tells you the map just lost someone, the low hum under everything that never quite resolves. It is one of the few horror soundscapes I would happily leave running with the monitor off. And yes, the opening is slow, deliberately so. You spend your first several sessions poor, ignorant and jumpy, and I will defend that, because the paranoia only means something once you have something worth losing. The moment a full bag turns your walk home into an actual decision is the moment the design clicks. Where it disappoints is mostly in the grind and the guesswork. Onboarding explains close to nothing, which is atmospheric for about an hour and then just obstructive, and a lot of the early economy is learned by throwing runs away. The tension curve can flatten into repetition once you know the routes, and the roguelike element of losing everything hits hardest exactly when you are least equipped to absorb it. Population is the other honest caveat. An extraction game lives on who else is in the city with you, and off-peak sessions can be eerily empty, which is peaceful and also somewhat beside the point. Solo viable is accurate. Solo comfortable is not. The top-down framing that generates so much dread also means some deaths feel arbitrary, since a player with a better angle down a corridor will erase you before your screen has told you anything. Controller support is partial and it shows. Mouse and keyboard is the real way in. So: not for anyone who wants a shooter that respects their aim, and not for anyone who needs a clean tutorial and a fair fight. It is for people who liked the dread of Darkwood or the loot-anxiety of Hunt: Showdown and want it compressed into shorter, meaner sessions with a stronger visual identity than either. Come for the art and the sound, stay if the fear of walking home with a full bag turns out to be the feeling you were missing. Leave early if you need progression to feel generous, because this city was never designed to be kind to you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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