A bunch of us here at the GSC were immediately intrigued by Hell Is Us, the upcoming 3rd-person action adventure game being developed by Rogue Factor, when it was first announced back at the PlayStation State of Play on September 24th, 2024. With its unique setting of a country torn apart by civil war and dealing with the effects of a supernatural calamity, focus on challenging close-quarters combat, and striking character and enemy designs, we were curious. But it’s the game’s “hands-off” approach to exploration and narrative that had our attention. A passage from the Hell Is Us Steam page description summarises it perfectly:

“No map, no compass, no quest markers: following your instincts is part of the adventure. Enjoy a unique experience that uses innovative writing and level design to let you make your own decisions and make your own decisions and follow your instincts as you explore. Your discoveries are yours alone.”

Fortunately, the demo for Hell Is Us was available from June 2nd to the 16th on PC(Steam), and is now available across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. I have spent about 4 hours with the demo on PC and PS5, and with its upcoming release on September 4th, now feels like a great time to give you my impressions of the Hell Is Us demo.

Welcome To Hadea

Starting up a new save file on the demo, I selected the Normal difficulty for a balanced experience. It opens with a cut scene of our player character, Remi, being interrogated by a rather grotesque-looking, shadowy figure. They want to know how and why Remi got back in the wartorn Hadea, and have got our protagonist hooked up to a polygraph and dosed up on truth serum. Eventually, the serum takes effect, and Remi divulges his reason for returning to Hadea: to find his parents in the village of Jova. Now that he has begun to loosen up, Remi begins recounting events, which is where the game begins.

After a brief, in-game cutscene showing Remi running through a forest and changing out of his peacekeepers uniform, I am in control. With no apparent gear or weapons, I walk forward through the rain-soaked forest down the once available path. The environments of Hell Is Us feel grounded and gritty, desaturated and depressing. Hadea has been wrapped up in a civil war for a long time, and it has taken its toll on the land as well as the people. Animal corpses lie next to craters left by mortar rounds, and I pause briefly at the site of three decorated graves.

Pressing on, I reach a rundown farmstead, surprisingly still standing amongst the chaos. I scour the area and discover a set of stairs leading down to a basement beneath the main building. I walk down and enter to find an elderly man sitting on the other side of a small room. At this point, the game explains talking and trading with NPCs, about collecting Datum to access different topics of conversation, and learn about Hadea and current events. I chat to the old man, learning his name is Ernest Caddell, three of his four sons have been killed during the war, and that the village of Jova would have to be reached with a vehicle. Fortunately, some mysterious soldiers have shown up with an APC that Remi could “borrow” to reach the village and hopefully find his parents.

At this point, I have to say how impressed I am with the voice acting and animations of Hell Is Us. Caddell’s words feel heavy, weighed down with the knowledge that this is a man who has had to bury his own sons. Watching his slow movements as he speaks, feeling every pause, deep breath, and long, drawn-out sigh. He isn’t just here to deliver exposition or hand you your first quest; Ernest is living in this world you have entered, a living testament to the horrors of war, and he sets Hell Is Us’ dark, harrowing tone.

Having exhausted all dialogue options and checked what I have learned on my tablet, I leave the old man safe in his basement and set off into the forest to find this APC. I follow Caddell’s instructions to follow the wind chimes he has hung up in the woods, originally used so his sons could find their way home. This is the first example of Hell Is Us’ approach to exploration; instead of being given a precise location, having a map with an icon, or a glowing trail to follow, you are expected to pay attention to details shared with you by NPCs as well as from items you find and clues in the environment. Remi has a tablet device that tracks everything from his loadout and inventory to investigations and exploration, and this is where you’ll find any info you have collected.

I discovered the APC parked outside a closed stone door, with several bodies of soldiers lying around it. There is a survivor near the stone door, and chatting to them reveals that his sergeant has the APC key. What follows is a quick chain of events, including fetching a med kit for the wounded soldier, solving an environmental puzzle, and opening the stone door into the crypt that the soldiers entered.

The door closes behind me as I descend the stairs into this musty catacomb, my only goal: to find the sergeant and get the key. The atmosphere of the crypt is oppressive in a different way than aboveground; I get a sense that I won’t be leaving this tomb without event. Running through the echoing halls, pierced by occasional shafts of natural light, I reach a room where the game introduces the save system. This is one of my favourite details from Hell Is Us’ game design and the ludonarrative resonance created with a simple detail.

Save points look like digitised copies of the polygraph that Remi is hooked up to in his interrogation, which ties together several elements very neatly. Remi is recounting these events, so they are being recorded by the polygraph as to their authenticity. Any time you save during Hell Is Us, you are not just saving your progress; you are confirming that everything that has happened thus far is true. If Remi dies during the game, he returns to his last save point exactly as he was when you saved, because he can’t have died if he is currently being interrogated. It is a very clever way to frame the save system and the game as a whole, in a way that I feel I haven’t seen since Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Walking into a dark corridor strewn with soldiers’ bodies fades to a cutscene, where Remi comes face to face with one of Hell Is Us’ main enemies, the Hollow Walkers. Remi’s pistol is useless against the creature, and all seems lost when it summons a bizarre, digitised entity that sends Remi flying. Before the final blow is struck, a poncho-wearing stranger, wielding a sword and accompanied by a drone, attacks the two monsters. The cutscene ends with Remi as the only survivor, so he quickly arms himself with the stranger’s weapons and garb. Now I feel ready to take on what Hadea has to offer, at least a little bit.

Hell Is Us’ combat is focused on close-quarters, using your drone to assist in distracting other enemies so you can focus on one. Fans of Soulslikes and Action/Adventure games will find the combat familiar, with a standard attack combo, a dodge, a block that can parry, and a charged special attack. Remi’s drone is also a light source and scans ancient texts across Hadea. I used this scan to decipher some text and solve the door puzzle, barring my progress.

All actions cost stamina in combat, and your stamina is dependent on your health. If you are hit and lose health, this lowers your max stamina as well, so your current health dictates your max stamina. Alongside using med kits to heal, Remi can use something called the Healing Pulse. Hitting enemies gathers a white essence that solidifies into a ring around you for a brief window. When this happens, you can heal yourself for a portion of your health by hitting the assigned button at the right time. It feels very similar to Bloodborne’s rally system.

Combat feels great, with hits feeling like they have weight and are felt by your foes, but players will want to set their expectations for difficulty. Even on the normal difficulty setting, combat is not that challenging, and I only used one healing item in the 3-4 hours I played, relying on the Healing Pulse almost entirely. It’s worth reiterating that this is the opening of the game, and there was no boss fight to attempt, so this could not be the case for the rest of Hell Is Us. I also only fought two types of enemies, so it’s a shallow pool of data to draw on. I did find that combat got more hectic and challenging when there was more than one or two enemies in one fight, so I’m not expecting the game to be a pushover.

Weapons level up as you use them, strengthening each hit of their combo, and you’ll be able to upgrade and equip enhancements to them, although this was not available during the demo.

I fight my way through the rest of the crypt, switching to a pair of twin axes for a faster combo, and find the sergeant’s body, identified by his red poncho. Retrieving the APC key, I walk out of the crypt into some trenches, currently empty save for a few Hollow Walkers. At this point during my playthrough, I did experience some drops in framerate, nothing alarming, but noticeable.

Upon exiting the trenches, I realise I am not far from the entrance to the crypt, with the APC waiting for me. Instead of heading straight to my newly acquired set of wheels, I decide to explore the area around the trenches and backtrack to see if I missed anything.

The last lesson the demo has to teach players is about Dual Entities. These are the pairings of a Hollow Walker with the digitised constructs they can house, called the Haze. When the construct is active, the Hollow Walker is invulnerable, and you must defeat the construct for it to retreat. This makes the Hollow Walker vulnerable but also enraged, and the construct will emerge again if the Hollow Walker is not killed in time. More than one enemy can be linked to one Haze construct, which adds to the challenge and tactical element of combat.

There isn’t much more to find in this starting area of Hell Is Us. I fight a handful more Hollow Walkers, which respawn whenever you use a save point, and complete a couple of puzzles/events found out in the world. One of these required two seals to be found and placed on either side of a door, unlocking a room with an enemy guarding a piece of armour I promptly equipped.

I found a wrist watch that once belonged to one of old man Caddell’s sons, and on returning it to him, I was informed that I had performed a Good Deed and that this would lead to something good in the future. It’s these organic elements to Hell Is Us’ design that get me the most excited for its full release.

Finally, I unlock the APC and enter. It acts as a mini hub, letting you move between discovered locations and check your tablet. I set Acasa Marshes as my next destination, and another cut scene plays where a shadowy figure warns Remi from stealing their APC, warnings that fall on deaf ears. Arriving at Acasa Marshes is short-lived, because as soon as I walk down a wooden gangway to see a wide open area littered with landmarks and enemies, a chopper flying overhead, the demo fades to black.

Closing Thoughts

I had a great time with the Hell Is Us demo. I think Rogue Factor is handling their worldbuilding in a very interesting way, using NPC conversations, items, and how Datum is recorded and linked via your tablet to slowly peel back the layers of this story and world. Hadea is a land at war and under siege at the same time, and whether or not these two things are tied to one another is unclear. I’m excited to learn more about the Palomists and Sabinians, the two factions carving up Hadea into territories, defined by a religion and god but entirely at odds. There is so much hinted at already in just the first couple of hours of the game that has me determined to find out what is going on.

I enjoyed the balanced combat that the game is going for, although I would expect the difficulty to increase after the intro area I played in the demo. I love the enemy designs so far, and look forward to seeing more of them, along with boss designs, and I can only imagine how much more intense combat could be with various enemy combinations. The Dual Entities and Heal Pulse systems, along with your helpful drone, give Hell Is Us’ combat the identity it needs to match the rest of the game and stand out from the crowd.

I think that Hell Is Us’ lack of clear direction with markers and maps, and your reliance on information you have gathered, is the game’s strongest element. I loved the way I had to pay attention to what NPCs were telling me and what new topics I had to discuss, checking my Datum for the relevant info to my current objective, all while stumbling across new leads and mysteries as I went. It’s this organic, grounded nature that kept me hooked and meant I absorbed more of what was going on and the lore of this world. Hadea is an oppressive land filled with discoveries and revelations, and it is entirely up to you to find and them.

My experience wasn’t perfect, with some frame rate issues in certain spots, but ultimately the demo did what it was meant to do: to get me excited for the full game. With just a small taste of what is to come, Hell Is Us has quickly become my most anticipated game for the rest of 2025.

Hell Is Us releases September 4th on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. The Standard edition of Hell Is Us, which is just the base game, is set to be priced at £44.99 GBP / $49.99 USD on PC, and at £49.99 GBP / $59.99 USD on consoles. The Deluxe edition will be priced at £59.99 GBP / $79.99 USD on PC, and at £65.99 GBP / $79.99 USD on consoles.

A demo is available on PC(Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series.

Check out the Hell Is Us Achievement List to prepare yourself.