Hell Is Us is the upcoming action-adventure game, developed by Rogue Factor. It combines thrilling close combat with some awesome-looking environments and exploration. In Hell Is Us, you play Remi, a man returning to his home country of Hadea to find his parents. It is a fictionalized take on the real world, set in the 1990s and we can already tell you that the visuals are stunning. The game will be released somewhere in 2025, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Microsoft Windows (via Steam, as far as we could tell).
On the last day of September, PlayStation posted a video interview with Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, Creative Director and Art Director at Rogue Factor. During that 15-minute interview, Jonathan talked us through the creative process and the idea behind the game and showed us various in-game footage.
The Players Are in For a Treat With “Hell Is Us”
From early on in the video, we hear the team is made up of old-school, passionate developers, there to create a good game, harkening back to the “good old times”, when developers actually cared about their projects. They take great pride in removing the so-called “sliver platter” that many modern games have. To clarify, the term “silver platter” here refers to everything being handed to the players, with reminders, quest markers, detailed UI, and basically everything to make your gaming experience easier.
Rogue Factor takes an entirely different approach here, removing all those “handy” features, to make the players pay more attention to the world around them and the information they gathered. They showed an example of an NPC directing the player to “follow the windchimes in the forest”, and now the player has to really look for and try to hear the windchimes to get where they are headed. A “modern” game would simply give you a marker for you to follow. The end goal is for the player to feel like they discovered something on their own, and not have the discovery handed to you. The same goes for in-game puzzles, there are no hints of any kind to tell you what to do. The solution is entirely your own.
As for the combat, since Hell Is Us is 50% combat and 50% exploration, the devs opted for a middle ground. It is not a no-brainer, but is also far from souls-like levels of difficulty. There are different melee weapons that you can use, all of them with their own unique abilities to help you out when fighting the game’s creepy monsters. Furthermore, you have access to a drone-like machine, that can help you in combat as well as during exploration (by translating ancient texts, for example).
All in all, Hell Is Us looks very promising just from the gameplay video. We are sure that the game will be more polished in the future, as we near its release in 2025. The exact date is still unknown, unfortunately.