Hands on Hell Is Us – Forget Souls, this has emotion

Watching Rogue Factor’s Hell Is Us in action is like video game clickbait. At first glance it’s a dark and depressing modern war story, but suddenly there are white art-deco style creatures rising from the ground, huge balls of spinning time, and melee combat rather than guns. It invites investigation and that is a key element to the game, as there are no way points or quest markers; you need to use your instincts to work you way across the landscape and find out what exactly what is happening.

Set in the fictional country of Hadea you play as Rémi, a native Hadean who moved out of the country when he was very young, leaving his family behind. Now a member of a United Nations-style peacekeeping force, he returns to his war ravaged home country in the 1990s and promptly goes AWOL so he can search for his parents. He is very much on his own, wandering through the country trying to piece together three overlapping stories: What happened to his family, what happened in the war, and what is the ‘Calamity’, the event that has caused the supernatural creatures to appear.

These creatures take strange humanoid forms that will attack you if you get to close, but they can have more dangerous forms. Get too close to one and a ball of glitching mass will spew from the creature and attack you as a secondary drone which needs to be defeated before trying to kill the creature itself. These extra nodes are colour-coded to specific emotions – red for rage, green for terror, yellow for ecstasy and blue for grief – with each emotion having a specific attack style.

While the game may look like an open-world Soulslike, it isn’t. Or at least, it’s not totally. Combat uses melee weapons made of a special Lymbic material as conventional firearms cannot harm the creatures. So you’ve got to resort to the swords, axes, poleaxes and other low-tech weapons that are available, each with their own strengths and weakness. You will need to use the block and dodge button effectively, running in and hacking away will lead to certain death, but chaining hits will gradually increase the damage from some weapons. You also have a stamina and health bar, attacking and dodging will use stamina which will eventually recover, but health does not and death will send you all the way back to your last save point.

You also have a drone, KAPI, and you might be thinking that would be used for extra firepower, and you’d be right, but not in the way you would expect. As conventional weapons do not hurt the enemies it would be pointless giving KAPI a gun, so it instead attaches itself to Rémi to power him up for special moves, such as a whirlwind of blades or an extra strong forward stab.

Now, I am not the biggest fan of Soulslike combat, but after unlocking a few special moves and power ups I really began to enjoy the core fighting loop, chaining together attacks and special moves soon becoming second nature. The development team are keen to stress that this game isn’t a hardcore battler like Elden Ring, and is maybe more of a “Souls-lite”. Think of a middle ground between modern God of War and Bloodborne and you’d be close; you can still do hacking and slashing, but carefully.

For my hands-on preview I played a large open world section near the start of the game and, after walking past a disturbing pile of corpses and a crying woman, a large marshland area was revealed with plenty of landmarks spread across it that invited investigation. The main task is to discover what happened to your father, the blacksmith in the village, but there are many other characters to talk to and pick up information and side quests. It’s worth talking to everyone you can as they may just reveal a small detail that sends you in a completely new direction, although many of them are wary of strangers. You also may also need to return to characters as moving the story forward will unlock new dialogue options.

Rémi’s village, Jova, is occupied by one of the forces in the civil war, so he must be careful with what he says and who he talks to. Suffice to say, Dad is no longer there and you are given directions as where he might have gone. I decided to ignore the main quest and have a wander around the rest of the map, uncovering more information on the war, the Calamity and an Abbey which I could not access due to soldiers barring the way. A little more wandering and an audio clue led me to a new character, who in turn unlocked the trainee blacksmith back at the village, who had more news on good old Dad and also allowed me to upgrade my weapons.

While there are no quest markers to direct you, you do have a handy digital device that keeps track of who you met and what they want, along with any significant details that will help you find what you are looking for.  You can also access your inventory here and assign weapons and consumables and read any documents you have discovered. From the four hours I have played it does seem the world is packed with things to do and discover and you may want to have a notepad by your side to remind you of everything you are investigating.

I also played a section from later in the game, a water-filled dungeon packed full of enemies and contraptions. You have to unlock mechanisms that drain out the water, gradually revealing more and more of the dungeon. This section felt a little more guided as, while there are no clues what to do or where to go, your options are limited by locked doors or pools of water, and the obvious destination would usually have a key or mechanism for unlocking the next part of the dungeon. Oh, and there’s the obligatory boss battle at the end.

I think the most alluring part of Hell Is Us is the unknown.  It has the feel of Death Stranding where clearly something very odd is going on, but you have no idea what. Clearly there’s a link to the war and the creatures powered by emotions, but what has your family got to do with it? I have no idea how the story will unfold but Creative Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête has said “The central theme of Hell is Us is that human violence is a perpetual cycle fuelled by human emotions and passions.”

I really enjoyed playing Hell Is Us, and from my hands-on time it could turn out to be something very special. I can’t wait for the final game, set to release on September 4th, 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Hell is Us will also be part of the June Steam Next Fest and the game’s demo (with about 1.5 hours of play time) will be live ahead of time, from Monday, 2nd June at 3 PM BST / 4 PM CEST.