Summary
- 'Hell is Us' is set in Hadea, a hermit state ravaged by civil war for the last two years while also facing an otherworldly anomaly spawning monsters into its ruins.
- The game emphasizes exploration and limited assistance, promoting a player-driven experience and coining the term "player-plattering" to counter the silver platter style of open-world adventure games giving too much away without requiring curious discovery.
- Players must navigate a dark, atmospheric world with extremely little help from quest markers or waypoints, seeking answers on what humans have done to bring about such an apocalyptic hell in Hadea.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hell is Us begins when you wake up in a dilapidated police interrogation room, face to face with a wildly disfigured detective. He says the truth serum with which you’ve been injected will begin taking effect soon. When it does, you’ll be telling him why, when, and how you snuck into the her🔯mit state of Hadea. This micronation has spent the last few years ravaged by an increasingly violent civil war, but complications compounded when an otherworldly anomaly appeared and began spitting hundreds of aggressive entities known as the Hollow out into what little of the country now remains.
Your truth serum kicks in, and you fade out again. This time, you awaken in Hadea armed with only a compass and a foreboding sense of dread. Time to start exploring and work out the clues for what happened and why you’re involved, because Canadian studio Rogue Factor isn’t going to hold your hand with Hell is Us 🦹and proudly refuses to give you much help at all.
Hell Is A Hermit State Destroyed By Violent Civil War
During a preview at Rogue Factor’s office in Montreal, general manager Yves Bordeleau and creative director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête were keen to highlight their on-site rec💝ording studio and team of about 55 creatives working on the game as we make our way to a forebodingly dark meeting room. We’re here to play a few hours of the game, and as we take our seats, the team passes out notebooks and pens.
Hell Is Us Release Date Revealed At PlayStation's State Of Play
It was𓆉n't that long ago that Hell Is Us was revealed, but we've already got a release date.
Jacques-Belletête explains that Hell is Us seeks to define a term the Rogue Factor team has coined, “player-plattering.” He says 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:fatigue with open-world games and a yearning for the adventure 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:games of the 90s, befor🔥e players were handed a story on a silver platter, was the driving force behind the decision to purpos💧efully withhold information unless players seek it out. Hell is Us “encourages exploration and reflection by eliminating traditional forms of assistance” throughout its winding, increasingly grim narrative.
You’ll find no quest log, no waypoints, nothing to direct you on where to go next, except vague hints from the locals and your sense of direction. You’ll need to be cautiously curious about the world around you as you explore – you are trying 🍸to infiltrate a small country with a civil war and a monster problem, after all. The more you seek to learn about the world, the more jarring backstories and startling anomalies you’ll discover, and it’s not long before you’re not sure if the humans or the monsters are a♌ bigger threat.
The game relies heavily on atmospheric horror to set the stage before introducing you ♔to the meat of the mystery – what happened in Hadea, what sparked the civil war between Sabinians and Palomists, and just what are these Hollows wandering between the sparsཧely-inhabited ruins of what used to be thriving towns? You speak with the few remaining humans you meet in a series of dialogue choices, allowing you to press as much or as little as you'd like.
Gleaning information from these conversations and double-checking it against what you know already (since different people in dif♛ferent pl༒aces have different versions of the truth) is essential for your story progression. Then again, everything you learn about the Hadean civil war almost makes you wish you hadn't asked.
When I sit down with Jacques-Belletête, Bordeleau, and Hell is Us audio director Antoine Vachon to talk about the game, Jacques-Belletête tells me the Hadean civil war of fiction was inspired by the all-too-real Serbian civil war of the 1990s. I mention how uniquely unsettled I felt walk💙ing into protagonist Remi’s hometown after a bleak, exhausting journey to be welcomed by graffiti of a “Sabinian family tree” at the entrance, humanoid figures hung from baren branches of lit♓eral tree. Jacques-Belletête, though, confirms that this inclusion was inspired by a real wartime image, with “Serbian” simply changed to “Sabinian" for the game.
Remi was born here in Hadea before his mother smuggled him to Canada at the start of the civil war, telling him only to never return. At 18, he joins a Canadian peacekeeping mission to Hadea and goes AWOL during one of his deployments, seeking to learn🌞 the truth of this hermit home state and hopefully reunite with his parents if they're still alive.
The team was, understandably, cautious about approaching such a sensitive topic, as well as using international peacekeeping symbolism in the game. Jacques-Belletête tells us be꧂fore the demo that the team spent time ꦜconferring closely with the United Nations to ensure everything was as respectful and appropriate as can be with such a delicate subject.
Hell Is The Horrifying Monsters That Want To Kill You Along The Way
Outside the human horror element behind the violence obscuring what even started the civil war, you’ll need to fight Hollow monsters haunting the ruins of the country. Jacques-Belletête says the team wants Hell is Us to be an even spli🐟t between exploration and melee combat, and both felt seamless as I dove into the game. I talked to an old man near where I woke up in Hadea who told me to follow the sound of wind chimes when I left his house, a trail that led me to a mortally wounded soldier. He tells me his platoon is fighting for their lives in the ruins below, and 💧that he barely made it out.
Affter Remi wanders through a narrow a🍷nd winding series of dim, dusty stairwells leading down into the ruins, the first Hollow appears suddenly as he rounds an otherwise innocuous corner, with no clue something is coming other than a nearby save point. Though a mysterious warrior in a red mask swoops in and kills this Hollow for you, they lose their life in the process. You take the fallen fighter’s sword and helpful combat drone, and it’s immediately up to you to learn to fend off the creatures in hopes of making it across Hadea with your life – sure hope you were watching the cutscene where the warrior dies, since that was the bulk of your fighting tutorial.
The first Hollow you meet spits a red, angry ball at you from the ‘hollow’ inside its chest, one that remains tethered🎐 to the monster itself via umbilical cord. Both the core and the Hollow attack Remi, but you need to handle the core before the Hollow actually takes damage and can be slain. To do so, you’ll have a series of melee weapons.
In that first section, I barely survived my encounters with irate, immediately aggressive Hol꧋lows, but it makes sense, since those seemed to be infested with Rage. Hollows have four distinct patterns, which appear to coincide with the four emotional themes in the game.
While jarring to encounter, the striking saturation of the four feelings contained within the Hollows are the only real colors to speak of in the game. Hell is Us is as dark visually as it is thematically, with a grim grayscale palette reserving colors for the Hollows, the occasional child you come across to add an extra sense of innocence, and, in stark contrast, the vibrant red of all the spilled blood around the ruins of the d🌟ecimated hermit count♏ry.
In the dungeon section later on, I was up against another Hollow, and this time, green, cube-like static coming from its core appeared to represent Terror, according 𒈔to a book I found lying in a ransacked area outside the dungeon before I went in. You’ll need to notice this stuff on your own, though; nobody pointed it out, there wasn’t a quest for it leading me to a character who told me to watch out and pay attention for colors, but it’s something I noticed myself and began to connect dots back to as I progressed.
Hell Is Waiting To Unravel The Rest Of This Mystery
That’s the thing with Hell is Us, though – it wants you to figure out the mysteries and dive as deep into its eerie hellscape as you want, and luckily for me, I love this kind of thing, so I'll be diving in pretty deep🀅. I played the demo at the beginning of May and haven’t gotten the game out of my head in the weeks since, running through what I remember looking to see if hindsight adds insight. I even kept my notes to write this preview weeks later, sitting here in my office like the Pepe Silvia meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I conferred with the bulleted notes I took on my phone during Jacques-Belletête’s preamble. I looked back through the two notebook pages from my three hours going hands-on with the game, full of scribblings like “three special forest graves oh god (sad face)” and half of a weapons locker security code that I found in a truck. I flipped through the mood booklet of information and imagery that Rogue Factor gave us about their game; I clicked through b-roll footage they sent from the demo; I scoured their PR spiel about the title from before I went to play it myself, I re-listened to the audio recording of my interview with the three members of the Rogue Factor team after the demo, and I still feel like I’m barely scraping the surface.
If you're also looking to look the ugliness of humanity square in its terrifyingly Hollow face, Hell is Us will have a demo running on Steam Next Fest between June 2-16 before 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the full game launches on Septeꦇmber 4 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Hell Is Us
- Released
- September 4, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ // Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nuꦏdity, Sexual Themes, ♕Strong Language, Use of Drugs
- Developer(s)
- 💖 Rogue Factor
- Publisher(s)
- Nacon
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Unknown
