This intentional confusion brings to mind the enigmatic world-building present in Hidetaka Miyazaki’s soulsborne classics. Similar to these games, particularly Elden Ring, Hell Is Us offers a universe of obscure symbols, intricate puzzles, and complex lore. The combat mimics the rhythmic intensity of Miyazaki’s creations, where each attack drains stamina, which only regenerates during frantic or strategic retreats.

However, that’s where the similarities with FromSoftware cease. Hell Is Us doubles as a detective game: it equips you with a satisfying retrofuturistic datapad, housing a wealth of information, and provides spider diagrams filled with investigative leads. Solving the game’s tougher challenges might require good old-fashioned pen and paper!

True to its ominous title, the fictional land of Hadea is engulfed in wartime chaos — essentially morphing into hell itself. The opening hour reveals a gruesome scene of executed bodies and corpses hanging from a tree, while, nearby, a soldier mournfully plays a violin. Strange white beings lurk in the marshes and windswept plains; massive, spike-adorned orbs known as Time Loops throb intensely. These time-space ruptures stem from the so-called “Calamity,” and protagonist Rémi, a gorpcore adventurer turned action hero, is tasked with sending them back to the void.

At first glance, the game presents a mishmash of visual elements: desolate terrains, mannequin-esque creatures, rugged attire, and enormous swords reminiscent of Cloud Strife’s from Final Fantasy VII. Gradually, it takes on a mesmerising, haunted character, steeped in dream logic. The peculiarity is heightened by the dense array of obscure puzzles, prompting the question: what kind of maddening world holds so many enigmatic dilemmas?

Hell Is Us offers a lot to unravel, including powerful adversaries that conjure support creatures through an eerie, ethereal umbilical cord. One is a pale humanoid; the other, a vivid geometric adversary. Each color signifies an emotion: blue for sorrow, green for fear, etc. While the metaphor may seem a bit trite, it’s compelling. These foes are tangible illustrations of war’s emotional destruction. They haunt the landscape, infusing it with a surreal, psychological essence. Yet, the symbolism is somewhat constrained: how do you confront ancestral anguish? According to Hell Is Us, you vanquish it by slicing it apart with rage-infused hand axes.

There is a breadth of ambition and imagination here but uneven execution. Take our hero, who looks great in his flapping, rain-resistant poncho, yet speaks like a gruffer, more cynical version of countless male game protagonists from the late 2000s. Gazing upon a cathedral-sized mound of human bones, Rémi (played by Elias Toufexis, aka Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex series) muses aloud: the Sabinians may be the victims here but the region is also littered with Palomist graves. It is an odd, jarring line, to make this kind of equivalence when confronted with such monumental loss.

After the wonderfully discombobulating opening hours, Hell Is Us loses some momentum. Hadea remains a beguiling setting throughout; the desire to pull at its various laced mysteries never wanes. But the same can’t be said of the other narrative layers, either Rémi’s own personal voyage to discover the fate of his parents and the place he fled as a young child, or precisely what the Calamity is. The former is intended to propel the player’s exploration yet it does not grip. Without the requisite narrative intrigue, the plot boils down unlocking a series of doors decorated with ornate glyphs. At one point, a character inadvertently sums up the prosaic plot: “So you found a door with a strange mechanism. What happened next?”

Meanwhile, combat — which is an activity you need to do a lot of in order to decipher the weird event that caused the appearance of the unnerving pallid creatures — becomes rote. My attention started to dwindle around hour 15 of a possible 30.

This is a shame because Hell Is Us does so much that is admirable and interesting. The actual dungeons that plummet below the game’s semi-open zones are a spatial symphony of claustrophobic passageways and soaring, light-filled atriums and altars. There are no waypoints or quest markers; you must carefully read journals for navigational clues (and sometimes use a compass). Another smart design choice: you can only talk to characters about information you have already uncovered. In this era of often anodyne and frictionless big-budget video games, where anything that might potentially limit a game’s audience is carefully considered and often avoided, it is refreshing to play something that is so intentionally prickly.

As I trudge forward in this muddy, miserable land, my mind keeps circling back to language and understanding: the codes, symbols, tongues, and customs of Hadea. It’s clear that I am only grasping a tiny fraction of this millennia-old conflict. But there is another, more universal language that the game seems to use, which it relays through bracing imagery: the misery of war.

Regardless of time and place, violent conflict breaks people in much the same way, making them scared, angry, vengeful, and, naturally, violent. Despite its myriad of shortcomings and sheer informational density, Hell Is Us speaks with clarity: of war, it is impossible to close Pandora’s box once its evils have escaped.

_{Hell Is Us launches on September 4th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.}