I Hate This Place

My first impression of I Hate This Place was pure delight: a cell-shaded isometric world drenched in 80s VHS grime, onomatopoeic sound cues popping off the screen like a living graphic novel every time you crunch over broken glass or crouch through a tendril-choked bunker. The visual identity here is genuinely rare. Rock Square Thunder, a small Polish studio whose second game this is, clearly understood the assignment when it came to adapting Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin's award-nominated comic series. Bold outlines, saturated reds and greens, a menu screen that loads like a VHS tape - it screams a specific decade with real intention, not nostalgia-bait laziness. The stealth system underneath that gorgeous shell is the game's most inspired mechanical idea. Enemies are nearly blind and hunt almost entirely by sound, which means the visual "THUD" and "SQUELCH" and "CRUNCH" labels that appear on screen are not just style flourishes - they are active gameplay information. Stepping onto a puddle or a patch of broken glass in a monster-filled bunker has real stakes in the early hours. Throwing objects to lure enemies away, crouching to dampen footsteps, planning your route around the literal noise map of a room - that loop genuinely works. There are also nighttime ghost encounters where you are pulled into a surreal spirit-world, armed only with a flashlight, piecing together fragmented stories about how people died. Those sequences carry a quiet, detective-horror energy that feels genuinely inventive and are easily the most memorable thing the game does. Where things get complicated is everywhere outside those highs. The base-building system at Rutherford Ranch - farms, distilleries, metallurgy workshops, water pumps - exists as a parallel game that never meaningfully connects to the tension of the horror side. Resource balance falls apart by mid-game: the same survival pressure that made the opening tense evaporates once your automated workstations crank out more food and ammo than you can spend. The day/night cycle, which should be the game's dramatic spine, ends up feeling perfunctory because the incentive to explore at night beyond the ghost quests is slim. Direct combat reveals further cracks - there is no dodge ability, grabs from enemies deal massive damage, and enemies absorb considerably more punishment than the feel of the weapons suggests they should. The voice acting and cutscene animation are rough enough to undercut story beats that the underlying premise could have sold well. Steam user reviews sit at a mixed 60 percent positive, and most professional critics land somewhere between a guarded recommendation and a polite shrug, which feels about right. For atmosphere-first players - people who savour the soundscape of a horror game the way some savour a film score, who will stop to appreciate the way a monster's silhouette falls across comic-panel shadows - there is real craft here to reward. The roughly seven-to-ten-hour campaign contains four or five dungeon-style locations (bunkers, mines, underground mazes) that genuinely deliver tension, and the ghost side quests add a layer of environmental storytelling that fans of narrative horror will appreciate. But players expecting the survival systems to stay taut throughout, or combat that feels satisfying beyond the spiked baseball bat in your first couple of hours, will find the game loses its grip before the credits.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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