Hell is Us hit Game Pass a little bit ago. It’s a game that I was curious about based on previews and teasers I’d caught during various not-E3 events. Figured I’d give it a go.

I didn’t make it far.

When Hell is Us starts you’re being interrogated by a fellow with the most enormous double chin you’ve ever seen. No idea who this is, but the gist of it seems to be that you’ve crossed a border illegaly and gotten caught. In this world two ethnicities (the Sabineans & the Palomists), are at war and there’s pretty intense hate between the two groups. Basically they seem intent on exterminating each other. Anyway the setup is that the actual gameplay is all a big flashback as you succumb to the truth serum and polygraph and start telling your tale to your interogator.

Actual gameplay is a 3rd person action/adventure game. You’re sneaking through a war-torn area that has the feel of World War I to it (trenches, bomb craters and the like). You have melee weapons and a drone, and rather than fighting people you’re fighting weird humanoid creatures that feel like something out of Silent Hill, maybe.

So far, so good. There’s a lot of puzzle solving mixed in with the combat, and lots of exploring to do

The first cracks appeared when I was learning to use the drone in combat. Your drone’s first trick is that it can distract enemies. If you’re faced with several baddies, the idea is you lock onto one, order the drone to distract it, then shift to a different enemy to fight. Sounds easy enough but I really struggled with getting the lock-on to work quickly and efficiently. A bit of Googling suggests this is a common complaint with the game. I eventually got things to where I could deal with this mechanic by increasing the sensitivity of the controls. Ideally we’ll see a patch for this but since the game launched last September I’m not sure how likely that is.

I was enjoying the gloomy aesthetics, the combat was OK once I got the hang of dealing with the lock-on requirement, and I was really intrigued by the story setup and genuinely wanted to learn more about this world. The puzzles I encountered weren’t overly hard, but they were hard enough to give a sense of satisfaction once you solved one.

Ultimately what ruined the game for me was one of the core tenets of the developers: no hand-holding. Hell is Us doen’t have a map. It doesn’t have quest markers. It doesn’t have a traditional quest journal. They want the player to feel really immersed in this world; this is an idea that I appreciate in theory. In practice it’s just not where my head is at these days. Some reviewers suggest taking notes while you play and my old-school gamer soul loves that. My current day lazy-ass gamer self can’t be bothered.

I realized the game probably wasn’t for me when I came back on the 2nd (IRL) day and already couldn’t remember which direction I’d been traveling in. I booted up and was standing in a trench on a battlefield and couldn’t recall, at all, which direction I’d been headed in. And this was after one day!! The way I tend to play several titles at once and jump from game to game often means I quickly forget details and need quest journals and game systems that nudge me in the right direction.

For the right audience, I think Hell is Us would be a hell of a game. It’s got Very Positive reviews on Steam and about an 80/100 on Open Critic. If I had a week’s vacation and wanted a game that I was going to focus exclusively on then I think I could give it a go and have a grand old time. But my old man brain and the fact that I get distracted by new games far too often make the old-school vibe too much of a challenge for me. A very much younger version of myself would have loved playing this game while drawing a map on graph paper and taking copious notes. Sadly, I’m just not that gamer anymore.