The upcoming third-person action adventure title Hell is Us has received a playable PC demo which is available on Steam right now and will be available till June 16. So if you wanted to try out developer Rogue Factor’s sci-fi action title that puts a strong emphasis on exploration before it fully releases on September 4, playing the demo version of Hell is Us will provide you with a sneak peek of what to expect from the full game.
Also, the system requirements for Hell is Us was announced recently with the Unreal 5 powered game being severely demanding in Max visual settings which can be pretty alarming for most gamers. But thanks to the demo which is available right now, you can gauge how your current system holds up to the game so there’s another reason to try out the demo.
Hell is Us is also expected to feature a fairly deep yet versatile combat system that’s designed to separate it from the legions of Soulslike action games of recent years while still aiming to offer a fresh new spin on the genre and an exciting experience for action enthusiasts.
But perhaps the most interesting feature of the game is it’s complete lack of map marker’s or mini-maps in it’s Open World which provides a lot more organic and discovery-based approach that’s completely different from what you see in all other games featuring an Open World. This feature should give a significantly different perspective on explorations in videogames that you can’t find anywhere else, and another neat reason to play Hell is Us.
And recently, the game’s Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête spoke in an interview on the design philosophy behind their unique approach to Open World exploration:
“It’s the joy of discovery. It’s putting the players back in the driver’s seat of exploration, you know, so you’re not pretending to be exploring by following things. It’s like, when you play Skyrim—and don’t get me wrong, I’ve finished all the Elder Scrolls games since Arena—Skyrim is the epitome of silver plattering. You can’t even look at a rock without getting a side quest, you know what I mean? It’s everywhere, and when you walk around, your compass is like, ‘Hey, here’s a cave, here’s some ruins, here’s this, here’s that.’ It’s overwhelming, not exploring, and it’s just walking through a miasma of things to do.”
If you think about it philosophically, it’s really what’s happening. That’s not what exploration and discoveries are. I mean, you can play and put yourself into this fantasy of exploring, being on top of a mountain, being in this forest, but what you actually discover gets tremendously diluted because of that. The true joy is you making the cognitive decision yourself to see what’s in that direction, figuring out what this guy needs, and your instincts and gut feelings as you figure it out. You figure it out, then that’s you. You discover the end result of this.
I find games used to be a lot more like that for all sorts of reasons. Then, we figured out how to make them more approachable and whatnot, but I think we got a little lost in that. We’re trying, in our own kind of way, to bring that pendulum back a bit toward the middle.”
Hell is Us is slated to be released on September 4 for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Windows.
