Hell Is Us review

I finished Hell Is Us after about 26 hours on PlayStation 5, and it’s one of my top games of 2025. It’s a AA game from an independent studio in Montreal, and it feels far more polished than that label suggests. There are fair complaints about the combat, and I’ll get to them, but the world, the exploration and the way the story is told make this one easy to recommend.

No map, no quest log, no hand-holding

Hell Is Us is a story-driven exploration game, and it really commits to that. There’s no map. There’s no quest log. Nothing tells you where to go next.

Instead, you get investigations. There are six main ones that carry the story, and you solve them by talking to people, reading documents and listening to the world around you. One of the first things the game teaches you is simply to listen. Wind chimes, clues in conversations and small details in the environment are what guide you.

That might sound intimidating, and I understand if it puts some people off. For me it was the best part of the game. For the first time in a long time, a game forced me to actually explore, and that’s where Hell Is Us is at its best. I was still finding things in the very first area after 26 hours.

Good deeds: side quests that feel like stories

As you move through the main story you meet survivors, and helping them completes what the game calls a good deed. These work like side quests, except nobody hands you a checklist.

Early on you meet a father who lost three sons to the war and is searching for a fourth. Helping him find his son is one of the first good deeds. Later I freed a dog that a soldier was holding in a village, picked up its collar, and only found its owners by chance: a family hiding in a completely different zone. That’s how the whole game works. You collect items and clues, and it’s up to you to figure out who they belong to.

The story and the horrors of war

You play as someone who was sent away from the war as a child and has snuck back into a war-torn country to find your family, mainly your mother. The country is fictional, but the parallels to real conflicts, especially in Eastern Europe, are hard to miss.

This game does not shy away from the horrors of war. You’ll hear and see some truly brutal things: murdered families, orphaned children, people hanged in the trees, survivors describing what soldiers did to them. What I found most interesting is that you get both sides. Soldiers who seem like the villains early on have their own point of view once you cross to the other side of the conflict. The game’s message is that there’s really no good side to war.

Content warning: if real-world war atrocities are something you’d rather avoid, be aware going in. For me, it’s a big part of why the world feels so real.

The main story is good, and it ends in a way that feels like the setup for a sequel. I didn’t mind that at all. This feels like the start of a new series, and I really hope the developers get to make the next one.

Combat: simple, and the weakest part

This is where most of the complaints come from, and they’re fair. I played on Normal and never touched the difficulty settings, though there are plenty of them if you want to tune the challenge.

There’s no character leveling. Your strength comes from your weapons:

• Four weapon types: twin axes, a polearm (spear), a slow greatsword and a standard sword.
• Upgrades: each weapon can be upgraded to grade 5 at the blacksmith you unlock in the story, and leveled up to a maximum of 20.
• Emotions: enemies and weapons are tied to four emotions (rage, ecstasy, grief and terror). Once you commit a weapon to an emotion you can’t undo it, but you find plenty of weapons along the way. I mostly used the twin axes and the spear.
• Glyphs, gear and drones: glyphs slot into your weapons for extra effects, gear can be upgraded too, and your drone carries swappable abilities like dodge assists and stopping an enemy in place.

Your special moves run on limbic energy, and the core loop is blocking, parrying and dodging, then using your specials when enemies release their emotion. There’s a well-timed dodge mechanic that will feel familiar if you’ve played Nioh.

The problem is that it never gets much deeper than that. There are only three tiers of enemies, and only a handful of fights, fewer than half a dozen, feel like real boss battles. The first five hours or so are the hardest. After that, with upgraded weapons, I was shredding most enemies, and even the tier 3 enemies late in the game only took me one or two tries. A couple of group fights got frustrating, but nothing major.

It has Souls-like touches in its mood, mystery, parries and dodges. But it’s really an action game, not a Soulslike.

Time loops, prisms and post-game puzzles

Scattered around each zone are time loops: memories of a horror of the war, guarded by enemies called Guardians. You close them using prisms you find throughout the game. Closing a loop gives you collectibles and stops the basic enemies in that area from respawning.

On top of that, there are mysteries and hidden vaults. A reporter you meet early on can research clues for you and turn up passwords to locked doors and vaults. Some of the puzzles take real thinking: computer passwords pieced together from clues, rod combinations for chests, keys held by people you haven’t helped yet.

The zones themselves are semi-open. You fast travel between them with the APC you unlock at the end of the first chapter, and every area is packed with detail, down to graffiti left by the families who lost their homes.

How long is Hell Is Us?

I finished the main story in about 25 hours and I’m at 26 now with some extra exploring. I’d guess there are about five more hours to wrap up all the remaining good deeds, time loops and puzzles. It doesn’t need a New Game Plus, because there’s so much to keep doing after the credits.

Verdict: 4.5/5, a must play

Hell Is Us is a very polished, really well-made AA game. It feels like it could almost be a AAA release, except for the combat, which is the one area I’d want improved in a sequel. The world-building is where it stands out, and the no-map exploration is something I haven’t enjoyed this much in years.

It’s definitely worth your money and your time. I’ve played a lot of indie games this year, and this is my favorite. We always support the big studios and then complain their games aren’t great, so support AA games like this one.

If you want to see the full story and get a better feel for the game, my complete Hell Is Us playthrough covers the whole thing, from the start through to the final ending cutscene.