A dark adventure through war, monsters and time loops
Hell is Us is a third person action adventure set in the fictional country of Hadea, a place that looks a lot like a war torn Yugoslavia. You play as Rémi Letam, an ON Peacekeeper who deserts his post to search for his parents and instead ends up fighting supernatural horrors in the middle of a brutal civil war.
The game is built around a heavy atmosphere. Hadea is split between two ethnic groups, the Palomists and the Sabineans, locked in yet another violent conflict. That violence has triggered the appearance of Hollow Walkers, disturbing "lymbic" entities, along with strange time loops that freeze parts of the world in repeating moments of catastrophe.
While the supernatural elements provide the scares, it is the grounded themes that make the setting stand out. You see the legacies of ethnic hatred, religious tension, nationalist propaganda and the failure of international peacekeeping playing out across ruined cities and abandoned villages. The game is at its best when it trusts you to absorb this history from the environment rather than from direct exposition.
Hell is Us is due out on PC on September 4, 2025, and this review was played on a Windows 11 machine with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS and 16GB of RAM. Steam Deck support is not available.
Combat systems with not enough enemies to justify them
Most of your time in Hell is Us is spent in combat. On paper, the game offers three separate ways to fight:
- Standard melee combat focused on combos and parries with weapons like axes.
- Drone combat where a hovering companion can distract enemies or interact with time loops.
- Lymbic combat which uses glyphs attached to weapons to unleash special abilities and stuns.
On top of this you can upgrade weapons, armor, glyphs and drone modules. Rémi also equips relics that grant passive and active modifiers. It sounds like a deep build system, and the core feel of combat can be very satisfying. For example, using twin axes, sending your drone to distract enemies and timing a lymbic stun to open them up feels fluid and crunchy when it works.
The healing system is clever as well. Your ability to recover health depends on how many hits you can land in a row, which keeps you aggressive and rewards precise timing. Tougher fights rarely feel unfair once you have the rhythm down.
The problem is there are only five enemy types in the entire game, with a few variations where lymbic growths must be destroyed before you can hurt the monster itself. There are only two real boss fights, and one of them feels so random that it seems like a glitch when it appears.
Because enemy variety is so limited, the combat systems never reach their full potential. Once you learn how to handle each monster type, there is very little tactical reason to experiment with builds or abilities. Encounters boil down to timing and luck rather than creative strategy. The game feels overloaded with mechanics for how little it actually asks you to do with them.
Early levels highlight this issue the most. These areas are deliberately simple because you are meant to revisit them later, but that means you spend a lot of time on flat, basic landscapes fighting the same handful of monsters again and again. This repetition ties directly into the time loop system, which is supposed to encourage you to clear areas once and close the loop so enemies do not respawn.
Time loops, puzzles and the highs of exploration
Every time loop in Hell is Us works in roughly the same way. Scattered throughout a zone are Timeloop Guardians which look identical to regular monsters. After you kill an unspecified number of them, you can enter the loop. Rémi's drone then drops a prism in the center and detonates the loop, stopping enemy respawns in that area.
In theory this gives you a reason to methodically clear maps. In practice it becomes busywork. You do not know which enemies are guardians until they are dead, the guardian locator effect is vague and unhelpful in large zones, and the game never tells you how many guardians are needed to unlock the loop. The result is that you often end up wiping out every monster on the map just in case. Once you finally enter the loop, there is no climax or boss fight. You simply use the drone to blow it up and leave. It feels anticlimactic and more like cleaning a checklist than overcoming a challenge.
Outside of combat, the game leans hard into puzzles. They are everywhere, from main story locks to optional side tasks called Good Deeds. These range from simple symbol matching to more involved multi step scavenger hunts that send you across maps. The main story puzzles are usually fair as long as you pay attention to your surroundings and take notes. Some Good Deeds can feel contrived, such as scenarios where you can hear people screaming behind a door but are forced to solve a side objective rather than simply breaking it down with your weapon.
Despite these frustrations, exploration is the real highlight of Hell is Us. The game largely drops traditional maps and checkpoints. Levels are not huge, so it is hard to get truly lost, and thorough players will naturally stumble across what they need. Later areas in particular showcase outstanding environmental and level design.
One standout example is the Auriga Museum. You move through an R and D complex in a state of emergency, carefully juggling a limited power supply. Inside, you find two competing time loops: one ancient from the museum's founding and a newer one created so the military could experiment with lymbic entities as weapons. The linear layout lets the developers control pacing, mixing arena style fights, tougher enemies and narrative reveals into a tight arc that tells a complete story about how research and nationalism corrupt each other over time.
Another powerful moment comes in the city of Marastan. As you wander through its streets, bodies lie where they fell and Hollow Walkers loom in the distance while nationalist announcements echo through empty buildings. The game finally steps back and lets your imagination fill in the horror. You eventually learn that Marastan was meant to be an integrated town. A terrorist attack was then used as an excuse for targeted riots and purges that fed the lymbic entities. These scenes where the game trusts the player instead of dumping lore directly are some of its best.
The frustration is that you have to push through around ten hours of repetitive fights and heavy handed exposition before reaching these stronger, more focused sections. The environmental storytelling is good enough that the long text dumps and direct to camera history lessons feel unnecessary. The world already shows you everything the script insists on telling you.
In the end, Hell is Us is a visually striking and thematically ambitious action adventure that struggles to balance its many systems. Combat can feel amazing in the moment, and some later levels deliver incredible atmosphere and design, but the game also asks you to endure too much repetition and too many underwhelming time loop chores. If you are patient and love bleak, story rich worlds, there is something memorable here. Just be prepared to work for the good parts.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/hell-is-us-review/
